Yes it strikes when I least expect it. Today was long and busy. Work was a zoo, non-stop from 8 pm to close. My seond driver stayed very late, the new server had no clue how to really close the dinging room (hasn't been trained properly because I didn't train her, she got the crash course tonight) and the stupid alarm system was not set properly, which of course entailed me calling my boss to get the directions on how to set it correctly. (Ugh not a fun call to make at midnight let me assure you!) Of course then I scared myself silly when it seemingly alarmed. (It didn't thank god) So, I drop off the server because I promised her mother I would give her a ride home. Get back on the rode, my accelerator pedal decides now is a good time to stick! (Not) I call K (I had called her earlier to tell her I wouldn't be in our nightly adoptese chat and promised to call her after I was done at work) *sigh* Long day got longer but that was ok, I was talking to my girl right?
So, we chatted for about an hour. Now I call my friend Mer. I had a feeling she was not doing so good. (Her son found her about oh 8 months ago) Said son had pulled back big in the reunion. This happend after he told his arents. (Why does this not surprise me?) So the other day she gets an e-mail from him finally. He apologizes for acting like an ass and not keeping in contact with her. She is now brooding about it. Seriously depressed brooding. At first she didn't want to talk at all. Being my charming and winning self, I coaxed her into talking anyway. Finally she says to me, "Is there something wrong with me?" Serious voice question. Ya know the kind I mean? I promptly told her no, there is nothing wrong with you or me for that matter, or any of us. We have these perfectly natural responses in our lives because something really un-nartural happened to us. ( I didn't use those words exactly, but that was the gist of it) So, we continue talking and she says she is tried of "it" it being all the adoption stuff. I told her to take a break if she had to. (Joe says breaks are not allowed, but he means from talking to our kids, not the kind of break I am talking about, somedays you just need to not think, breathe, talk, and obsess about adoption) I also told her that once things are a little more stable and settled, that I think she needs to tell her son how his pulling back made her feel. (not that he is responsible for her emotions, but that it hurt her when he did that, sometimes our children are rude, unthinking, and ill-mannered, and it is not so good for us) She also asked me what I thought about his pulling back. I gave her my not so humble opionon, which of course involved the whole loyalty/not wanting to hurt his arents speech, and how it is very hard for some adoptees to handle the fact that their parents ( read arents here please) are not supportive of reunion, that in fact they down right refuse to share, and have no intention of allowing "their child" the freedom to form a loving relationship with their nmom. I Told her to tell her son to keep them out of their reunion, all it would do is conflict him and make it harder in the long run. Most arents either want to control the reunion, prevent it or stop it cold in it tracks. (Been there done that, it is not so fun for either an nparent or the child/adult in the reunion. IT in fact makes it downright awful sometimes)
OF course all of this got me thinking about K and our reunion. While we have had bumps, and occasional sticks thrown in our road but, we mostly are good. Her parents made it a battle and used her as the ball. Put her right square in the middle of us and basically told her to choose. She refuses to make that choice. I say good for her! Why should she have to make a choice like that? Her parents love her, I love her, her other family loves her, and my family loves her. Why should she have to make a choice? Love is good for us no matter where we find it. I say that you can never have enough love in your life. I say that if all of this adoption stuff is supposed to be "in the best interst of" why isn't it in our childrens best interest to have a good and loving relationship with us? They are adults, and they can make those decisions for themselves. Somedays ( most days I think ) I want to smack those people upside the head and yell "Wake the fuck up! Don't you get it yet?" and well those thoughts make think it is better that we haven't met yet. (and are not likely to any time soon) Wouldn't it be grand if all adoptive parents got it? IF they all actually did what was in the "best interst of"?
*sigh* I can dream can't I? Maybe there are more out there that get it like Heidi, or Afrindie or Mo. I can hope there are, I Can also hope that adoption goes the way of the dinosaur. But you know, it isn't happening anytime soon is it? So we will keep working for the kind of reform they have in NSW, New Zealand and Australia. Take the money out of the equation and guess what? Yeah adoption is a very rare thing indeed in those places where money has been taken out of the mix. Again I can dream can't I?
Monday, July 24, 2006
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Triggers.....
So Suz says triggers are everywhere.. Today I found out what she meant. *sigh* I had to go to court today and as I sat there waiting I overheard several attorneys talking about the hearing that was taking place in the courtroom. No big deal right? They talk about that stuff all the time. But, this time they were talking about an adoption hearing. My heart started to pound and I started to feel sick, shaking and sweating(a panic attack perhaps?) Then the courtroom door opened and I see this woman who was probably in her mid thirties, and her (I think) husband who looks like he is probably my age, walk out. The woman was holding this beautiful little girl. A sweet looking baby dressed in a pink sundress, with a small little smile on her lips. The woman was holding her around the waist, her hand tucked under her bottom, facing away from her. (Does that position seem weird to any of you? I mean if you are there to finalize an adoption wouldn't you be grabbing her to your heart and hugging her?) What got to me was the huge smile on her face the husbands face. It seemed to me that those smiles were predatory, shark like grins if you get my meaning. It was very hard for me to watch them walk out of that courtroom and control my tounge.
I wanted to scream at them both, "Don't you realize what you have just done? Do you know the years of heartache and pain you are in the process of creating? Do you even think of the woman who's child you hold and hope or pray she is going to be allright?" I had so much to say, and yet I did dare to speak a word. Not only would it have been wrong to say anything in this case, but I probably would have lost control and lashed out in a way that might have ended up with me being arrested for disorderly conduct and possibly landing myself in a jail cell. So yeah, I bit my tounge. Hard enough to almost make it bleed.
Now here I sit with this image in my head. K's parents walking out of the attorneys office holding her and smiling like that. My heart hurts, and I am still shaky and panicy, and sick to my stomach. If I could call in today, I probably would. I don't want to do anything but crawl into a corner and wail. But, I can't call in, and I can't crawl into a corner. I have to deal. Once again it feels like the guilt and pain is going to be never ending. I know it isn't, and I know it is better now than it was a year ago. But somedays, it feels like yesterday....
I wanted to scream at them both, "Don't you realize what you have just done? Do you know the years of heartache and pain you are in the process of creating? Do you even think of the woman who's child you hold and hope or pray she is going to be allright?" I had so much to say, and yet I did dare to speak a word. Not only would it have been wrong to say anything in this case, but I probably would have lost control and lashed out in a way that might have ended up with me being arrested for disorderly conduct and possibly landing myself in a jail cell. So yeah, I bit my tounge. Hard enough to almost make it bleed.
Now here I sit with this image in my head. K's parents walking out of the attorneys office holding her and smiling like that. My heart hurts, and I am still shaky and panicy, and sick to my stomach. If I could call in today, I probably would. I don't want to do anything but crawl into a corner and wail. But, I can't call in, and I can't crawl into a corner. I have to deal. Once again it feels like the guilt and pain is going to be never ending. I know it isn't, and I know it is better now than it was a year ago. But somedays, it feels like yesterday....
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
So new things...
I bought the movie Walk The Line last week. It made me cry, mostly because it reminded me of my father. My father got to meet Mr. Cash when I was just a little girl. He always loved the mans music, and me well, to that little girl I was Dadddy reminded me of Johnny Cash. HE ws like him in alot of ways. ( Not the drugs, or the things he did exactly, but the way he loved June Carter. My dad loved my mom like that. He would have come home in a heartbeat if mom had just crooked her finger. He loved her like that) I think what hurt the most about being reminded of him was the fact that he will never get to know my daughter Kristen. He won't get to see her get married, or to see great grand children. ( any of them )
So as I watched the movie and thought about my dad ( and hell sang along to most of the songs too, I am an invenerate singer of songs. My kids always tell me to shut up lol ) and cried, I also thought of how I didn't tell my father I was pregnant with K. I thought of how foolish it was on my part. I didn't realize then what I realize now. He would have been right to put a stop to what I was doing. That was the big reason I didn't tell him about it. How fucked up is that? I htought I knew so much back then. I didn't know the horror of what I was doing. Yes horror, you read that right. I think all the time about this. I worry this puzzle like a dog worries a bone. I look at it from all sides and still can not for the life of me understand why I didn't tell my father. Really, it hurts my heart now to think I did this stupid thing. This big secret I had to hide from everyone.
I now know I had no choice in this. NO matter what I had said or done, it still would have happened to us. Once you talk to a lawyer or an agency it is all over. Game over, case closed, zip up your fly over. Once they get their hooks into you, it is a done deal. The tactics they use against mothers are (as far as I am concerned anyway) ethically and morally wrong. Coercion lies at the heart of adoption. The use of tactics like making your parents sign paperwork saying they will have to pay for everything if you don't surrender, telling a mother she will not be able to have her child with her until the bills are paid, drugging you to the point where you are incapable of making any kind of decision, let alone a decision like surrendering your child to adoption. Is just plain sickening to me. My eyes were closed to all of these things, yes once upon a time I was a "happy bmother" *gag* I bought into every lie I was told. Every single one of them.
Do you know why I did that? It was a simple matter of survival to believe the lies!!!!!!!! Yes survival, if I hadn't bought into the lies, I might well be dead now. I know in my heart that "forgetting" (read suppressing here) those memories is most likely the reason I didn't end up in a mental hospital, or take my own life. There were days in the first year that I seriously thought about killing myself. I had all those things in my head, things like. How could you do this? What kind of mother are you! YOU GAVE YOUR BABY AWAY TO STRANGERS WHO CAN NOT POSSIBLY LOVE THAT CHILD THE WAY YOU DO! I found that if I just suppressed the memory, I could survive. Taking the above thoughts and stuffing them in a closet somewhere deep in my mind is what gave me the ability to be strong, to go on and to live my life. I can't say that my life has been perfect since then. It hasn't been, but it has been not been horrible all the time either. I have three other children whom I adore, children that never stayed with strangers ever, until they were old enough to talk to me. Family is and was important to me. My family looked after my kids when I needed someone to look after them. No stranger ever watched my kids when they were babies and unable to communicate with me. Never would have happened in this lifetime or any other. The fear of losing them, while it was an unconscious fear, was great. ( yeah I figured all this out in the last year)
Now if you are here lurking, (and I know I have some lurkers, I love ISP Tracking) consider this, more specifically if you are in the adoption industry and lurking here, read all the blogs of moms and dads I have listed. Learn from us, what you already know, but refuse to acknowledge. That adoption is an ugly, ugly thing. That adoption at it's heart destroys women, children and families, for no better reason than that some poor infertile couple thinks they have a right to take our children from us. I have done some really heavy duty thinking about this lately. Those people who adopt our children, oftentimes have huge issues they need to deal with, but don't. It is not just infertility either. Entitlement attituides abound pap's. I have seen the "give me child lest I die syndrome" all too often since entering the blogosphere. What I read in pap's blogs makes me heartsick and angry. I want people to read and to learn that mothers such as myself were given no choice. That we were coerced into surrender as surely I am a living breathing human. We were lied to from day one. We are still being lied to, our children are lied to. And I want the lie that is "Open Adoption" to be exposed. Open adoption is a gimmick designed to further coerce mothers into surrender. Open adoptions usually slam shut as soon as the ink is dry on the decree and that really makes me angry. The adoption industry will stop at nothing to acquire babies. It is after all a multi billion dollar industry, and we all know how much they really care about "the best interests of the child" yeah they care to the tune of billions...
I promise that I will be posting more often now. I am finally done with my training at work and will actually have time to post. See you all later~
Laugh A Lot, It's Good For You~
Mary~
So as I watched the movie and thought about my dad ( and hell sang along to most of the songs too, I am an invenerate singer of songs. My kids always tell me to shut up lol ) and cried, I also thought of how I didn't tell my father I was pregnant with K. I thought of how foolish it was on my part. I didn't realize then what I realize now. He would have been right to put a stop to what I was doing. That was the big reason I didn't tell him about it. How fucked up is that? I htought I knew so much back then. I didn't know the horror of what I was doing. Yes horror, you read that right. I think all the time about this. I worry this puzzle like a dog worries a bone. I look at it from all sides and still can not for the life of me understand why I didn't tell my father. Really, it hurts my heart now to think I did this stupid thing. This big secret I had to hide from everyone.
I now know I had no choice in this. NO matter what I had said or done, it still would have happened to us. Once you talk to a lawyer or an agency it is all over. Game over, case closed, zip up your fly over. Once they get their hooks into you, it is a done deal. The tactics they use against mothers are (as far as I am concerned anyway) ethically and morally wrong. Coercion lies at the heart of adoption. The use of tactics like making your parents sign paperwork saying they will have to pay for everything if you don't surrender, telling a mother she will not be able to have her child with her until the bills are paid, drugging you to the point where you are incapable of making any kind of decision, let alone a decision like surrendering your child to adoption. Is just plain sickening to me. My eyes were closed to all of these things, yes once upon a time I was a "happy bmother" *gag* I bought into every lie I was told. Every single one of them.
Do you know why I did that? It was a simple matter of survival to believe the lies!!!!!!!! Yes survival, if I hadn't bought into the lies, I might well be dead now. I know in my heart that "forgetting" (read suppressing here) those memories is most likely the reason I didn't end up in a mental hospital, or take my own life. There were days in the first year that I seriously thought about killing myself. I had all those things in my head, things like. How could you do this? What kind of mother are you! YOU GAVE YOUR BABY AWAY TO STRANGERS WHO CAN NOT POSSIBLY LOVE THAT CHILD THE WAY YOU DO! I found that if I just suppressed the memory, I could survive. Taking the above thoughts and stuffing them in a closet somewhere deep in my mind is what gave me the ability to be strong, to go on and to live my life. I can't say that my life has been perfect since then. It hasn't been, but it has been not been horrible all the time either. I have three other children whom I adore, children that never stayed with strangers ever, until they were old enough to talk to me. Family is and was important to me. My family looked after my kids when I needed someone to look after them. No stranger ever watched my kids when they were babies and unable to communicate with me. Never would have happened in this lifetime or any other. The fear of losing them, while it was an unconscious fear, was great. ( yeah I figured all this out in the last year)
Now if you are here lurking, (and I know I have some lurkers, I love ISP Tracking) consider this, more specifically if you are in the adoption industry and lurking here, read all the blogs of moms and dads I have listed. Learn from us, what you already know, but refuse to acknowledge. That adoption is an ugly, ugly thing. That adoption at it's heart destroys women, children and families, for no better reason than that some poor infertile couple thinks they have a right to take our children from us. I have done some really heavy duty thinking about this lately. Those people who adopt our children, oftentimes have huge issues they need to deal with, but don't. It is not just infertility either. Entitlement attituides abound pap's. I have seen the "give me child lest I die syndrome" all too often since entering the blogosphere. What I read in pap's blogs makes me heartsick and angry. I want people to read and to learn that mothers such as myself were given no choice. That we were coerced into surrender as surely I am a living breathing human. We were lied to from day one. We are still being lied to, our children are lied to. And I want the lie that is "Open Adoption" to be exposed. Open adoption is a gimmick designed to further coerce mothers into surrender. Open adoptions usually slam shut as soon as the ink is dry on the decree and that really makes me angry. The adoption industry will stop at nothing to acquire babies. It is after all a multi billion dollar industry, and we all know how much they really care about "the best interests of the child" yeah they care to the tune of billions...
I promise that I will be posting more often now. I am finally done with my training at work and will actually have time to post. See you all later~
Laugh A Lot, It's Good For You~
Mary~
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