The Spirit of the Season

I’ve been thinking about gifts and open adoption. I’ve mentioned before that gifts are important in my family, and it was important to me that the right to send a birthday and a Christmas gift be in our open adoption agreement. The state legislature will now theoretically enforce my right to send Cricket two presents a year. When I married, I secured Ruth and Nora’s permission to give Cricket a wedding present. Talking with Mr. Book recently, I realized that I like the idea of in some years being able to send a book or a cd or something at the other end of the year, in the spring or summer—maybe sending a souvenir when we travel. Of course, this would only be once a year or so, and nothing terribly expensive. Part of the reason that I’m so tentative is that in my experience, what I’ve read and seen, gifts can be tricky.

In my group therapy, there is a woman whose children were taken by the state. That’s got to be much harder than the kind of adoption that I have personal experience with, but I winced to hear her talk about all the presents she sent—including a box of back-to-school clothes in the fall. Now, I can see that a new school outfit might be a sweet present, but a full box of back-to-school clothes would feel to me like the firstmom was trying to parent from afar. One birthmother whose blog I read talks about sending presents frequently to give her an excuse to contact the adoptive parents. And I’ve heard adoptive parents talking about getting a box full of things ever month or so and feeling a bit overwhelmed; the gifts were too many and too impersonal to feel really special, but the adoptive parents felt guilty throwing anything out. Those adoptive parents talked about wishing that the birthparents would call or visit—the presents were taking the place of the contact that the adoptive parents and the kids really wanted.

When I visited my sister, as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to buy Cricket a book. I resisted the impulse. Ruth has mentioned in the past that she doesn’t want gifts to take the place of a close relationship, and that makes sense to me. At the same time, if I had a nephew in the area, I would probably have brought him back a book. And since I am mostly cut off from Cricket, I want badly to give him extra gifts and make him food and make the other gestures of love that are important in my physical vocabulary. Since I’m aware of the impulse, I guess I should redirect that energy into reminding myself that in most of the ways that matter, Cricket is not my son. Fighting to stay close to him isn’t really appropriate right now. I do believe that we’ll have a relationship, but I don’t think it will probably be very close. Understand, I grew up barely knowing the names of my extended family—I don’t have a model for closeness outside of the immediate family.

Therefore what? I ordered a copy of that book I wanted for Cricket, but not for him. I will make graham crackers, but not for him. I sent Cricket a birthday present, I will send a Christmas gift (two books; I already have them), and I won’t do anything else—this year. It’s hard for me to sit back and let things evolve…but that’s all I can do in this case, I think.

The Internal Optimist

I have this adoption daydream—it’s a bit embarrassing, but I’m going to go ahead and write it out here. In it, Cricket is a teenager: sixteen or seventeen. He comes to see us without letting us or his parents know—maybe he skips school, which his birthdad did a fair amount of in high school—or maybe he just drives down after class. Maybe he brings a friend. But he shows up at our place without giving us any notice, and I welcome him in, and I call Ruth to let her know what’s up and ask her what she wants me to do. She tells me that I may as well let him stay to dinner if I like, and that she’ll talk to him when he gets home. He has kind of a bad attitude; it seems clear that he’s doing this to test all four of the adults, waiting to see whether his moms will scream at him or I’ll turn him away. But as the evening wears on, he relaxes, warms up a bit. Whatever I’ve made—this varies, depending on what I have planned for any given week—is delicious, and he ends up enjoying the visit in an uncomplicated kind of way. By the time he leaves to go home, it’s almost as though he hadn’t started the visit as a prank.

 

Weird, huh? But this is the best thing that I can imagine. When I try to break it down, here are the things that I like: Cricket comes to see me on his own; while he has some anger at me, it seems resolvable; I get a chance to confirm Ruth in her role as the real mom; I get to feed Cricket; and at the end of the day, while Cricket belongs with his moms, he feels some connection to me. Does it sound any less weird when I explain it that way?

 

In response to a request from Mr. Book, I made gumbo for the first time this week. It took me awhile to find a vegetarian gumbo recipe—in the end, I ended up using a Lenten recipe for “green gumbo.” It was good, I think, but not entirely my kind of thing. Still upcoming: my first foray into Korean food, and some maple shortbread to take to therapy. Oh, and I’ve got some sundried tomato pesto leftover, and will probably use it to make pizza this weekend. I’ve been working on my pizza crust, trying to make a really fantastic one, but while I’ve got the texture just right…the taste still isn’t quite what I hope for. I think I need to give up on olive oil for pizza dough. Any of you who bake, what do you use: Vegetable oil? Butter? Fat-free dough?

Open Adoption Roundtable #10

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.

This is a topic that is very timely for me (Thanksgivingmom) right now, but is something that all of us in open adoption deal with at least once during the year: birthdays.

I know that birthdays can be an extremely emotional time, for everyone connected to adoption, not just those of us in open adoptions. So what is it that we do, as part of our open adoptions, during the “birthday season”?

Our experiences on this are so diverse, that I don’t want to limit your responses to one specific question. BUT, since some of us (like me!) sometimes like the specific questions, here are a few that have been rattling around in my brain as my daughter’s third birthday approaches:

• What do you/your family do to integrate open adoption and birthday celebrations?
• What do you wish you would see in future birthday celebrations re: involvement with your child’s adoptive parents/birth parents?
• Do you have an open adoption agreement that requires contact on/around birthdays?
• How does that agreement affect you? Do you wish it were different? Do you wish that you did have an agreement that requires such contact?
• If you do not have contact around birthdays, do you do something private to honor birthdays?
• If you’re an adoptee, how were birthdays celebrated in your family with regards to open adoption?
• How do you wish they would have been celebrated?
• And anything else you can think of!

How timely for me! Cricket’s birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, and we’ve had a bit of chaos surrounding it. Since I am one of those who likes the specific questions, I will answer these.

• What do you/your family do to integrate open adoption and birthday celebrations?

Well, Mr. Book’s family chooses to pretend that Cricket is dead, so I assume that they won’t be commemorating his first birthday in any way. I suppose there’s a chance that he’ll get a weepy, angry phone call from his mom, but there will probably just be silence from that side of the family. My mother has bought him a book and a birthday card. I’m actually a bit nervous about this, as she didn’t get express permission to send a book. On the other hand, it is a cool children’s book, and I think the gift is coming from a good place in her—I think it’s really a (relatively) uncomplicated desire to send a present to a baby on his birthday. Ruth has said that she doesn’t want me to get trapped in the middle of my mom’s relationship with them, so I haven’t mentioned to them that my mom has a book to send. I just don’t want to then be responsible for telling my mom that she can’t send it, which would feel sad and unkind. So yeah, I’m taking the coward’s way out. As for me and Mr. Book: he may have to work on Cricket’s party day, but we are invited to the party. If we can’t go, we will visit some day that week. I have already mailed his present and a card.

• What do you wish you would see in future birthday celebrations re: involvement with your child’s adoptive parents/birth parents?

I really don’t know. I would like to be included, but not at the expense of Cricket’s happiness—if he doesn’t want us around, I want to respect that. But assuming that he doesn’t care (or, miracle of miracles, wants us around), I hope that we’ll be able to see him on or near his birthday every year. If we can’t make it, I would like to call. Of course, that’s not exactly right; in some ways, I want to not call or go or have any kind of contact. I want to grieve and mope and feel sorry for myself. But since I keep reminding myself that this is a child-centered open adoption, I want to want to do the right thing by Cricket.

• Do you have an open adoption agreement that requires contact on/around birthdays?

Our open adoption agreement guarantees us the right to send a birthday present, but not to have any kind of contact. However, Ruth and Nora have said that of the two mandated sets of photos a year, they plan to send one around his birthday every year.

• How does that agreement affect you? Do you wish it were different? Do you wish that you did have an agreement that requires such contact?

Honestly, at this stage in our relationship (and hopefully forever, knock on wood), the agreement matters very little. Ruth and Nora want us around, we want to be around, and we are all working together in a pretty good set-up. I do wish that we lived closer—this only started a week or so ago. For the rest of the adoption so far, I’ve been glad to have this buffer of distance. But now… When I sent Cricket’s birthday package, in addition to his card, I included a card for Ruth and two books I think she might enjoy. And in the card, I said that I wished we lived in the same city sometimes, because I’d like to be able to take her out to coffee once in awhile and just chat or hang out, no big deal. That is such a big deal for me. I know how small it sounds, but while I’m sure I’ll get frustrated or angry or depressed about things in the relationship again in the future, I have this enormous faith in her, and a great love for her. I don’t want to buy her a cup of tea so that I can stare at the baby, although he is adorable and certainly I’d be glad to see him—I wish that I could have her company sometimes, is all. I guess that’s friendship, or the wish for it. I don’t think we ever will live in the same city—we love it here, they love it there—but just wanting less distance is a precious and rare thing for me, the antisocial butterfly.

Why’dja do it, huh?

Yesterday and today I am answering questions from fabulous commenter Artemis: “Hi. I guess my question is why you decided to place, and how you came to that decision? Maybe you covered that already but I only discovered your blog about a month ago. And what made you choose Ruth and Nora?” If you have a question, lay it on me.

I’m a little nervous about answering this one. Part of that is that there are reasons here that I never gave to the agency, or to Ruth and Nora, or to anyone, really—there are dumb things and petty things. I tended to give people my good and overwhelming reasons: “I am extremely poor and not ready to parent.” True, and it seems like enough…but there’s always more to the story, seems like. As soon as I had given birth I felt ready to parent—hell, I did parent for that one day—but I literally would not allow myself to consider any alternative to adoption. I didn’t want to let Ruth and Nora down, I didn’t want to look weak, I didn’t want to trap my boyfriend—and of course my list of reasons going into the process was still mostly present. And it was an actual, physical list; when the agency told me that many women falter after birth, I decided to write a list down so that I could look at it if I needed to. The list was full of self-hate, and I kind of wish that I had been able to get some counseling during the adoption process: it started out “Listen, you stupid f%ck%ing b%tch.” Yes, that is what I had to say to myself. So I guess that’s one reason for choosing adoption that I never put on any list, not even in my head; I sort of despised myself.

 

I had a lot of reasons for choosing adoption: some of them were good reasons, and some of them, frankly, were pretty crappy. I’m going to give all of them because I do myself no favors by holding back on this blog and because I think it’s usually a complicated decision. So here they are, in no particular order:

• My partner, the future Mr. Book, was planning on going to law school and wouldn’t be able to do that if we had had a baby. It’s still going to be at least another year, but a child would have pushed that back several years.
• I wanted to prove to my partner that I hadn’t gotten pregnant on purpose.
• I have a history of serious depression, and worried that I would suffer from post-partum psychosis. My mother had pretty bad post-partum depression and abused me and Tammy as infants—I began, in a weird way, to see the pregnancy as a trial run, a chance to see whether I could have a baby and not lose my mind. I managed to keep taking care of my cat and remained affectionate and attentive to him even during the worst of the aftermath, so I’ve decided that I can probably have a baby and not go dangerously nuts.
• My parents had all of us kids while they were poor and my dad was in school, and things were pretty dire sometimes. I wanted my kid to have toys and adequate indoor heat and health insurance; stuff I didn’t have when I was little. My memories of my childhood are not good, and I didn’t want to raise my son the way I was raised.
• My partner had very much wanted me to have an abortion, and told me that many times. Maybe this sounds weird, but I didn’t want to raise a kid whose life we’d talked about ending. I’m trying to find a more rational/less emotional way to phrase this one, but this is the best I can do. Not that we ever would have told Cricket, but I didn’t want to have that in my head, even.
• I told my partner that I worried that ten years down the road, he’d resent me and feel that I’d trapped him…and he didn’t say anything. Right, I thought to myself.
• The only night of my life that I had unprotected sex, I got pregnant. I decided that this meant that I’d gotten pregnant for a reason, and that the reason must be that God was punishing me by making me carry someone else’s child and then give the baby to the real parents. Catholic guilt can really do a number on a girl, huh?
• When I was pregnant, I was unemployed, living with my parents, and in a long-distance relationship—if any one of those things had been different, I might not have placed. Even now, I’ve had a couple of bad moments where I look at Mr. Book and think, I should have kept Cricket instead of marrying you. That’s not fair of me; if I had told Mr. Book that we were going to be raising this baby, he would have married me and stepped up to be a dad. But we were both in bad situations, and we didn’t want to make a baby carry part of the burden.

 

I second guess my decision to place—maybe I always will, I don’t know. But Cricket is doing well, his parents love him, and I’m meeting my obligations to him; I think that’s as much as I can reasonably hope for.

 

I guess that’s only half the story, tho. Before I got pregnant, I had always assumed that I would have an abortion; once I got pregnant, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do that. I am still pro-choice, but feel that abortion is a choice not available to me personally. So when I did get pregnant, I thought that I was going to have a baby. Then I talked to my partner, and I realized that I couldn’t have a baby. I had read Dan Savage’s memoir about adopting his son, so I knew of open adoption—I emailed the agency he used, and went from there.

Narrowing It Down

Today and tomorrow I am answering questions from fabulous commenter Artemis: “Hi. I guess my question is why you decided to place, and how you came to that decision? Maybe you covered that already but I only discovered your blog about a month ago. And what made you choose Ruth and Nora?” If you have a question, lay it on me.

 

How did I pick Ruth and Nora? Well, although I was not able to use the agency I first contacted (instead I had to use an agency from the state in which I lived, an agency about which I have many unpleasant things to say), I started out thinking that I would be working with them—so I looked through the couples on their website first. I had a long list of things that I wanted, some more important than others:

• I wanted a stay-at-home parent. I know that many excellent parents put their kids into daycare—and, in fact, Cricket may start daycare next fall—but I don’t like it, personally.
• I wanted the couple to live in a big city. I’ve lived in big cities and tiny towns, and felt trapped in the small towns.
• I wanted Democrats. Obviously I can’t choose what beliefs his parents share with Cricket, but—during the entrustment, Ruth talked about wanting Cricket to grow up with a strong sense of social justice. How great is that?!
• I wanted a gay or lesbian couple. This was one of my more flexible criteria, and in fact I shortlisted several straight couples. Here was my thinking: I had been lurking adoption forums for awhile before I made my choice, and I saw a number of women adopting because of infertility who had a great deal of grief and rage, some of which got taken out on the birthmothers. I can’t tell you how many times I saw the “pregnant, crack-addicted sixteen-year-old” nastiness, and as a twenty-five-year-old woman who used no drugs and was in a monogamous relationship…I wasn’t impressed, let’s just say. I know that there are many, many straight couples adopting because of infertility who are generous, kind, awesome people. But I couldn’t find a way to pick them out based on their “Dear Birthmother” letters. =/ In Dan Savage’s book, he talks about feeling that being able to adopt was an amazing privilege, and I thought, What a great way to come into adoption. I want that.
• I wanted a couple who were religious, but not fundamentalist.
• I wanted a couple with no more than one child already. I grew up fundamentalist, and it left me with a bias against a great many things, large families among them. My mother didn’t have enough time and attention for all four of us; I wanted Cricket to be the center of somebody’s universe. That said, it wasn’t important to me that he be an only child, and if all goes as planned, he won’t be. But I do like it that he will have had a couple of years as the star of the show.
• I wanted them to own their own home. A lot of money wasn’t important to me, and in fact Ruth and Nora are not well off—but they have enough money to have bought a house and to be able to get Cricket anything he needs.

 

There’s one thing that wasn’t on my list going into the process that ended up being incredibly important; Ruth and Nora looked genuinely happy in their picture. I would say that more than half of the couples in the pool did not look really happy in their picture, but Ruth and Nora seemed glad to be next to each other, glad to be wherever they were. It was a nice bonus that Ruth is a vegetarian, like me; I was pretty sure that they lived in the Emerald City, where I planned to move. I thought that I would get along best with Nora—she actually looked like someone I would have dated—but in fact Ruth and I have ended up building a close friendship, while I’m just amiably not close to Nora.

 

By the time that I first spoke to them, I was sure that they were the ones. They were fairly reserved during that first conversation, which I now know was a good sign—they wanted the right match, not just any match—but at the time it made me feel as though I had to win them over, rather than vice versa. After that conversation, I got a copy of their full profile, which felt to me as though I was just confirming what I already knew: Yes, yes, these are the ones. After a second conversation in which I explained that I still wanted to match with them, they planned a trip to visit. It went well. =)

 

It’s funny; I still look at the agency website sometimes, see who is in the pool. There are couples waiting whom I evaluated back in the day—there is even one couple I liked, but their Dear Birthmother letter says so little about them that I didn’t seriously consider them. I even—and this is strange—will pick out the couple I would choose if I had to pick today. Right now, it’s a charming gay couple with a three-year-old daughter (if you wondered).

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Solicitation

Only once during my pregnancy was I solicited by someone who wanted my child, and it was as polite and inoffensive as that situation can be, I think. If I had gotten PAP business cards from a doctor, I would never have gone back—I’m pretty indignant about that kind of advertising, although I guess my position makes it easy for me to disapprove.

I had just started the second trimester of my pregnancy, and had already picked out Ruth and Nora, although of course they didn’t know that. It would be…a month and a half, maybe? before we first talked on the phone. I was at a dinner party for my parents given by family friends; they knew that we were moving away, and wanted to have an informal sort of “we’ll miss you” party. One of the other couples present were a young professor and his physician assistant wife; my father is a professor and my mother is a physician assistant, and the two couples had become friends. The wife, Amy, had heard from my mother that I was pregnant and planning an adoption—I now wonder whether my mother also mentioned that I wanted to give the baby to lesbians and perhaps indicated her dissatisfaction with this plan. Later that night, she approached my mother, who then told me brightly that Amy couldn’t get pregnant again and wanted my baby! Wouldn’t it be nice to give the child to a friend?

Amy hadn’t impressed me as a bad person or anything, but she certainly wasn’t my friend; even setting that aside, I already knew that I wanted an open adoption, and since she lived in a state we were moving 1500 miles away from…. I suppose I’m glad that I didn’t have to turn her down in person, but my mom was annoyed.

I expect that I’ll end up talking about all of the pieces of my journey to adoption, but do any of you out there in radioland have any questions? About anything? I think I’d only refuse to answer the really obvious “What is your legal name and real address?” kind of questions. If not, I’ll keep chattering at random, but I think I do better when I have a prompt.

Presents and Presence

Well, Mr. Book’s work has informed him that no one gets days off during the holiday season; this means that he may very well be schedule to work the day of Cricket’s birthday party. If so, he will try to trade shifts—if that isn’t possible, I don’t know what we’ll do. Tomorrow I will mail Cricket’s wrapped gift up to his parents so that it can be opened at his birthday even if we aren’t able to be there; finally, my habit of acquiring gifts two months in advance pays off! The whole situation is slightly complicated by the fact that we don’t actually want to go to the party—but we think that we need to, that it’s important for the open adoption relationship.

Wrapping the present was a challenge for me—I am somewhat clumsy and impatient at this sort of thing—but I really wanted it to look nice, so I bought paper and bows and took my time. It does look nice, if nothing special—the paper has little zeppelins on it, which I like, but I should emphasize that they are peaceful-looking little airships accompanied by shooting stars. I didn’t move here with any wrapping paper, so I ended up spending better than $10 on the roll of paper and some bows; Ruth would be horrified, I’m sure. It’s a stupid way to spend money while we’re poor, I realize…but then I don’t think that kids think “Well, of course she didn’t wrap it, they need that money for the gas bill.” As long as we’re able to do both, however carefully, I want to keep up appearances for Cricket.

On Monday, before I started for home, Kate and I spent a bit of time wandering around downtown–some lunch, but mostly used bookstores. Souvenirs are important in my family, and it’s a tradition I hope to keep alive in the Book family—I’d already gotten Mr. Book something, but I ended up adding a couple of vintage Canadian postcards and something little for his mom, who is having a pretty rough time of things this year. Then, suddenly, I wanted to find something for Cricket. Now, there was probably nothing in these musty stores that would be genuinely appropriate for a baby, but I thought about getting him a book for when he is older, some beautiful out-of-print something that his parents could hold on to for him.

As a kid, I loved the books of Albert Payson Terhune—he wrote about beautiful, clever, noble collies, and since Cricket is growing up with a dog, I thought one of his books might make a great present—I found one of the same set that I had as a kid, and for only ten dollars. And then I just got upset and put it down and left, wandered into the biography section and finally left without buying anything.

I have this split in terms of how I feel about the kid. On the one hand, I think that my life would be easier if I could just stop thinking of him as mine at all, think about myself as no more a mother than any woman who has an abortion. I know how ugly this sounds, and how selfish–certainly, even when I’m holding this out as my personal ideal, I never imagine myself contradicting Cricket in his opinions. In some ways, all I am doing now is deciding what I’ll think until he tells me how it’s going to be. But of course it will inform my attitude and decisions, that underlying belief, and so I have to choose the right model. The other hand, of course, is feeling like the other mother; I’m sure I don’t even at my most momly feel as much like his mother as Ruth does, but I do feel some mom things. What do I do? I guess I think that the more I feel like one of his mothers, the more hurt I am going to get. Maybe that’s true for any mother. But when I think of him as my son, I think “I’m not going to see my son this month” or “I wish I could cuddle my son when they visit” or of course the big things like “I would never put my son into daycare.” If he’s not my son, then I’m fine—kids do great under all kinds of different, thoughtful parenting philosophies, and while Ruth and Nora’s differ from mine quite a bit, they are good and loving parents, and why shouldn’t they, e.g., dress him in clothes I would never ever choose? Maybe I could ideally feel like a grandparent; he is very slightly mine, for all that I don’t get to pick or do a lot of bonding.

So what will I do? Well, I’ll probably pick up a couple of those books for futurekid off the internet. That’s my imperfect solution to so many of these questions—what happens when I can’t get pregnant? Yes, I know that I’m borrowing trouble with that question, but if you’ve read my blog, you know that that is my m.o. And this way I get to come up with answers; if there is to be no futurekid, I can give these things to future nieces and nephews. My sisters each want three kids, Tammy has already gotten pregnant twice…odds are that there will be some kids around sometime in the next several years. A bold claim, I know. So I’ll pick up The Heart of a Dog and one or two others, and I’ll put them on the shelf that has all of the children’s books—which is in the room that was closed off when Ruth and Nora were here. There are things that I am glad to hide from them.

A Parent Trap

An acquaintance of mine asked me what I think of a position paper on revocation periods in adoption, and since I ended up writing my thoughts about this issue in adoption, it seemed only natural to put my response on the blog. The paper calls for two months after birth during which “no adoption business or person seeking to adoption should be allowed to approach a mother.” Additionally, the paper calls for a one-month revocation period after TPR is signed.

I disagree pretty strongly with the first provision. There are some practical concerns, for one thing; since most women relinquish because of poverty, who buys two months’ worth of diapers and baby clothes? Many women wishing to relinquish might prefer not to breastfeed—who pays for the formula and bottles? If she’s homeless, who finds her an apartment and pays her rent? If she has an addiction problem or an abusive home environment, who makes sure that she and the baby are safe? Beyond the practical considerations, I honestly think that it’s cruel to require that long a period: relinquishing after a day was impossibly hard; relinquishing after two months would be simply impossible. Perhaps that is the author’s hope, but I am not anti-adoption and find it hard not to see this as another way to punish women who plan to place their children. Similarly, if the mother has other children whom she is raising, they also suffer—they bond with the new baby for two months and then baby goes away. And it’s worth pointing out that this sort of waiting period is already legally possibly. While you’d be hard-pressed to find it out from your friendly adoption agency social worker, there’s nothing in the law to stop a woman from creating such a period herself and just not calling an agency until her child is two months old; I’m sure that many agencies would be more than willing to place such a young baby.

If the birthmother wants an open adoption, I think prebirth matching has some distinct advantages—the expectant mother needs to find a couple with whom she can have a relationship, and it’s easier (although still not easy!) to figure that out in advance than to try to make things work with someone whom you’ve just met but who is now parenting your child. And whatever you think of birthmother expenses, some women need help during the pregnancy to get their physical needs—and the needs of the fetus—met. Who helps these women outside of adoption? There are of course some charitable organizations, but I don’t know that they can help every woman who needs help…and not every woman experiencing a crisis pregnancy knows how to find them.

I believe that the main result of this proposed change would be to increase the number of Safe Haven surrenders.

On the other hand, I strongly agree with the idea of a one-month, unwaivable revocation period. Perhaps that makes things harder for adoptive parents, and I regret that possibility…. But I do think there should be a short period during which women who have lost their children can realize that it was a mistake and get them back. I personally would not have reclaimed my son a month out—but I know of one woman at least who tried to get her son back a week after TPR and found out that she had waived her right to revoke.

In Which Our Hero Is Kind of a Downer

I’ve been reading more and more adoption blogs recently—I should start adding names to my blogroll, I guess, as it is sadly incomplete. Of course, there are some I read that I wouldn’t link other people to: blogs whose authors have points of view that I find offensive. Yes, I often keep reading…but probably I shouldn’t.

 

Sometimes I write whole posts and delete them because I worry that I’m just rehashing old territory. I should either be a mother or not at all a mother right now, the limbo is my fault: check. I feel ambivalent about visits: check. Sometimes I cry about Cricket but I never tell his mom that: check. What more can I say?

 

I mean this blog to be mostly a space for me to work things out—so maybe if the same things keep coming up when I sit down to write, I should just write them out, see whether I can say or see something new. On the other hand, does it really benefit me to indulge myself in a sad sack game of broken record? I honestly don’t know what the best course is.

 

There have been so many little kids on the planes this trip. The first I saw were a pair of (I assume) transracially adopted little kids, a boy and a girl, two and four years old. They were adorable, and I let their family in the queue ahead of me and then valiantly didn’t watch the kids as they chatted with their parents and looked around. At some point (yes, I know how bad this is), I decided that if someone noticed me watching the kids and babies and asked whether I had or wanted any, I would tell them that I had a son stillborn last year. What is wrong with me? I’m glad that it didn’t come up—even though I did end up chatting with a few of the moms when their kids ran up to me, or into me—I would, I’m sure, feel even worse if I’d actually lied instead of just planning to. Usually I just tell people that I don’t have any kids.

 

I sometimes realize that I could end up bitter about the adoption, but have to acknowledge that if I do, it will be entirely my own fault. On some level, I loathe myself for making that decision—for even being able to make that decision. Shortly before our wedding, Mr. Book was treated to some no-doubt-delightful sobbing phone calls along the lines of “what the f%ck is wrong with me that I could do this,” and you know what? I haven’t really resolved that question to my satisfaction. Did I place give Cricket up because I thought it was the best thing for him? Yes, and.

 

I don’t know that any of my questions have one-word answers anymore.