Nature

Janey, As I was reading your post, I couldn't help but smile, even with all the truths that you shared...because you are an example of how, even through horrible experiences, we survive despite ourselves, despite what "should have" or "could have" been, and despite what others thought... As for your children, I think you summed it up when you said "your history"...the history is over. We learn from history, but we don't live there. History can set the stage for things, but doesn't mean that it makes the final curtain call. Each person has their own responsibility for their life. My bmom has made horrible choices in her life, and it hurts me, because I wanted more for her (she is still living in those choices, and never chose to get out...)...but I have learned, and so will your children, that what happened to our bmoms, amoms, grandparents, ect does not define us. We each get to make our own legacy. And the legacy that you are leaving is not based on just a certian number of years, but the joy, love, blessing that you are to the people that are in your life. We can look back for so long, that we forget that we are walking forward...into a future. And the way I see it, your future is bright!! You have A LOT to offer people, especially your children. One thing that I admire about you is the fact that you DO take responsibility for yourself and your choices, and that speaks VOLUMES about you!!!! I am glad you survived..the world is a better place because of it! :grouphug:

Janey, I don't quite know where to start with this post......I want to stamp my feet, put my finger in your face and yell at you!:bullwhip: Here is why1. Why the heck Should you have been an addict or a prostitute...why? you had the intelligence and yes STRENGTH to not go that route in order to survive. 2. you may have been the oldest but you were the oldest CHILD, you thought as a child and left to survive yourself. You were NOT there parent as much as you loved them.you taking the hits doesn't help them....YOU did not have the ability to save them as much as you wanted to...you really had to save yourself first. You wer one little child that was helpless to the horrible adults around you, as were your sibs. I don't think there was a contract anywhere that said you were suppose to save them. Smart kids run. 3. the comment about your kids living as adoptees The fact that you are understanding their position only validates the fact that you are their mother too. I have always maintained that if a mom is unable to give shelter, food, clothes etc then adoption is truly in the best interest of the child. I am willing to bet that your twins are just living...living the life of 20 somethings and as much as adoption has changed their course they just want to be a 20 something. You didn't DO anything to them but give birth and make a maternal decision in their best interest. Please don't feel guilty for most of us adoptees I am willing to gather that the last thing we want our bmoms to feel is guilty! that in turn makes me feel guilty...LOL..crazy as it sounds. 4. YOUR legacy? Naw, your legacy for your children is how you broke the cycle of abuse and made decisions for all involved to do just that. I can't imagine your life, I can't imagine having the strength to endure what you have and come out the other end as intact as you are....you deserve accolades, love and respect. NOT judgment and criticism. Your children I beleive will be honored to know tht their bmom was strong enough to fight for herself and her children.....you have come such a long way and you have done well.....I feel honorred to be communicating with you....Let YOUR legacy be the strong woman you are not the abused child. otherwise that aweful man that did abuse and those that let it happen have won.5. You should have survived because you are needed today..You should not have been abused, you should not have hade to feel you needed to save your sibs, you should not have lived on thee streets as a teen...but you MOST definetly should have survived.:love: 6. You made choices based upon was was handed to you.

Janey, you say this as thought it is a bad thing to live as an adoptee. I'm not an adoptee and can't begin to know what that feels like (I' sure it's a very different experience for each individual), but I also don't think it's something terrible, or at least it shouldn't be. And what was the alternative? To bring those children into an abusive household where they'd see you and others being beaten, and possibly become the targets of that abuse, too? No, I think you did the right thing in running far away from that whole scene and protecting your babies.

Peachy... It's true, not all of us adoptees think it is such a horrible thing being adopted. I like my status as being an adoptee...not saying it wasn't without struggle, fears, questioning, ect...but then who doesn't deal with those things in life...like I've said, it's all about the lenses we look through in life that matters the most.

I hope it's OK to post here on this thread as an amom. As usual, Janey, I am amazed by the emotional power of the honesty of your posts. I learn so much from reading them. I wanted to post because as an a-parent the idea of nature resonated with me in a profound and disturbing way. Everyone in the adoption triad, it seems is at some point accused by society of violating some invented ideal of "nature" - some ideal of what it means to be a mother, a woman, a child, a family. You get the societal accusations, spoken or unspoken, that you somehow went against nature for having relinquished. You get the "Oh I NEVER could have done that." I get, spoken or unspoken, the parallel accusation my family is somehow "unnatural." I also get the "I NEVER could have done that" - i.e. be the mother of a child I didn't give birth to. And the child at the heart of it all - well as Brock and Dpen said so eloquently, every adoptee is different. But they also have to cope with society's questions and accusations. And they REALLY have no agency in the whole thing. Obviously we are all in different situations. And I understand and admit that as an adoptive parent I am in a position of privilege within the triad, and that thus I cannot equate our positions. But I do see a unity in the way we are made to defend ourselves (either our loud or silently in our hearts) as women who have defied the so-called natural order. It's just another case of women paying a high price in this world for making tough choices.

Hi Janey! I don't think your reaction was against nature at all. I think we do what we need to do at the time to survive. For me, I have felt guilt about having a life after relinquishment. Somehow, I guess I felt unworthy. This guilt has held me down in a way. At times I have needed to tuck my head down and walk on too. I think this makes you a survivor...

Hey All! Thanks as always for responding! I wanted to write more on this but will have to come back this evening after my grandson goes home. You know I did want to apologize though for misspeaking. I feel just awful about it. I didn't mean to say that living as an adoptee is a bad thing (and thank you Peachy and Brock for bringing that to my attention - this stuff is hard to talk about and I sometimes don't realize what I've written. Thank you guys for being kind enought to call me on that so that I can clarify before I ended up looking like a complete jerko!) It's just that I've seen so much pain that adoptees have lived with. So much pain that I was ignortant to. Sometimes I just feel bad about it, but I don't AND I SWEAR THIS , look down on adoptees at all. I sure hope I didn't hurt anyone. That's not something I'd ever deliberately do but if I did, please forgive me. You guys and your thoughts mean a great deal to me. You are all the only way that I have to come back, if that makes sense. Anyway...I'll post more later. Love and respect you all very much,

My standard response to crap like that is, "Well good thing you weren't living my life then." I refuse to put up with the I could never do that stuff. Of course I'd been refusing to put up with stupid adoption related comments for 26 years by the time I placed kiddo. You'd be amazed.

So I'm one of those first moms who doesn't let her grief eat her alive. I don't sit around on holidays in deep throes of grief, I don't look at pictures and sob because my son isn't in them, I don't do those things to myself and to him, because they won't accomplish anything. Do I miss him? Sure I do. Have I had moments of grief so deep that I was afraid I was never going to see the top again? Oh yeah. Those first months were very dark for a lot of reasons. I don't think that goes against nature though. I think that means that we all survive in a different way. I guess I believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and keep on going on. Not that I haven't had help doing that, I've had plenty, I don't think it is a on your own activity. You find the resources to help you and and then you keep going. That doesn't end the grief or the sadness. I didn't want my first mom to be depressed and sad forever. It makes me sad and angry now that placing me caused her so much damage. I can't do anything about that, and realize that, but the feelings are still there. I won't let my son ever wonder that. When he is old enough, like his 70's HA, I might tell him a bit about the raw pain, but he is going to know that even though I missed him I have still had a full happy life. To have anything less would be letting my son down.

Janey, please don't feel bad about this. I didn't bring it up to "call you on the carpet," but just to point out that, from my perspective, it is not inherently a bad thing to be an adoptee. I understand your clarification, though, that in reading about the pain or difficulties that adoptees can go through, a birthmom can feel responsible for that, for putting them in that position to begin with. We don't want our children to have pain related to our decisions to place them. Thanks for clarifying what you meant. :grouphug:

Okay....I'm back! Long post coming... RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! :arrow: Little did I know when I started this thread that I would: A. Put my foot so far into my mouth that it'd become part of my pulmonary system! :eek: Again, my apologies to any adoptees I offended. Yikes!! B. That I would discover myself talking of things I thought I'd long buried and forgotten :boot: C. That it's still so hard and embarrassing when people say nice things to me. D. That talking about this rips open other people's wounds even though none of us means to do that when we open our mouths. E. That it's a good thing I'm learning from all of the good folk in here because if I met my children with the limited amount of knowledge I have of all this....that would be a disaster! Geez! This stuff is something else!! It's like I'm some kind of brambly weed with 20 foot roots and I'm being ripped from the ground and I'm the idiot gardener doing it! :arrow: Let's see....I should write back in order of those who posted since my initial post. (Good grief! I sound like an insurance form). BrockBaby You're 100% correct about the history stuff. How skewed my thinking becomes sometimes. JustPeachy You're right too. I can't begin to know what it feels like to be an adoptee. You know what I just realized that I think I've been doing? I've been trying to project what that must feel like in order to understand it enough to not make a mistake. THAT'S got to be like the ultimate description of codependecy! Ooo...I hate that disease!! Dpen6 Thanks for the being enough of a friend to tell it like it is (including stamping feet and pointing finger) :love: . I take it as a compliment that someone would bother to take the time and post back. Abuse ingrains so much into people; so many lies we tell ourselves in order to justify the shame of being abused to start with. Honestly, I had no idea that the issues of adoption were wrapped around my childhood so tightly. I think it caught me off guard because I had told myself that one had nothing to do with the other. One more conceit to deal with. Saya For me personally, I love hearing from adoptive parents. They're just parents like me and parenting is the toughest job out there. I guess I'm just letting you know I welcome what you have to say and I thank you for responding to my thread. When I first came here, I was very ignorant not only of my own suffering but of others. See...for 31 years I'd bought the line that someone spoke of (I think it was Lovemy2Boys)....the fairy tale. That everyone skips happily along through this stuff like a flower girl down the aisle. When really we're all Dorothy's traversing the Yellow Brick Road just trying to get home. I have long empathized with women who are looked down on because they can't bear children. And I don't think that that is something I've imagined. I think that society has looked own. That these women are patted on the head with "oh you poor dears" at best and hateful things that I've actually heard people say like, "well maybe they weren't MEANT to be moms". That kind of callousness and complete indifference to the hurt of others. Like women who suffer miscarraiges and there's always one person in the family who says, "Oh well...it was natures way of taking the baby because there was something wrong with it." People think they're being nice offering up such platitudes. :hissy: Maggie Thanks for sharing. You are always so kind-hearted in your posts. :love: And to leave everyone with a smile I added icing to the stupidity cake of my day. My little grandson has these butterfly wings that he likes to wear when he runs around the house. They are shiny and huge and I think he thinks he's flying or something when he has them on. (He's 2). Welp, I forgot to take them off before my SIL came to pick my grandson up. SIL is a wonderful man but a "guys guy" if you know what I mean. So SIL looks at the grandbaby wearing the wings and then he looks at me and says, "Why is my son wearing butterfly wings?" I could read the words behind my SIL's expression at that moment and it translated roughtly into, "I'd love to put my foot up my mother-in-laws patoot right now!" :eek: Ooo Boy! :eek: So it has not been one my better days. Foot in mouth, foot up buttski. sigh............ I think I shall go back to hiding in the codependency thread where I belong! :arrow:

brock, I feel the same way.....I am GRATEFUL(there i said it),...that I was finelly adopted. Being an adoptee is not "bad"...it is not necessarily a sentence that neds to be endured but there are siiues sometimes that need to be respected. But for janey yo say they gave them a life sentecne for me...is not a true statement....maybe for some it is.

Hey Dpen6! :grouphug: Hmmm... I never thought about how that must've sounded to you guys. I was speaking in terms of family and how I've had to endure a lifetime of contempt from them. And how I sentenced myself to a lifetime of self-hatred in return. That of course is not my children's fault in any way. They are blameless in this. Hugs to ya!

Janey, I was in no way offended by what you said about the adoptee thing. I was just reassuring you that not all adoptees feel bad about being an adoptee. So please do not beat yourself up over that comment. No foot in your mouth, or shoe up any other part of your anatomy... As for butterfly wings on little boys...I had a little boy that LOVED to walk around in the high heel dress up shoes, and when he was three he would often comment on "liking your shirt Miss Worry" and would always comment when I got my hair done...but he was a BOY BOY too....and I had one boy that would always dress up in my old high school cheerleading skirt (dang..preschoolers wore it..what HAPPENED!??!? LOL) So SIL has no need to worry about his BOY!!! geeeesh! Do something for you Janey...just because you are worth it!!!!:grouphug:

((( BrockBaby ))) Thanks so much! :-)