It's Tuesday and snowing and I contemplating so many things. Reading a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down- Anne Fadiman- a story about Hmong immigrants and their child who is ill, and the collision between their beliefs and Western Medicine.
What has struck me so far in the reading is how similar the collision is to the collision we as mothers faced. Caught between two things, the thing we wanted (to raise our babies) and the thing others wanted of us/for us to do.
Imagine if you will being in that place, where someone asks you to make two lists, one being: What can you give your baby? one being: What can a married couple give your baby?
Can you see how as a single parent the list you wrote for yourself would be quite short, especially if like many of us you were young and in school and not making much money?
Now imagine the other list- what do you think would be on that list?
I can tell you, the second list is always longer- ALWAYS-
Can you see the way in which this could be called coercion? Can you imagine looking at these lists you have made and comparing them? Which list do you think would win in that little exercise? Right, I thought so too.
So riddle me this, Why use this sort of thing? I find the answer quite simple, it's a not so subtle attempt to make you see things "their way" it's a not so subtle way of getting you ( the mother ) to see things in a different light. It's all about love, and how our love was manipulated by a system that has no interest in doing what is really best for us as mothers, and a system that has a very vested interest in having a baby they can "sell" to a "deserving happy family"
What they fail to explain to those of us who were caught in this collision, is this- even happily married couples get divorced, one or the other may die when a child is young, that in fact, that happily married couple is just as human, as we the mothers are. They have failings, and fears, and doubts just as we do. In short they fail to inform us, that just as we are, adoptive parents as all too human, just as we are.
Being human it all comes back to that- and thus the question becomes, How can humans (women and men) do the things they do to young, scared pregnant women? I wonder how some of them can sleep at night knowing all they do about what adoption does to both mother and child. And then I weep-
3 comments:
You know what is interesting. The list you would write preadoption is vastly different from the one you would write several years post adoption. I might have to blog about this thought
You know what? My list would be vastly different too- and when you write it let me know- Love you keed!
You know what I find interesting? The fact is that no matter what, the greedier the business the more likely they are to lie to win.
I know that my list was small - but it weighed more on the scales of life and living.
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