I’m a regular Dear Abby, probably to an annoying level if the truth be told. In my blogs, however, I have tried not to give specific advice in answer to requests for such. I’m just an adoptee. I have very clear ideas on nearly everything under the sun, but I don’t believe that makes me qualified, necessarily, to give ‘answers’ to any of you … until now.

My last bunch of blogs on ‘Issues and Issues’ found me editing out pages and pages of advice, encouragement and/or some part of a wake-up call to one leg or another of our three-legged adoption pot. Yes, the tripod, triad, triangle, try and try again… to me, the three-legged pot: birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents. (In South Africa, the three-legged pot is a cast iron stew pot that has three legs so it can balance easily over a fire. It’s called a “potjie” –POI-kee ... a very delicious stew it makes, indeed.)

It seems to me that our pot is not very well balanced, precariously leaning on one leg or another at different moments, searching for equilibrium so that some seriously tasty cooking can take place inside.

The next few blogs are post scripts to the ‘issues’ series. While it is definitely presumptuous of me to do this, I feel some sort of obligation to say the normally unsaid. Somebody’s got to do it. Or not.

Anyway, let the presumption begin…


p.s. A note to birth parents…

This first post script is the most challenging for me to write simply because it is the leg of the pot I am least sure about in some ways. I have not stood or had to lean on this leg, and yet, if it didn’t exist, if it wasn’t part of the pot, I wouldn’t exist. So of course, I find it a very important leg, indeed.

I don’t know the people who birthed me. I don’t know their names. I don’t know their story at the time I was born. I don’t know what kind of people they were then or what kind of people they are now. I don’t know if they still know each other. I don’t even know if they knew each other well at the time they conceived me. I mean, it WAS the sixties. (I have mused that I was a hippie love child. Perhaps I was Abbey Hoffman’s, from some post-protest good lovin’. He was in the area. Why not? Well, because probably not, which is just fine.)

My feelings toward my birthparents came to be mine the summer I was 12 years old (I wrote about it here.) No matter how much information I get or how much I learn via this whole blog thing and relative immersion in the ‘adoption world,’ my feelings are still the same.

From my point of view, giving her baby for adoption must be one of the most difficult things for a woman to do after having that baby be a part of her for nine months. (There are harder things, just for some perspective: try watching your baby starve to death while you are walking hundreds of miles, your own breasts shriveled and empty, to find food and water during a drought or war… this happens every single day to tens of thousands of African woman. Now THAT is as hard as it gets.)

I always believed that my birth mother did want a better life for me than what she could have provided for one reason or another. I thought, I think, she was generous.

Given the generation in which I was born, I know there is a good chance that my birth mother was pressured into her decision to let me be adopted. I also know some women whose families tried to force them to give their child up who refused, ran away from the ‘homes’ to which they were sent and worried about making nice with their own parents later … after the baby was born.

No matter how defiant and brave the act, I am not sure I would have wanted my birth mother to do that. If the families were completely against the pregnancy and my birth, how would I have been treated by those families? Would I have been happy? Would they have accepted me or would they have sanctioned me as a second class citizen, so to speak?

I have known married women who knew they could not take care of another child and others who knew that their marriage was going to end or were entirely focused on their careers, all who gave their babies for adoption. They each knew they were not in a place in their lives where they would be good parents and so they gave their babies a different chance. It doesn’t mean it was an easy thing for these birth mothers to do.

I have also known many people of all ages and situations that were not planning to get pregnant but did, had and kept the children and resented those children their entire lives. Maybe it was too hard to let go of the baby or they didn’t want people to think bad things of them, or, more likely, they just never thought about how their resentment would affect their children. It affects them, though, a tremendous amount. I know most of these mothers and fathers thought they could control, hide their resentment, but resentment is the rust of the emotional world: it quietly, determinedly discolors and eats away at one’s emotional pipes, eventually rendering them useless and/or in dire need of repair.

For these reasons among many too numerous to mention here, I can never and will never be angry with or resentful of birth parents; mine or anyone else’s.

[Next blog: p.s. to birth parents, continued.]