Category: Adoption

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Living Out Loud: The Underside of Blogging

I have been blogging regularly for over five years now.  Donna’s cancer brought me to the keyboard and I have simply never left.  For a person who is not religious, busy, and ‘taking a break’ from the clinical social work I am trained to do, the human connection the Internet affords me is invaluable — honestly akin to food, water, oxygen.

One thing that keeps me blogging are the folks who read what I write.  Between Donna’s online cancer journal and Mary Tyler Mom, there have been well, well over one million visits to my posts.  That is crazy town for me.  I am a geek, a dork, utterly unpopular and awkward.  That people care about what I write is something I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

And I know people read because you tell me.  So many comments over the years — sustaining, supportive, friendly, funny, loving comments.  Most of the time I want to crawl under the covers when I read the love you shower on me.  You shower love, I run for the covers.  It is humbling and awkward and I don’t quite know what to do with it except keep doing what I am doing.

Every once in a while, I touch a nerve.  You see, I am a woman with opinions.  I am.  I know this as I have always had opinions.  Ask my grade school classmates, and they would describe a mini-Mary Tyler Mom who argues about politics and religion.  True.  Freaking.  Story.  In the first grade I got into it with a classmate who said her mother let her vote.  Well my little first grade self was not going to stand for that.  I corrected her misrepresentation and felt justified in doing so.  In junior high, I proudly wore a ‘Harold Washington for Mayor’ (Chicago’s first African-American mayor) despite living  in the suburbs.  Ugh.  I can be smug and self-righteous.  I know that about myself.  I try hard to own it and dismantle it, too.

When I first started Mary Tyler Mom, I was resolute in not wanting to write about cancer.  I was going to separate myself from having been sainted as a Cancer Mom.  When you have a child with cancer, people tend to think you are somehow stronger, better, more compassionate, etc.  The thing is, you’re not.  You’re still who you’ve always been, just with something important to say that people may or may not want to hear.

Well, summer 2011, Mary Tyler Mom came out of the closet as a grieving mom.  I was still the same snarky, witty woman, but now I was snarky, and witty and sad, too.   When I wrote Donna’s Cancer Story last September, my Internet presence kind of ballooned.  I was grateful to get the word out about pediatric cancer and I was grateful that lots and lots of people were learning about my dear Donna.  If her mother doesn’t tell her story, who will?  No one, is the sad truth.  So I do.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the praise my readers give me.  It makes me uncomfortable.  I want to tell you about my flaws as compensation.  The things I do that I am ashamed of, the things I wish I did better.  I feel the need to humanize myself so no one treats me like a saint, cause a saint I am not.

I am snarky, opinionated, passionate, loud.  I was all those things before cancer, too, but now people listen to me.

Overwhelmingly, I get warm reception from my readers.  Great heaps and piles of love and support.  It’s crazy not only that people like what I do so much, but tell me about it.  All the time.

Enter a flaw.

For every hundred or couple hundred warm, heartfelt, loving, supportive comments, I get a mean one.  Or two.  When I write about something I am most passionate about — pediatric cancer, or bald Barbie dolls, or now, adoption, that is when I get the mean.  And while I will read those hundreds of positive, uplifting comments, and they will carry me and hold me up when I feel weak, I will obsess over the one or two negative ones.

See?  I told you I was flawed.  You should have believed me.

What the freak should I care about what a stranger thinks about me or my life?  I shouldn’t give a fig.  But I do.  Ugh.  It makes me feel needy and narcissistic, but I do.  

Here is the thing:  I chose to write about adoption.  I willingly chose to tell the story of our introduction into the world of adoption, as wrenching as it was.  When I pressed that ‘Publish’ button, I agreed to accept the consequences of that action.  People will question and judge and suggest.  It is human nature.  And the Internet kind of turns the volume up on human nature, doesn’t it?

Please know that Mary Tyler Dad and I are so grateful for all the virtual support shown to us in the past week.  It brings us back to the days of Donna’s journal when we would pour over the comments at the end of a long and draining day in Cancerville to fill us back up so that we could do it again tomorrow.  We are humbled by those who shared their own stories of adoption with us — birth moms and dads, adopted kids now grown, foster parents, and adoptive parents.  Thank you for that.  Your stories fill us with hope at the start of what we know will be a rough process.

Others made suggestions about all different types of adoptions, wondering if we have considered this or that — foster children, older children, international children, special needs children, even older, international, special needs children.  Please believe me when I say that we have considered everything.  You don’t enter adoption lightly.  You truly can’t, as the vetting process for adoptive parents is hard freaking core.  We are fully informed of all the adoption options available to us.  We know what is best for our family.  If others make assumptions about what that means, that is about them, not us. 

Also know that our decision to walk away from this birth family was not an easy one or lightly made.  Mary Tyler Dad and I did what was right for our family, our son.  It does not bring us any comfort to know this family will continue to struggle.  They are in the midst of things that affect many American families — drugs, theft, homelessness, emotional and physical violence.  They were using their baby as a carrot, dangling that unborn child in front of us, testing to see how tight they could squeeze us.  We can’t and won’t invite that into our lives.  If others would, please message me and I will put you in contact with their attorney.

Whew.  That feels better.

I’ll make you a deal:  you keep reading and I’ll keep writing.  I will do what I have always done — write about things that matter to me.  I will tell the stories that I think need to be told.  Maybe, someday, I won’t always be in the middle of them.  Maybe, someday, they won’t always read like a Lifetime movie script.  Maybe, someday, I will learn to not care about the haters.  Truth is, they get me all riled up in the moment, but then I move on.  Donna taught me that trick.

So hate away, haters!  I’ve gonna choose some hope instead.  Donna taught me that trick, too.  You should try it sometime.

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Adoption 101: Final Exam

The response to our adoption story has been completely unexpected and surprising to Mary Tyler Dad and I.  Over 30K page views for MTM posts in just three days.  We are grateful for the support and encouragement, welcome the questions, and understand some of the criticism that has come our way.  And this, my friends, is why I opted to write about our experience.

As we were driving away from the town where we met the birth family, as I wept and traded texts with a friend, trying to make sense of what we had just seen and heard, there was a resolve to tell the story of adoption.  What happens, how it happens, the highs and lows (literally and figuratively, natch) of such a complex process.

In the first entry I wrote about my need to give order to chaos, but Adoption 101 has also been about shedding light on a part of America that so many of us do not see.  Poverty, addiction, and abuse are invisible to many.  Some might say that is a blessing, I personally feel it is a shame.  A few commenters felt there was too much judgment attached to the birth family.  I worked hard to simply tell the story as it unfolded.  No doubt, some of my anger, sadness, and simple sense of feeling wrung out to dry found itself in my words, and for that I am sorry.

Mary Tyler Dad suggested I wait a week before writing, but we all know how that went.  The keyboard is my greatest confidant, writing is my solace.  When I need to write, I write.  I am still amazed that you want to read.

Many of you have been moved to share your own stories of adoption — being adopted, having placed your child for adoption, being adoptive parents yourself.  And gratefully, so gratefully, we are learning how unique this past weekend was.  Someone chided me for titling this series Adoption 101, feeling it was misleading and would scare others researching adoption for themselves.  I don’t know what to say to that other than this experience has been our Adoption 101.  We will learn much from the past month as we continue to search for our child.  And the certainty we feel, Mary Tyler Dad and I, that if prospective adoptive parents are scared away by poverty, addiction, and abuse, than perhaps adoption was not in the cards for them.

We first talked about adopting in the fall of 2007.  In the midst of Donna’s treatment, as she was being prepped for her stem cell transplant, we were informed, sitting across a conference table from two of our docs, that the treatment Donna had received and would continue to receive, the toxic chemotherapies we hoped would save her, would prevent her from ever having children.  That was wrenching and made me so sad to know that Donna would never get to feel the kick of a child, her baby, inside of her.

There are so many losses in cancer that are also invisible.

I started thinking about the need to educate Donna, to normalize for her the reality that giving birth does not make one a mother.  Families are made in many different ways.  In the spirit of choosing hope, we wanted Donna to grow up with a sibling that would feel as much a part of her as her biological brother, so that if she grew to adulthood and chose motherhood, she would know adoption.  The course of Donna’s illness and the arrival of her brother made adoption impossible a few years ago.  And full disclosure, there have been four miscarriages along the way, three in the eighteen months after Donna died.

It is fitting that Donna brought us to adoption.  She has brought so many of the good things I value into my life.

But now it is Mary Tyler Son we want a sibling for — he was born a brother, feels like a brother, envies the siblings of his friends and cousins.

Like many folks we know, we came to parenthood late.  Contrary to every fear and concern I had, I am a good mom.  Not only did I have no idea I would love it so much, I had no idea I would take to it as I have.  And Mary Tyler Dad?  Forgettaboutit.  Read for yourself what an amazing man he is.

Maybe because of that, because we realize the combination of us, Mary Tyler Dad and I, create some good parenting, is one of the reasons we opted to pursue adoption.  We simply want more of parenting.  We want another child to love and hold and diaper and teach and learn from and raise and nurture and discipline and laugh with and sing with and weep over and stand back in amazement as we watch them soar.

And that child is out there, that birth mother is out there.  We haven’t found one another yet, but they are there.  Maybe they are looking for us right now, as we are looking for them.  I’ve thought for months and months that our baby would find us through Mary Tyler Mom.  There are so many of you, nationwide, that read my posts, and know what kind of parents we are.  I honestly had a whole campaign strategy planned, enlisting the help of my fellow bloggers, none of whom I have yet informed they were part of my plan.

Well, plans change, don’t they?  And this adoption thing keeps evolving, doesn’t it?  We weren’t expecting the call we received on July 16.  We weren’t expecting the roller coaster we would enter, hanging on for dear life all the way.

But here we are, Mary Tyler Dad and I, still standing, still waiting, still looking.  We are not discouraged by the pain and sadness we witnessed.  We are resolved.  Resolved to keep looking, resolved to keep telling our story, resolved that we will find our child and that child will find us.  We are resolved that there is a birth mom out there that believes, as we do, that we are the people she wants and needs, just as she is the person we want and need.

Maybe you know her.  Maybe she is your sister, your aunt, your daughter, your granddaughter, your friend, your sorority sister, your classmate, your neighbor, your church member, your patient, your client, your neice, your goddaughter.  Maybe she is the girl who shampoos your hair, or the one who sells you coffee, or walks the cute dog down the street.  Maybe she is you.

Mary Tyer Dad and I are waiting.  You can find us at marytylermom@gmail.com.

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Adoption 101: The Visit Ends

There we were, clinging to one another in the Wal-Mart — our own little islands of calm and sanity.  Birth mom requested a different cell phone and given that it wasn’t significantly more expensive, Mary Tyler Dad went through the exchange while we shopped for some food.

Think about food without a kitchen to prepare it in.  The hotel room had a fridge and microwave, which is a bonus, but both were small.  You can’t buy anything frozen, as the freezers are no bigger than a radio.  You can’t buy anything that requires more than a heating.  At one point, birth mom remarked they had no bowls.  Not having a bowl will stick with me a whole long while.

We did the best we could.  I watched, hung back, tried to observe her food choices.  Again, I felt intrusive, and yet, this information seemed significant to me.  I am trained as a social worker.  We are observers by nature, then taught to assign meaning to our observations.  I remain so very grateful for my training and education that have served me so well with cancer and now adoption.

Birth mom was amenable to being linked to a social service agency — something I had been pushing for with our attorney.  She continued to state a wish to extricate herself from her mother, another good sign, I thought.  She asked again about open adoption, wondering how often she might see the baby.  She hoped for once a month.  She hoped we would help the family move closer to Chicago, the land of opportunity.  Oy.  This worried me.  Our friends and family with open adoptions work very carefully to maintain boundaries.  It is a tight rope walk, but one we see working for those we love.  Except the idea of birth mom and dad living close to us set a panic in my heart.  I dodged.  I evaded.

As we proceeded to check out, I got a spontaneous hug from birth mom.  It was easy to hug her back.  She was so very vulnerable in my arms.  There was so much this girl did not know, did not understand, was not capable of — I worried how those things might impact an adoption.  I felt old knowing as much as I did, carrying the worries for both of us.  I hoped she knew nothing of my worries.

We dropped her off at the hotel with a promise to return in 30 minutes for dinner.  And in 30 minutes we returned for dinner.  She picked the restaurant at the truck stop across the street.  Birth grandmother came out to smoke while birth mom was getting her son ready.  There had been tears and more concern about stolen meds and the cost of them.  There was more than a faint hint of expectation.  I could feel in my bones her desire for us to give her money, to fix the situation.  I ignored those tears as best I could, anxiously waiting for birth mom.

She came out, decked out in her new clothes, holding her cell phone in her hand, hoping Mary Tyler Dad would help her activate it over dinner.  That boy of hers was as bright as ever.  Just beautiful.  He looked right at you, clear eyes, always a smile on his face, trusting and playful.  We got to the restaurant and ordered dinner.  We both worried birth mom did not read.  Still hard to know.  The waitress seemed annoyed with the birth family.  Did she know them?  What did she know?

While we waited for food, Mary Tyler Dad and I seemed to be the only ones noticing that a toddler in a restaurant requires stimulation.  Books, activities, toys — little incentives to sit still and be patient.  I never left the house without a bag of tricks for Mary Tyler Son.  I still don’t.  This little one had to be content eating crayons.  Repeatedly.  And while I know all toddlers explore with their mouths, it just hurt a little more to see him with his grandmom on his right and his mom on his left and they didn’t seem to know or understand that every time they handed him a crayon he would eat the tip of it.

When our food arrived, a plate of chips was placed in front of the boy.  Neither of his caregivers seemed to notice that the pizza they ordered for him was not delivered.  When it finally was, they put it in front of him without cutting it.  Here was this little guy trying so hard to navigate too big pieces of hot pizza.  Eventually, they got it, his mom and grandmom, but why did it take so damn long?

Over dinner, once birth moms new phone had been activated, a series of calls and texts were made to birth dad.  Would he be joining us?  Where was he?  The instinct to reach out to him was almost primal in birth mom.  The messaging was almost constant.  In between texts, birth grandmom told her daughter that she was moving to the shelter in the town where her other kids lived and that she would be taking the toddler with her.  She advised her daughter to leave her wreck of a thieving boyfriend and come with her, but if she didn’t, the boy was still going.  She warned her daughter not to get “too spoiled” with all her new things from our shopping trip.

In the middle of this there was a call from birth dad who wanted to talk to me.  He needed a cell phone and wanted the same one as birth mom — could we get it tonight?  His wasn’t working well.  Um.  No.  No, we can’t get you a cell phone, my friend.  The answer is no.  He kept asking, I kept saying no, as clearly and firmly as possible.  He told me that birth mom’s mother accused him of stealing her pills after we left, but he was innocent, and she had just misplaced them.  Uh huh.  Got it.  No worries.  He hung up.  He was mad?  Angry?  He was something.

Turns out, he was high.  As a kite.  He walked over soon after, all dolled up in his new Chicago Bears shirt.  For some reason, that annoyed me.  Birth mom was wearing hers, too, and that annoyed me.  We offered him food, he declined.  He sat, sulking and glaring, at the lot of us, but seemed most focused on birth grandmom.  After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Mary Tyler Dad and I almost singularly focused on the sweet boy at the table, birth dad stated clearly and loudly, “I did not steal your pills and I was not cheating.  I was sitting at my mother’s grave.”  As if that explained everything.  As if he wasn’t under the influence.  As if his entire life wasn’t a shambles.

We paid the bill, birth mom with a new spring to her step.  She had gotten a paper over dinner and was looking at apartments.  She was happier than I had seen her.  I was sadder.

When we got to our car, I offered birth dad the front seat.  I had heard somewhere that it was good to defer to the birth father, pay him the respect he so craves.  As I was getting in the back seat, birth grandmom was looking for her cigarettes.  She asked birth mom if she could bum one off of her.  She knew precisely what she was doing, in asking birth mom, who simply ignored her.  She asked her daughter and birth dad to borrow some money to buy a new pack.  Neither had any.  Our wallets were closed for the night.

As we made our way across the street, I saw birth dad leaning over talking to Mary Tyler Dad.  I was curious, resolved to ask later.  We got to the hotel, everyone hopped out, we made tentative plans to meet for 9 AM breakfast.  I suggested a movie to clear our heads.  Mary Tyler Dad just needed to drive, so we did.  We drove and breathed and shook in disbelief.

I asked after what words were said with birth dad.  Mary Tyler Dad told me that birth dad asked if he could contact us directly.  The consummate gentleman, Mary Tyler Dad said, “Sure, but it’s really up to birth mom, isn’t it?”  BUZZ!  Wrong answer.  What I had seen was birth dad leaning forward, giving Mary Tyler Dad the “jailhouse stare,” and asserting his dominance as decision maker, “It’s up to me, too.”  That alone, his attempt to intimidate us, scare us, threaten us with his power over birth mom, probably sealed the deal for us to walk away.  Before the day started, we had created a “safe word,” that was to be enacted if we needed to bail.  Just short of either of us wanting to be the first to exercise the safe word, we called our attorney to report on the day’s events.

I lead with the clear substance abuse that seemed rampant.  That was followed with the dicey family dynamics — a father and grandmother who seemed jealous of the attention we paid to a baby and the gifts we had bestowed on birth mom.  Gifts like paper plates and plastic forks and underpants and a cell phone and a package of turkey.  Our heads were spinning.  I was angry, so angry at their attorney,  who didn’t provide a whisper of a clue as to what we would find.  We hung up, dazed and exhausted.  I noticed there were two voicemail.  “Here we go,” I said, as I listened to them.

What I heard was horrifying.  A baby screaming, a mother pleading, shouts of “GET OFF ME, GET OFF ME, PLEASE GET OFF ME!”  The sound of slapping, hitting, skin on skin contact.  And that sweet boys piercing screams.  Not fifteen minutes had passed since we left the family.

I broke out in sobs, Mary Tyler Dad just kept driving.  I quickly called the attorney, telling him I needed to call 911 — was there 911 in this town?  I was frantic and wrecked.  I called immediately, got it together to keep my voice intact.  Before I got to the issue, I explained who I was, where I was from, why I was visiting — trying to establish credibility?  Who knows.  I was shaken and as I got to the messages and the location of where they came from, describing a mom, dad and grandmother, the 911 dispatcher said their names.  Each of their names was said to me before I said them.  He encouraged me to stay on the line until police arrived at the hotel, just to keep me calm.  He was older and had a kind voice.  I cried, I wept for that boy and for that mother.

We drove past the hotel and saw the police presence.  Mary Tyler Dad wanted to leave town.  Was that alright?  Yes, knowing full well that this baby was not our baby.  You can’t call 911 on a family and move on from that.  Done is done.  Over is over.  Enough is enough.

We drove and I wept.  My tears were not for us, my tears were for that boy.  What will happen to that boy?  What will happen to the unborn baby?  What will happen to this mother?  Nothing good.  We felt it, both of us, and yet drove to protect ourselves, drove fast away to feel better, drove to get the hell out of Dodge.

Last weekend was a nightmare for us, but we got to drive away.  It was a visit, a blog post, a bad memory.  For that family — everyone in that family — it is their life.  Their nightmare that they do not wake up from.  I can’t feel angry at them, or upset over a lost dream of a child that was never ours.  All I feel is sad.  Big, giant mountains of sad.

Truth is, we can’t fix people.  We can’t help someone that can’t receive help, or doesn’t want it.  We can’t grab their baby, hoping to reverse whatever physical and emotional and substance induced violence he has witnessed.  We can’t do any of that.  All we can do is drive away.  Drive far away to catch a plane that will take us home where we are safe and loved and supported.

And when we get home, we will realize that we didn’t help at all, but more likely worsened an already untenable situation.  By swooping in from Chicago with our suitcase of good intentions and our pound of Frango Mints, we upset the birth family balance.  We showered praise, attention, and things on the three least powerful members of the family — mom and toddler and baby-to-be.  Without knowing it or meaning to, we made it worse.  We did that.  And we are sorry.

Tomorrow:  Adoption 101:  Final Exam