–

I attended the Women of Faith conference in Pittsburgh this weekend with the women of my family. As a whole, it was a great experience. I love a chance to sing some great praise songs, listen to some faithful and inspirational women, eat nachos with jalapenos and generally have a good faith experience.

But… there was a moment during which it was almost derailed.

Let’s back up to 2003: I was pregnant with the Munchkin. It was a difficult time as a whole. Those who have read my blog for years know that I fell into adoption when my kidney disorder landed me on Level III bedrest. It has worked out for us, as I chronicle here, but it wasn’t an easy time.

During that time, the Pastor at my parents’ church basically threw my family under the bus. For all intents and purposes, I shouldn’t have been able to come out of my daughter’s relinquishment and immediate postpartum phase with my faith in tact.

But I did.

I don’t get all “God meant for me to be used as a vessel for Dee to be a Mom.” I don’t believe that. I believe that free will — which we all have — came into play. I believe that my faith has allowed me certain room to heal — and to be angry and to rant and rave and get back to healing — along the way. I’ve been angry with and/or at God at times, but I always come back to a peace that, despite that free will decision, I can still use whatever free will I have left combined with His grace for good.

Now we can get back to Saturday morning, October 8, 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My hometown, where a Pastor put my faith to the test eight years earlier.

Lisa Harper is on the stage. And she is rocking it. She’s funny. She has on great boots. She has this smile that reminds me of one of the women in my family. I want to give her a high five. And then she tells us that she has started the process of adoption.

I start the inward cringe. I know where this is going. But I pray — not just hope, but I pray — that she won’t take it there. She’s a single woman, and I want to believe that she has an understanding of what other single ladies might have been through, gone through, dealt with at one time or another. She starts talking about the kind of child she’d like to adopt. I give her leeway. I allow her space. She’s new to this, right? She doesn’t know what can of worms she is opening, right? I allow her the wiggle room that I don’t always offer others.

And then she slams me into the floor. My breath catches. I can’t feel my toes.

“I’d like to adopt one of those chocolate babies that their birth mamas and daddies have passed over.”

I won’t even get into the race issue. That’s something else entirely.

I just blinked. I felt every woman in my row cringe; every woman in my family who knows the beauty that is my daughter, the love that I have always had for her, the hard work I put into making our open adoption work. They knew. They knew, and they have never relinquished a child. They knew, and they’ve said their fair share of stupid things over the years. They knew.

I didn’t tweet immediately (but I did eventually, to which @womenoffaith didn’t reply like the other ones I tweeted which were full of good things). I wanted to let it slide. Lisa even included a prayer at the end of her time specifically stating that if anything she said offended anyone, that God would erase it so that the message wouldn’t be lost.

I can tell you that for the women in Row W on the back side of the stage, the message was lost.

I tried to let it go. But the truth is, in a crowd of 8,000+ women, I wasn’t the only birth mother in the crowd. In fact, I know I wasn’t the only birth mother in the crowd. Some of my birth mother (Internet-started) friends who happen to live in Pittsburgh were in attendance. And they were caught off guard by that comment as well. I’m just the most verbal one. My sister-in-law laughed, knowing I was going to blog it. It’s what I do.

I get that Lisa has not yet adopted. She isn’t fully indoctrinated into what is and is not acceptable with regard to adoption-speak. She’s learning on the fly. She’s being baptized by fire.

But.

As a public speaker, you have to be responsible for what you say on a stage. If you don’t know enough about adoption and birth parents and the intricate “stuff” of the in between, then don’t speak about it on a stage to a room of 8,000+ women. You run the risk of doing more harm than good.

So let me tell you, Lisa Harper, something you need to know: I did not “pass over” on my daughter. I wanted her. So desperately. I loved her with all of my being. I was heartbroken when I had to hand her over to her parents. I didn’t “pass over” on the opportunity to parent her. I didn’t just think, “Well, I’ll just hand her over to someone else because I don’t want to do this and it will be all okay.” It has been the most difficult road I have ever had to walk. It has changed who I am, at the very core of my being. I am grateful for the open adoption I have with her, with her mom, but it still remains the hole in my soul — the colander in my heart that won’t be filled by God or anything else. I miss my daughter every single day.

I just want you to think, Lisa, the next time you speak. In that room, there will be a woman who relinquished her child for adoption. It will be the hardest thing she has done in her life. It will be that one thing that she still questions God about: the whys, the reasons, the heartache, the hurt. It will be the one thing that she still cries about in prayer, the one thing that still makes her doubt if she had just been a “good enough” Christian if it would have worked out differently. So before you make some flippant comment about birth parents who “pass over” their children, think about the wedge you’re driving between those parents and the God you are representing on stage.

And then — more importantly — think about the child you might one day adopt. They will hear the undertones in how you speak about their birth parents. They will know that you think less of their birth parents, even if you use God-speak to say what a “gift” they were. They will read this post one day and know that you think their birth mama just “passed them over.” Your child will take your cues about how to feel about their birth parents and thus how to feel about themselves.

Please think before you speak on a stage. Your words hurt me, and I wasn’t alone. Your words run the risk of hurting children in the future, one of whom might be yours someday. Think, Lisa. I’m a real, faithful, hurting child of God who made a decision that altered the course of my life. I am not less than you, and neither is any other birth mother or father.

Please remember that before you speak next time — because there will always be a birth mother in attendance. Always.

(PS: Angie Smith made me cry — hard — with her story of Audrey. I love me a blogger. I love me a Mom who wanted to give her child a chance at life no matter what. I love me a redhead. She redeemed the day for me and I’m going to go buy her book right freaking now. The end.)

And today I turned 28. See? Whirlwind.

When I initially agreed to attend Women of Faith with a group from my church and speak at the AAC conference, I didn’t realize they were on the same weekend. When I realized my over-booking mistake, I just sucked it up and kept my commitments, aware that this weekend would leave me absolutely exhausted by the time it came to an end.

It wasn’t until last night that I came to understand why things happened this way.

Steven Curtis Chapman was at the Women of Faith conference last night. If you are not familiar with his work, he is the most decorated Christian recording artist. Ever. And on May 21, 2008, a horrible accident involving one of his sons and his youngest daughter resulted in the loss of that sweet little girl. I remember hearing the news and crying in sadness and shock. I’ve spent the past (almost) year praying for the family (just like I continue to pray for the Spohr family at the recent loss of little Maddie).

What I didn’t mention in the previous paragraph is that the Chapman family’s youngest daughter was adopted. Three girls total were adopted by the Chapman family from China. So, obviously, the news of her passing last year left me spinning. Dealing with everything that I was dealing with last year, it was something that I couldn’t even spend time thinking about without crying. Let’s think about last year for just a quick second: post-partum depression on my part, my daughter’s parents separated and in May of last year, I was one month away from a year of not seeing my daughter due to scheduling problems on all parts. My heart broke for the Chapman family. My heart broke for a birth mother, light years away, who (most likely) in the depths of her heart abandoned her daughter to give her a better life. I spent some time being angry with God for the loss of little Maria Chapman. How was death a better life?

Much like I had a few stern conversations with God when my daughter’s parents first separated.

But like my heart was softened and comforted through much prayer (on my part and the parts of others) and I came to realize that my daughter’s life was still amazing, Steven Curtis Chapman was able to talk last night of the beautiful memories Maria made in the time she had in their family. He admitted that he doesn’t have it all figured out just yet. And that? Was more of what I needed to hear. I don’t always know or understand why everything has happened the way it has in our lives. Why did I really have to place my daughter? Why, especially when I so desired that two parent home, did divorce enter her life? And what does the future hold for the lot of us? But as Chapman went on to sing about the beautiful song Cinderella, about not missing a dance with his daughter(s) before they were gone (which had a different meaning after the loss of Maria), I was stuck by the weight of it all.

I am thankful that I didn’t spend too long being angry at how things have changed in our adoption journey. Why? I don’t want to miss dancing with my daughter or watching her dance through this life. I know that she is being raised just fine. I know that she is loved beyond measure. And unlike Chapman and little Maria… I can hold her again. I can love her with kisses and hugs and laughter.

And this? This is the hard stuff of open adoption. While Chapman’s international adoptions are not open, horrible, unimaginable losses like this don’t just happen to internationally adopting families. Open adoption adoptees are in accidents. They pass away. Adoptive families are not magically immune to this stuff. They get sick, sometimes horribly so. They separate. They divorce. They deal with layoffs. And loss of medical insurance. And everything else that the rest of the world deals with. And we’re not giving adoptive or birth families in open adoption the right tools to deal with these issues … together.

Don’t misread me. Adoptive families need to deal with their own issues on their own. My daughter’s mom has done a great job at dealing with her emotions regarding everything, parenting those two awesome kids and generally being who and what she needs to be. But there’s no book that instructs other adoptive moms who have to wear her shoes as to how to best divulge the hard information to members of the birth family. When I really stopped to think of how scary it must have been, each time new things happened, to come to me with that information, my heart breaks for her! Similarly, birth parents aren’t even being counseled as to how things like this CAN happen in adoptive families… let alone how to deal with and process those things when and if they do happen.

In the end, I learned a lot about myself last night. I don’t always understand this … stuff. This hard stuff. But I do know that I am blessed to be have a presence in my daughter’s life. Or, rather, I am blessed to have her presence in my life. To know that she is so loved… should be any birth parent’s deepest prayer.

Before you go, have a listen to Steven Curtis Champan’s “Cinderella” … and then go dance with your children.