Some Thoughts on Why I Chose Adoption

November is National Adoption Month. Yes, again. I swear it was just National Adoption Month like a week ago but you know how these things sneak up on you. I mean, here we are, already a full month into Pudding Season and it barely feels like a day. But I digress.

I had this wild idea on November 1st that I was going to post every single day this month, just like I did that one year. Then I laughed at myself, because if my ADD has reached the point it has where being paid isn't motivation enough to get work done at work, I sure as shoelaces don't have the brainpower to post thirty times this month, particularly when I haven't even managed to post once a month this year.

I think that sentence made sense. Also I don't know if "sure as shoelaces" is a thing but the phrase that came to mind included a word that, while it begins with the same "sh" sound as "shoelaces," is not one I have ever used on this blog before to the best of my knowledge because my mother raised me better than that.

Of course I'm sure she also thought she raised me better than to have a baby with a guy I met on MySpace, but there you are. Roo got here how she got here and she's my favorite, so ... you know.

I'm just full of asides today. Positively bloated with them in fact. Sorry.

I turned 31 last month. It was a much more low-key celebration than 30 last year. My mother took me out to lunch, and I had dinner with some friends. My favorite part of the day is the time I spent with Roo and her family at a park. I took off my shoes and ran - "ran" - around the playground with Roo and her sister. We pretended we were some sort of fairies from a cartoon both of them seemed familiar with but that I had never heard of. It was great fun.

I let the girls lead me on a long walk to the far corner of the park and back (I think we were meant to be on some sort of fairy rescue mission) and on our loop around to the playground I ended up walking next to Roo.

As a general rule I've never seen any notable physical similarities between me and Roo. She is a tiny, adorable girl clone of H. Her eyes are a different color but the shape and poetic depth match his - I always thought his eyes held galaxies. It sounds almost unbearably saccharine to say that I got lost in his eyes but it's the truth. Roo's eyes have that same sort of dreamy quality. She inherited H's ridiculously long, dark eyelashes, too. I wish that H and I had gotten along as well as our genes did. Roo is excellent work.

As I said, I don't see much of myself in Roo at all but I had this moment walking next to her, when I realized she was walking fast like I do, when I wondered if a casual observer would have spotted any similarities in our strides - or our ear shapes, or our postures, or our hands. Would Roo look like she were mine if someone didn't know any better?

I don't need her to. I don't necessarily want her to. I just wondered. Because as we walked it hit me, the magnitude of what I did when I created life. Here was this perfectly formed person, a complete and unique entity. A life. A whole human, complete with hopes and dreams and a sense of humor, and I made her from scratch.

I say this not to wound any of you but because it was a vaguely terrifying thought. I had no idea what I was doing when I got pregnant, I really didn't. These teenage girls who think they're just having babies - they have no idea, either. Babies grow up. One minute you're going to the doctor to hear a heartbeat for the first time, the next minute you're pushing a five-year-old on a swing and watching her point her toes as she tells you you're not pushing hard enough. "I want to go higher," she'll insist, and it will hit you that this is only a fraction of what she wants, and then you'll begin to understand the enormity of what you undertook when you created life.*

This is why I chose adoption for Roo. Because I knew I could give a baby what she needed but, as the saying goes, babies don't keep. People who tried to talk me out of adoption insisted that today's parenting magazines and websites were misleading me - babies don't need much, and they need love most of all. I won't argue that. But babies grow up. Toddlers need more than babies, and grade-schoolers need more than toddlers, and then they become adolescents, and then, heaven help us, teenagers, and the older they get the more they need - not just temporally but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.

I knew that I could provide everything that a baby needed. But I also knew that my baby would grow fast, and I knew that my ability to provide wasn't going to grow proportionately. I didn't want Roo to struggle or suffer while I tried to figure out how to make it work. She deserves better than that. I wanted more for her than that.

As I walked next to her, this perfect little person with dirty feet and a messy ponytail and a few blades of grass stuck to her leg, I had the thought that this was one of those rare, beautiful, perfect snippets in the space-time continuum. It was a beautiful day, warm for October, with an overabundance of bright sunshine and fresh air. I was walking across a field of slightly prickly crabgrass, matching strides with my favorite person in the whole world, and we were both very happy.

If I had to choose a single moment to live over and over again, I would have a hard time picking just one but this moment on my birthday would be a top contender. It was maybe twenty or thirty seconds from start to finish but for that short stretch of time absolutely everything in the world felt okay. I haven't felt that in a long time. It was glorious.

If I were Roo's mother** I am sure that I would enjoy countless such moments. I would. Roo and I would have great fun. But our lives would be so, so difficult. Those moments would be a sharp contrast to the constant struggle to stay above water. I could have done it. I could have kept her and been her mother and somehow made it all work.

But this is so much better - the way things are, I mean. Whatever else happens in her life, Roo got the best possible start. She's got the very best parents who love each other so much, and who love her and her siblings deeply and forever. Roo is confident and secure and well-adjusted and kind and buoyant and about six hundred other adjectives that I can't even use to describe myself at thirty-one. Adoption was the best choice I could have made. Roo herself is the proof.

I get uncomfortable when people try to pretty up what it means to be a birth mom or turn the choice to place into some kind of fairy tale. There can be so much beauty in adoption, but there is always pain. No woman sets out to become a birth mother. I don't think it's the first choice for very many women. It's beautiful and it hurts.

I am not brave or selfless or an angel or a saint. I'm not extraordinarily strong. I'm not a hero. I'm a bundle of flaws and good intentions and fleeting hope and once upon a time I fell irrevocably in love with this small person and every single day I was her mother she broke my heart because I knew she wasn't going to be my daughter forever and it terrified me. But I always knew.

I don't know if I've ever said that before on this blog, but there it is. I knew the second I first saw her tiny body in an ultrasound that my baby wasn't mine. When I was settled into a hospital room to recover from my c-section I looked up into the doorway every few minutes for at least four hours, waiting for someone to come in. I didn't know what they looked like then but I was watching for Roo's parents.

When I saw their picture for the first time, I knew. I saw their firstborn in their picture and I thought, that's Roo's sister. I saw P and M, and I thought Oh, there you are. And it scared me.

Adoption is scary. It's one of the scariest things I've ever done. But it's also my favorite thing I've ever done; it's the thing I am most proud of. It's brought me the most joy.

That flawless moment walking next to Roo at the park didn't fill me with any kind of desperate longing for her to be mine. There was no sadness that the fantastic little girl matching my steps isn't mine. I was happy because she was happy, and she was happy because she has a happy life. Not a perfect one, but a happy one. She bounces back quickly when things don't go her way. She notices the lovely little things in the world and they fill her with joy. She looks around and sees possibilities. She dreams.

That's what it's about, isn't it? Everything else is just filler.

I want to be like Roo when I grow up.






*I posted a picture of my three-year-old self on Instagram last week and when my mother saw it she said, "That's my baby," and she had this look on her face as though she were blindsided that that baby had just turned 31 - as though I had just been three and she couldn't quite account for the passage of time.

**Please don't comment and argue that I'm still her mother. Please just don't.

Some Thoughts on Adoption, Five Years Post-Placement

Greetings, Blogland! I haven’t blogged in pretty much forever, which is weird. I used to blog so much in the early days after placement and it seems kind of weird now that blogging was such an integral part of my life. It’s not even something I think much about anymore, which is good. I mean, if I do stop to think about it, my brain kicks into overdrive and I end up with thirty drafts of new blog posts, so it’s probably just as well.

I'm trying to be less of a perfectionist so I'm blogging today even though I feel that my thoughts are disorganized and not particularly pretty and I don't even want to read them for proofreading purposes. Allow me to apologize in advance for the scattered messiness that will follow. I probably should have taken a Ritalin. Thank you for reading and I'll try to disguise my ADD better next time.

Roo is five, you guys! Holy cow. She started kindergarten and is doing so, so well. M had her call me to tell me about her first day. Roo was really excited about lunch and recess, and a few weeks ago M told me that Roo has memorized all of her vocabulary words for the year and then some. She is pretty much the cleverest kid ever and I am very proud of her.

I got to hang out with her a few days after her birthday and we had so much fun. She is very imaginative and very chatty and happy and easygoing. I was such an anxious child; one of my fears for Roo was that she would inherit my worry (I worry about worry). But she is SO not anxious. Every good thing about her I credit to her amazing parents. I don’t want to start a nature-vs-nurture debate but I know what I was like as a kid – I was born worried – and I feel confident that Roo is the way she is because of the way she’s being raised.

I love that she has the parents she does. I didn’t know how awesome they were when I picked them but I couldn’t possibly have chosen any better. I’m probably making myself a target here but adoption has been the best thing on earth for Roo and so I count it as the best thing on earth for me. I know that mine is a best-case scenario and that tons and tons of birth moms and adoptive couples aren’t so lucky. Every day that I spend any time at all on the internet I am reminded of that.

Roo is doing very well. I, on the other hand, have what I will euphemistically refer to as “things going on.” I feel happier now than I have in a while but pretty much the first nine months of my 31^st year were rough. I was attacked by a feral pack of feelings and I had difficulty in fending them off. I still have problems with them at times but I am making progress in that area. Being an adult human female is hard sometimes.

A few weeks ago was my five-year placement anniversary. It was such a non-issue, you guys, you wouldn't even believe it. M texted me and we had a lovely conversation that way but most of my feelings on the 9^th were about my dad because I’ve been missing him like crazy lately. Five years is a pretty good chunk of time for a birth mom, I think, and I thought that maybe I ought to write about my feelings about adoption these days. As I said before I think Roo’s adoption was the best thing in the world. But other than that, you know what? I don’t think about adoption that much. I just don’t.

I know a lot of birth moms who feel this lifelong connection to adoption. Many of them are in school for social work. Many of them spend a lot of their own time and money and a lot of effort in assisting expectant and birth parents, and I respect them so much for it. I’m just not one of them. I still talk at high schools on occasion but I don’t feel this deep need to make an adoption my life’s work. My inner 10-year-old wants to be a writer, thankyouverymuch, and and while adoption is a part of me because Roo is, my feelings are for her and her adoption, not every adoption and every person involved in adoption. I don’t feel the need to connect to a greater sisterhood of birth moms. It's not what I need at this point in my life. I have dear friends who are birth mothers but the ones I'm closest to get me on a level that has nothing to do with adoption and everything to do with who we are as human beings.

I don’t think that being a birth mom is the most interesting thing about me and I don’t want it to define me. I don't like a lot of what I see various adoption communities becoming on the internet. I don’t like the way that there’s this us-vs-them division between birth and adoptive parents, I don’t like the way birth moms get idolized or vilified or any of that. A birth mom was a fleshed-out person before she placed, and placement doesn’t change that about her. There’s good and bad in all of us and I’ve been beating back the “hero” label for years because I’m not a hero, I’m the 0.10 % who got pregnant on the pill, who carried and delivered a little girl she loved more than life itself, a little girl she loved enough to give a better life, even though it wasn’t with her. 

Blah. I'm probably making enemies left and right here, aren't I? It's not that I object to there being this greater adoption community, or that I don't think people should let it be their life's work. It's just not *my* life's work.

Five years post-placement, I don't think about adoption much at all. I think about Roo, who happens to have been adopted, but that does very well for me for now.

She really is the most fantastic little kid and I feel privileged to get to watch her grow up and spend time with her. She saved me. I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't gotten pregnant when I did. I don't like to think about it. But I've had to lately. I've gotten myself into a few messes lately and wondered what's going to save me this time. I felt for a few months this year that perhaps nothing would; that I was finally just going to self-destruct.

But one of the things that I have come to realize about myself during this difficult year is that for as much of an emotional train wreck as I am there is some part of me that refuses to give up. There is some part of me that made myself get up every morning and go to work and smile when people said hello to me and continue to exercise most days even though all I wanted to do was sleep for the next five years until my current problems work themselves out.

I didn't used to have that inside of me. I know that I didn't because nine years ago when I started therapy it took very little to break me into pieces. 22-year-old Jill would have cracked starting last November, with almost no provocation. I am profoundly grateful for this strength I've found, and I do believe that it grew from placement.

I've wasted a lot of bandwidth comparing the death of my father to the placement of my daughter. My general conclusion is that my father's death was harder because I still can't make it okay, because I don't see any good that came of it. I haven't necessarily changed my mind about that but I do feel strongly that adoption required more of me than pushing through my grief did, and for precisely the reason that I always concluded my father's death was harder: because adoption was a choice. I chose this hurt. I chose to smash my heart into bits, even though it felt like little of it remained after my dad died.

I placed Roo on purpose, and it changed me fundamentally and deeply and forever. It hurt worse than anything in the world has ever hurt me and I can say for certain that it is the best thing I have ever done in my life. It made me stronger in a way that nothing else could possibly have done.

Roo saved me the first time around and placing her made me strong enough that this time I can save myself. I don't know how I'm going to do it but I know that I can.

I'm not sure of many things. I don't know what the next year of my life is going to look like. I'm not entirely certain what the next week is going to look like. But one thing that I know for sure, as Oprah would say, is that if I had to live my life over a thousand times I would place Roo for adoption a thousand times more.

Five

Dearest Roo,

Today you are five years old. How did that happen? I swear you just barely learned to walk and now you're reading chapter books and dancing and playing tennis and starting kindergarten in the fall. How did you grow up so fast? You're taller every time I see you, and smarter. You are the most fascinating little person I have ever met. Everything about you is interesting to me. You are my favorite in all the known world. There is a light in your eyes that fills my soul. When you smile, it seems impossible that there's anything other than joy in the world.

Do you have any idea how amazing you are, Roo? Everything about you is a miracle to me. I haven't found the words in any language to properly express how much I love you. It's not something I can explain. It's something that I feel. I didn't know I could love anyone on earth even half as much as I love you.

I was scared when you were born. You were brand-new and tiny and I knew what I wanted for you; I knew what you deserved. I was scared that I didn't have a way of making sure you had everything in the world that you deserved by merit of the love I felt for you. I wanted to be the best mother in the world because you deserved it.

I couldn't do it. I certainly couldn't be the best father in the world. You deserved that, too.

As desperately as I loved you I could never quite shake the feeling that I was raising someone else's child. The moment I first saw you my heart claimed you but some ineffable part of myself wouldn't settle down. A few hours after you were born, when I was recovering in a hospital room and you were burrito-wrapped in your bassinet, I found my gaze moving from your sleeping face to the door. My rational mind expected no visitors but the waiting part of myself kept watching the doorway. I didn't dare use words for what I was anticipating at the time but the truth is I was waiting for your parents to come in.

I took you home and you were mine for nine fragile and beautiful weeks but the entire time, I knew.

I have never fought anything in my life as desperately as I fought to be your mother. I warred with myself for the first seven weeks of your life, searching for some way to change what I felt in my heart. I wanted you so badly! I had already been through so much pain. I had already broken so many times. I couldn't bear the thought of shattering again. I loved you so much! How could I not be your mother?

Then I found your family. I saw their picture on my computer screen and the part of me that waited in my hospital room stopped waiting. It wasn't your dad or your mom that did it, either. Would you believe, darling Roo, that the first member of your family I found was your big sister? I was ready to keep looking at profiles and reading letters but I saw your sister in that photograph ... I looked at her dear, perfect little cherub face and I thought, that's Roo's sister. I knew she was your sister. I knew. I looked at your parents after that but it didn't matter who they were, because if they were your sister's parents they were yours as well.

No matter what else happens in my life, no matter what I believe or disbelieve, no matter what circumstances change, I will never believe anything contrary to this: your sister was meant to be your sister, and you were meant to be hers. I have never known anything to be true as strongly and solidly as I knew that the two of you were meant to be together when I saw that picture, and nothing anyone ever says is going to change that.

I love that you girls are such good friends. I hope you always will be. I hope that you always take good care of each other.

There's more to your story that your parents have told you, or will tell you when you're older, and more that I need to tell you as well, but I'm saving that for you and only you. But today, on your birthday, I want you know two things for sure.

The first is that there's no doubt in my mind you were meant for the family you've got. You belong together. I couldn't have placed you with any family in the universe but theirs. I couldn't have done it! I tried. I met with other families and I wanted them to be right but none of them were and it wasn't until I met your family that I knew why no one else would do.

The second is something that I hope is already a solid and immovable fact in your mind: I love you. How inadequate those words sound! They're overused. They've lost meaning. But in the absence of any others, I'll use them over and over again and hope that repetition will lend them weight. My dear little Roo, I love you. Nothing in the known universe will stop me from loving you. Any good thing I ever accomplish in the world is because of my love for you. Any improvement I make, any happiness I find, any good and worthy thing I do is a manifestation of my love for you. My task as your birth mother is to take the love that I have for you and spread it around.

Never doubt, not for a second, that you are loved. There's no one else in the world for whom I'd break my own heart. Only you.

You were worth it. You always will be.

Happy birthday, darling girl.

Love,

Your birth mother Jill

Due

I've had a lot of feelings lately and I'm going to address most of them in my next post, but today I want to talk about one set of feelings in particular.

I haven't been happy for a while now. It began with what my father used to describe as "general malaise." Then my discontent started creeping into other areas of my life, slowly and a little at a time, the way that hot cheese will escape the end of a Hot Pocket when you cook it too long. 

I was talking to a friend about feeling unhappy and she asked what changes would need to happen in my life for me to feel happy instead. I thought that a good start in answering was to list the things that I felt were contributing to my unhappiness, and I had an epiphany of sorts about the way that I've been seeing myself. In order to get you there, let's go back a few years.

Five years ago, June 30th was a Tuesday.

I wish I could say that I know this because I have the savant-like ability to name the day of the week that any given date fell on, like the girl with autism in that one Baby-Sitter's Club book that handled the issue of autism badly, even for a children's book from the 80s.

Alas, that is not the case. And parenthetically, precious few of the books I loved as a child have held up well over time from a literary standpoint.

I remember that June 30th, 2009 was a Tuesday, because it was my due date. Roo's due date. I knew that she wouldn't be born on her due date, because pretty much no one delivers on their due date. But the date still felt significant, because it was the date I'd had in my mind for nine months, and reaching it felt like a great accomplishment. So even though I knew she wouldn't be born that day, I felt like something should happen to mark the occasion of my due date.

Nothing did. It was a perfectly average Tuesday in every way, except for the fact that I was really super-duper pregnant and Roo kept kicking me in the kidneys (they must be pleasantly squishy or something, because she always kicked them). She stayed snug and warm in my belly for another week, and absolutely nothing happened on my due date. Despite my expectations, my hopes, and my timeline, all I got was a backache.

To quote my friend Rob, isn't that just like life?

I got to thinking about that the other day - about expectations and plans and mental due dates. How many times in my life have various due dates come and gone with nothing to show for them? Dozens, at least, if not a hundred or more. But despite a dearth of any savant-like skill with dates, I do tend to remember them, and more often than not I use them as a way of measuring my progress, or more specifically my lack thereof.

Three years ago I realized that it had been a decade since my high school graduation (May 24, 2001) and I quite naturally took inventory of my life in that space of time. It was an eventful decade, but I still felt like a failure, because I was single and fat and working part-time for $8 an hour. I always thought I'd have a college degree and a husband and children and a Volkswagen by the time my ten-year reunion rolled around. I had nothing to show for the decade that had elapsed since high school. It's been thirteen years now and I've still got nothing to show.

Even the revised life plans that I made when I placed Roo didn't come to fruition. I knew where I wanted to be when Roo was 1 year old, and 2 years old and so forth, and I am not in any of those places or stages of life. But, I told myself, that's okay. I just need to adjust my timeline. Change my when-Roo-is-four goals to my when-Roo-is-eight-or-nine goals.

I'd been feeling better about things last August, but then I took an online survey. I don't typically do that but at that time every single Target receipt I got had an invitation on it, and I needed to kill time while my cupcakes were in the oven. Nothing cuts to the heart of your insecurities quite like answering demographic questions. I already knew all of these things about myself, but it wasn't until Target asked me on one page that I thought, I am in my late twenties, I am single, I have never been married, I have no children, and I make less than $30,000 a year. That cheered me right up, let me tell you. I was glad to have cupcakes to look forward to; I needed them.

And then last fall I hit another due date, another deadline I set for myself. I turned 30. It wasn't as scary as I thought it might be. I actually had several days of birthday, culminating in a party where my fantastic friends surprised me with this cake:

(How you doin', Tom Selleck?)

I should mention that the very first thing I did in my thirties was put my contact lenses in, and then put my glasses back on. Isn't memory loss supposed to start in your forties? Anyway. After my week of birthday, I thought, well, shoot. I'm 30 now, and all I have to show for it is half of Tom Selleck's torso.*

All of those demographics that Target reminded me of (and more) kept coming to my mind. No husband - not even a boyfriend (not since the Bush administration, how's that for a frame of reference?), not much income, no children, thighs like a t-rex. It's a depressing way to look at your life, and the other day, when I thought about changing things, I wondered - at what point do I stop defining myself by the things that I lack?

Because that's what I've been doing since my birthday and probably my entire adult life. When I look at these due dates, at these deadlines, I feel that I've fallen short because of what I don't have. (And before you suggest counting my blessings, know that I actually have a list of my blessings. I am a compulsive list-maker; if you ever want to know what my faults are I have a Google doc I can show you.) I didn't used to do that. When did I start? When did I stop seeing myself as a whole person with innate value and start seeing myself as a collection of empty spaces?

My only consolation, if you can call it that, is that I know I'm not alone in this. I think it's a societal disease, this idea that who we are is what we're missing. I know plenty of other women who are put into boxes marked Single and Childless. How messed up is that? I've written before about how labeling birth mothers dehumanizes them. It's true for everyone, and especially when that label implies that they've come up short, that something is missing.

I want to get married. I want to be a mother. But I want to be happy even if neither of those things ever happens for me. I want to feel whole just the way that I am now. I want to see myself as the sum of what I do have, good and bad, and not as a list of unfulfilled dreams. I want to be enough. I want the woman that I am right now, right this second, to be enough for me to be happy.

When I was a child I was focused on what I could do, what I did well, and what I wanted to do. I didn't ever feel like I wasn't enough as I was. What changed in the past twenty years? I mean, obviously plenty of things have changed, but who I am fundamentally, as a human being, as a child of God - what's really changed? Nothing has changed. If I was enough then, I'm enough now.

I don't mean to imply that there's no room for improvement. I want to end each day as a better person than I was when I began it (how's that for an unattainable goal?). But I'm tired of feeling inadequate because of the things I don't have. Here's the thing - I'm never going to run out of due dates. I'm never going to stop having occasion to mark my progress and reevaluate my life. I don't have a lot of control over that. What I do have control over is how I let these due dates affect me.

Roo will be five in a little over a week. Another milestone - another deadline. I am light-years away from where I wanted to be when she turns five. I may never get to where I wanted to be at this point in my life. That doesn't have to matter. I can still be happy with where I am.

I know I'm not going to get there right away. It takes time to change the habit of being dissatisfied. But I want to start now. I want to learn to be happy with myself and my life, no matter what. It's time. I'm due.

*The left half. Well, my left, his right.

On Parenting and Being an Adult

Roo's birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I'm not sure where the last five years went but she's starting kindergarten in the fall and she has already started reading chapter books and is generally much smarter than any five-year-old has any right to be. She is my favorite.

That Roo has the parents she does feels like a gift to me. The more I get to know people the more I realize that P an M aren't just excellent parents. They are exceptional human beings. The world could use more people like them. I look up to them in so many ways and I hope that if I ever grow up, I end up being their kind of person. The only downside I can see to Roo being their daughter is that children so rarely appreciate their parents. I hope that Roo is the exception and that as she gets older she realizes how amazing her parents are and how blessed she is to be their daughter. I hope that as she gets older she knows that I wouldn't have placed her with just anyone, and that in fact I couldn't possibly have placed her with anyone on earth but P and M - not for a second.

I have never worried even once about whether Roo is happy and healthy and loved. She has such a good life and such a good family. I used to wonder if, as Roo got older, I would wish I had parented her but the opposite is true. The older she gets, the more I love my choice and the less I care what anyone else thinks of it. Things people might say that used to offend me just make me laugh now. I wish that I were this certain of every decision I've ever made in my life!

But even though I don't regret my choice, I do still wonder sometimes what life would be like for me and Roo if I had parented her. I don't consider things too deeply because I can't wrap my mind around custody arrangements and child support and I honestly don't know where I would be living or working right now. But I do think, if I had parented, I would have an almost-five-year-old now. I would have registered her for kindergarten. How scary is that? I don't have a clue how any of that works. How do you know you've found a good school? A good teacher? How do you prepare a child to go from preschool to kindergarten?

I'll confess to ignorance in pretty much the entire realm of childcare at this point. I have no idea how much a child is supposed to eat or how much sleep they should get every night. I don't know when naps stop. I don't know what you're supposed to teach them and when. How much TV is too much? Do kids still get chicken pox? So many questions.

I know that most people don't know any of these things when they have a baby. They just figure it out as they go along, which is kind of a terrifying thought, isn't it? All these people who haven't a clue what they're doing are raising children, and those children are going to be adults someday whether they're raised right or not. It sounds like a terrible idea. Who came up with this? Somehow it works and enough of us make it to adulthood (relatively unscathed) to keep the world going. I'll never understand it.

P and M seem to have the whole parenting thing figured out. They're not perfect but I think they do a better job of it than anyone else I know (although I will admit to a slight bias in their favor). I think it's because they were ready for parenthood when their firstborn was placed with them. They were absolutely ready to be parents. They were prepared. They stay calm. They make rational decisions. They are adults.

This is, I think, my problem with the idea of me registering a child for kindergarten. I don't feel like enough of a responsible adult to be trusted with that kind of decision. I know myself. I do stupid things more often than I remember to eat and I make bad decisions almost exclusively. I had to have help picking a health insurance plan and I don't actually understand any of it. I once ate half a can of chocolate frosting in a single sitting. My mother could make a list entitled Ridiculous Reasons My Daughter Has Phoned Me and the Equally Ridiculous Questions That Followed. (I once left her a voicemail that went something like, "Hi Mom, this is Jill, your youngest child. I think I poisoned myself. Will you call me back when you get a minute? No rush.") I will make it through an entire day off work without remembering that I'm supposed to eat regularly. Last year I bought a t-shirt with a pattern of unicorns on it and I wear it to work (also, ask me about my whale shirt).

The idea that I am a both a registered voter and a government employee should terrify you. I am thirty years old but make no mistake, I am not an adult.

I used to bristle at the idea that as a birth mom, I chose adoption because I wasn't ready to be a parent. "I was ready!" was my battle cry. I thought that I proved it by parenting Roo for nine weeks. I think I even blogged about the not-ready-for-parenting school of thought, because I remember writing the phrase "I was absolutely ready to be a mother."

But what I've come to realize in the past little while is that, no, I absolutely was not. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted it desperately. But that doesn't mean I was ready. Looking back I can see that. And what's more, I still don't think I'm ready.

I want to repeat that because when I realized it, it hit me with great force. I am not ready to have a child. I'm 30. When I'm in a quiet room I can't hear my heartbeat because my biological clock is ticking too loudly. I am jealous of pregnant women I see. My insides feel all squishy when I see babies. My mind is blank of every thought but one: I want one of those! Babies are awesome and at my age, when I see one I am biochemically predisposed to want one of my own.

But that's not enough. What on earth would I do with one? For the most part I'm no better off than I was five years ago. I make a lot of the same stupid choices and I have some of the same bad habits and I am an absolute child about things for the most part. The biggest difference between the Jill who placed Roo and the Jill who is typing this is that the latter is five years older and needs a haircut.

I don't want to discount any personal growth I might have done. I am a slightly better person right now. But I don't think I'm any better prepared to be a mother.

I already know I'm going to get comments from mothers telling me, "Nobody is ever really prepared for parenthood. Nobody is ever really ready." People are going to tell me that you figure it out as you go along, that you get ready as you parent. People are going to point out that plenty of people who aren't ready to be parents still have kids and make a decent go of it. And I believe all of that.

But believe me when I say that if I met an amazing man tomorrow and we fell in love and got married, I would think long and hard before having a child right away. I have more issues than Newsweek. I know I'm not ready to be anyone's mother. And isn't this the perfect time to figure that out, now, while I'm not anyone's mother?

I wasn't ready for Roo and I'm still not. I am so, so grateful that her parents were ready, and still are. I couldn't have placed Roo with just anyone. I love her too much for that. I could only have placed her with them and I'm so glad I did!

I think there will come a time, maybe a few years from now, when I stop panicking every time a bill comes in the mail, when I do my taxes before April 15th, when I give up napping under my desk at work, when my therapist no longer calls because he's worried about me ... there will come a time when I unironically describe myself as an adult, when I will see babies and think not only of how much I want one but of how much I have to offer to one as a mother. It's going to be a good day.

I'm just not there yet.

(Good?) Advice

I've mentioned before that, for one reason or other, people in the adoption community will occasionally come to me for advice. Bad idea, people. I once advised a co-worker to take naps under her desk. I am full to bursting with bad ideas that amuse me. Which isn't to say that I intentionally give bad advice; rather that I seem to be incapable of giving good advice because it simply isn't in me. I, too, take naps under my desk.

I digress. People will ask me for advice and sometimes I will offer it. Today I am offering advice to a group who have not asked for it, because someone has suggested that I am uniquely qualified to do so. I was asked by someone who works with birth mothers to advise women who have recently placed children for adoption. I asked what "recently" meant and was given a nebulous response that I promptly threw out. For our purposes today I want to go beyond the weeks and months immediately following placement, because I've beaten the dead horse that is post-placement grief for these many years and I'd like to find another carcass to swat at. I want to talk to women who are out of the fog that settles when relinquishment papers are signed, but who have not yet hit the one-year mark. If you fit into this category, what follows is for you. (If you don't, all I can tell you is that life is full of disappointment.)

So, you've placed a child for adoption recently but you have reached the point where you are awake and dressed more days than not and you're no longer crying yourself to sleep. Good job! I knew you could do it. I wish I could tell you that it's a calm ocean and clear skies from this point forward but it's not. For the rest of your life, you're going to have little moments where it hits you that you once placed a baby for adoption and how could you possibly have done that? Who does that?

You did. You did, and it was awesome, and you're awesome. So what if a tiny lost sock at the grocery store makes you teary-eyed. You made a family. You win. And, hey, free tiny sock.

Anyway. I want to tell you some things today that no one told me when I was where you are. I don't know if they qualify as "Things I Wish I'd Known" but they are things to know, in any case, and maybe you'll find them helpful.

So. (A needle pulling thread ...)

You're probably at the point where people no longer have to drag you bodily to social functions. You find yourself wanting to go out and see people, even if you are slightly terrified that adoption or your baby will become a topic of conversation. Be careful where you go and with whom. I said in a previous post that your surprise pregnancy was a symptom of a greater issue. I believe that. I wasn't living a happy, wonderful life when I got knocked up. There were so, so many other things going on.

I'd bet a tenner that it's the same case with you. Hence my caveat. If you go back to the same friends and situations you were in before, I hope you've got the birth control thing figured out because if you don't you're likely to end up pregnant again. I know (and dearly love) a number of repeat offenders. I'm not saying it's easy to change your life or lifestyle. I'm just saying, be careful. Placement can be a fantastic re-set button. Whatever agency or organization you placed through should offer post-placement counseling (if they don't, they should). Use it. Become a better person. Therapy is a beautiful thing. Figure out why you ended up  where you did, and resolve to stay away from there from now on.

Here's a fun fact for you: for the rest of your life, people are going to misunderstand you and your story and adoption. It hurts right now when it happens. It bothers you a lot. It feels personal and offensive and is the catalyst for many a crying fit. You will hate everyone.

Here's another fun fact: it will bother you so much less as time passes. As you become more and more comfortable talking about adoption, correcting or dismissing people will take zero emotional toll on you. You will be much less defensive. You're still going to blurt out "placed" when someone says "gave up" but you won't tear up if they insist that their terminology is right or ask why you didn't want your baby. (I tell them it's because she threw up on my sofa. Bad joke. Sorry.)

You will also, in perpetuity, encounter people who think you made the wrong choice or that adoption damages children. Right now it hurts like hell when you hear this. It makes you angry and defensive and frustrated and you will rant. Oh, how you'll rant! But you will come to understand that it doesn't matter if everyone you meet for the rest of your life thinks you did a bad thing. You know you made the right choice, and your placed child is happy, and no one else's opinion matters or ever will.

Friends and family will ask about your placed child less and less. It will seem like you're the only one who cares or even remembers. This will bother you. Eventually this too will pass. I let it go with some people, and I brought it up with others. It turns out that many relatives weren't sure what I felt comfortable discussing. They weren't sure if mentioning Roo would be painful for me. The more I told happy stories about her and open adoption, the more questions they were comfortable asking. I still have relatives who pretend she doesn't exist. That's on them. I still love them and enjoy making them uncomfortable by showing pictures of Roo being her adorable self.

The media is never going to get adoption right. You'll be happier if you avoid movies and TV shows with adoption-related plots. I stopped watching the show "Glee" when a pregnant Quinn was counseled to give her baby to "Someone who really wants it." I knew when I heard that line that adoption wasn't going to be handled in a sensitive or accurate manner. I don't miss it.

I know some birth moms who go out of their way to watch movies and shows with adoption in them so that they know what bad ideas they're going to encounter and have to correct when they talk to people. If you want to do that, more power to you, but I hope you like the phrase "gave up" because you're going to be hearing it a lot. Also, let's compare our lists of things that "Juno" got so, so wrong. Mine is 15 items long.

Here's something I do wish I had known four years ago when I was approaching Roo's first birthday. It won't always be like this. The pain or the relationship or the need for visits and contact. It will all change, and it will be a good thing. My relationship with P and M is a continuously evolving thing. Because we are all adults and are willing to communicate openly and honestly, it gets better and better. I don't see Roo nearly as often as I used to. I don't need to. It's not that I wouldn't be happy to see her more often. It's more a matter of weeks and even months will pass and someone will ask when I last saw Roo and I'll think, wait, when did I see her last? The need to reassure myself that she's happy and healthy and loved is gone. The desire to see her and her family because I love them pops up every couple of months.

At some point you will realize that although your love for your placed child hasn't changed or dimmed a tiny bit, it fits into your heart differently. You feel that love for a person who is 100% someone else's child, someone you don't know as well as they do. You will realize it, and it will be beautiful.Your love won't feel like a beautiful burden. It will feel like a bird in flight.

I spent several years overwhelmed by the love that I have for Roo. There was so much of it and I didn't know what to do with it. I had a mother's love in my heart but I wasn't a mother. Then I saw this post on Humans of New York. A woman's dying husband told her to take the love she had for him and spread it around. I decided to do that with my love for Roo. It has made all the difference in the world.

There will come a time when having placed a child for adoption will cease to be most important thing about you. Your birth child will cease to be your whole world. It is scary and you might think it's never going to happen with you, because you love your child too much. But here's the truth: I love my Roo with every bit of my heart, and I will often pass several days without giving her more than a moment of thought.

It has to be this way. It's better for both of you. Your placed child deserves a birth mama who has used her experience as a stepstool rather than a crutch. Neither of you benefits if you spend the rest of your life obsessing and ruminating and crying. Even someone who loves and lives and breathes music has to turn it down sometimes and enjoy the silence. It's the silences that make music beautiful.

It's the time that I don't spend with Roo that makes our visits so precious to me. It's the weeks or months that pass without hearing her little voice that make every word she says my favorite word ever spoken. If I thought about her every second of every day, I wouldn't appreciate what a wonderful little person she is to think about.

When I was where you are now, I felt fractured without Roo. She was my whole heart and my whole life. She is neither of those things anymore. She is still infinitely dear to me and I think I'll always love her the best and the most. But I had to step back. You will too. Roo is P and M's daughter. For real. I had to let her be completely theirs to love her completely. I placed her on September 9th but I didn't let her go until nearly 2 years later. I didn't start to heal until then. I wasn't sure I would. I was afraid to step back and figure out who I was without her. I thought it would break me.

In letting her go, I became whole again.

You're going to get there, too. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait for you to see.

Hopes and Fears*

Last week was an adoption picnic and I went to it, as I go to every adoption event, because I knew Roo was going to be there and I will take any chance I get to admire the fantastic little girl who used to live in my womb.

Roo will be five years old this summer, and frankly I don't know how that happened. I swear she just barely learned to read (before she was three, you guys!) and now she'll be in kindergarten in the fall. Because I don't see her every day, she always seems so much more grown up each time I see her. Taller - although not much; genetics are not on her side as far as height goes - and smarter and more independent.

Gone are the days when Roo was a tiny baby whose decisions were made for her. She has her own mind and she does as she pleases, within the limits set by her parents. Case in point: when Roo's daddy brought her to the picnic - she had been at a birthday party earlier - she didn't want to socialize. She wanted to play on the playground and I could barely get a hello out of her. She was too focused on climbing the jungle gym.

I watched her run off in her princess dress and for a moment I missed the tiny, chubby baby I used to be able to hold captive in my arms. It was easier to feel connected to her then, when I could hold her warm weight and clearly remember her little feet kicking me from the inside.

I missed the darling toddler who would play pretend with me because she was the age when children will play with anyone who sits down with them. I felt less connected then but she was still so small and she was easy to distract in my favor.

I watched Roo climb higher and higher - surprisingly adept at keeping her dress in place as she ascended  - and I realized, maybe for the first time, that openness is not a choice that Roo made for herself. It's a choice that was made for her. She knows who I am because her parents thought it would be best for her and for me. She did not ask to meet me. She did not ask to have me in her life.

And I realized that the time may come when she does not want me in her life. It may not come, of course, and I hope it doesn't, but as I watched her climb I thought, I have to prepare myself for that eventuality. If the time comes that Roo would rather not have a relationship with me, I will have to find a way to be okay with that.

I don't know any adults who grew up with an open adoption because it's such a relatively recent phenomenon. I know adults who have reconnected with their birth families, but none who grew up with a birth mom in their lives. What will my presence do to and for Roo as she grows up? Will I be a benefit to her or a burden?

Such heavy thoughts for a picnic. This is what happens when you use caffeine as a substitute for sleep.

Roo grew tired of the jungle gym and came over and we had an Arizona snowball fight with the rest of the picnic attendees. We made play dough shapes together ("Don't make any more seahorses," she told me. "Make something else") and she made me a valentine card and we watched the ducks swim in the pond.

("I wish that I was a duck," said Roo, "so I could swim all day and people would feed me." She looked pensive and then added, "But Mommy would miss me if I were a duck here.")

For now, Roo is happy to play with me when she's not asserting her independence. My hope is that she will always be happy to see me. That she will be able to feel my love for her. That she'll be a happier, healthier person for having an open adoption that includes her birth mother as a sometimes presence in her life.

But my hope is also that she will make the kind of choices that will result in peace and happiness in her life, whatever those end up being. My hope is also that if the time comes when she feels I am a hindrance rather than a help, that she will be strong enough to let me go. I don't want to be an obligation to her. Openness was chosen for her as a benefit, not a burden. I don't ever want to be a burden.

I don't want to not be a part of her life. The thought that someday Roo might not need or want me around scares me. And I don't want it to happen, and I don't anticipate that happening, I really don't. But I want the choice to be hers, when she's old enough to make it.




*Dear Keane: please forgive me for stealing your album title for my blog post. Hopes and Fears is my favorite of your albums, and "This is the Last Time" got me through a rough patch. I love you guys, even though I hated the heck out of your collaboration with K'naan.

In Which Jill Word-Vomits Some of Her Ugly Feelings

This blog used to be a painfully open book about every single thought and feeling that I had about adoption. It didn't occur to me to filter what I wrote, because it didn't occur to me that anyone would ever really read it.

People read it. I have been told that it was helpful, but mostly I find myself embarrassed that I shared as much as I did. If I could go back I would probably say a lot less. But I can't go back.

What I can do, and have done, is be much more thoughtful about the things that I share. Because I was so candid in the past I find myself being excruciatingly careful in choosing every single word anymore and as a result I don't blog nearly as much as I used to. I'm a worrier; I don't know how much I have mentioned that in the past but the first 25 years of my life were basically one long panic attack. As I've grown up I've gotten better at channeling my worry when I can and stuffing it down when I can't. My blog became one of the places I shifted this mental energy. I agonized over every word of every post and quite frequently I would write entire posts - they would take hours! - and then I'd decide at the last second that they weren't good enough to share.

It's exhausting. I'm tired of worrying so much. I'm going to try to worry less and just say what I feel. It worked for me in the past; I think it's what grew my readership. I've never been numbers-focused in my blogging. I don't care how many people read it; I just want the people who do read it to get something out of it.

So, I'm just going to get some feelings out right now. That's what I used to do. I'm going to try doing it again. And I'm not even going to proofread. How's that for living dangerously?

I turned 30 in October. I had a great week of birthday celebrations but then it ended and I felt like I had this itch I couldn't scratch. I'm not where I wanted to be at 30. I don't feel like I have much to show for my life so far.

I want a husband and I want children. I want children very, very badly. Not having any has made me miss Roo more lately. Not the real Roo, who is four, but my baby Roo, the tiny newborn who for a brief time made me a mother. I miss her. I miss being her mom. Babies are awesome. It seems like everyone I know is either engaged (seven engagements in two weeks, I kid you not) or having a baby, and I can't even get a first date.

In the 4-ish years since placement until the end of November, I was asked maybe a total of three times whether I had any kids. It just never came up for some reason. Then this past week I was asked twice if I'm a mother. The second time was at work. A very adorable and chatty five-year-old asked whether there were any lollipops in the library that she could have, and I apologized, telling her that we don't usually keep candy there. She felt bad for me.

"Next time I come in I'm going to bring you some candy. I'll bring lots. You can have some and you can take some for your kids. Do you have kids?"

I don't even know why my brain did what it did but for some reason I said, "I have a little girl." I felt like I was hearing myself say it more than I was making the conscious decision to speak.

"Well, she can have some candy, too," the girl told me, and then her grandmother said they had to leave.

And I was really glad there was a line at the circulation desk, because I think if I hadn't had work to do right then, I would have gone to my desk in the back room and just cried. Because I don't have kids. Because I don't have a husband or even a boyfriend. Because I don't have any money, or any plan for the rest of my life, or anything that I thought I would have at 30. Because maybe I never will.

I always get depressed around the holidays. It used to start at the beginning of October but I was still pretty happy then and I thought maybe I'd get a break this year. I was wrong. I've been a mess since just after Halloween, and I've spent the past 2 weeks in particular desperately fighting off a panic attack. It's like swatting a fly that won't go away. No matter how many times I beat back those feelings, they keep pushing at me.

It's exhausting. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of constantly thinking and feeling. I wish I could just shut that part of my brain off for a few weeks. I wish I could stop worrying and just enjoy my life and be happy with what I have instead of defining myself by what I lack.

That's the trick, though, isn't it? Because the world I live in is determined to define me by my lack. No kids, no husband. No college degree. Not tall. Not thin. Not pretty. Not enough. (I've had self-esteem problems lately, too, in case that isn't coming through.) It's hard to remember the good things about yourself when society only sees the bad.

One of my problems ... blah. I wasn't going to mention it but as long as I'm being honest, I'm going to just be completely honest and get it all out there.

I've kind of lost my head over a guy I know. He doesn't feel the same way about me. My friends and my mother and my therapist all have opinions on the matter but I don't feel comfortable with any of the advice I've been given. In the meantime I have all of these stupid feelings jammed inside me and I can't shake them. I am desperate to shake them. I have spent hours asking God to take away my feelings for this guy but whether I have them for a reason or I'm just not strong enough to get rid of them, the feelings are still there.

This, too, is exhausting. It's like having a toothache that doesn't go away. Some times it hurts worse and some times it's not as bad, but the pain is always there, waiting for a bad time to remind you of its presence.

I have had many days lately where I think that this whole adult human thing just isn't working for me. Of all the stupid things I've done in my life, being an adult is on the top of the list.

I know that what I need to do is focus on all of the things that are amazing in my life. Lately I have come to truly realize and appreciate how fantastic Roo's open adoption is. I feel like my relationship with Roo and her family just keeps improving, and it is a great blessing in my life. I'm a lucky girl. I know way too many birth moms whose open adoptions haven't turned out the way they'd hoped or planned.

I am so, so proud of Roo. She is the most awesome little kid ever. She is very smart and very cute but more importantly she is very kind. It does me a lot of good, when I'm feeling like a wreck and a failure, to look at Roo and her life. No matter what else happens to me, no matter how many things I mess up, I grew and gave birth to this precious little girl, and I found her family. I love the way that she is being raised. I think she's going to be unstoppable when she's an adult (and maybe even before then). How lucky am I to be able to see these things firsthand?

I am trying really, really hard to stay positive and to have hope. I had a motto for myself this year that I abandoned ages ago - probably back in March - that was cheerful and optimistic and then life happened. My new motto is something I try to remind myself of every single day --

It's not always going to be like this.

It's not. It won't. Things are already different than they were a year ago, and next year will be different, too. "Different" hasn't meant any of the changes I had hoped for but at least if I have problems, they're different problems. I like variety in my heartache. But I do hope for less heartache.

I hope that someday I will have the opportunity of falling in love with someone who loves me back. I hope that someday I will remember how to sleep. I hope that someday even if I don't have what I wanted for myself, I'll be happy with what I have. I hope that someday I will make Roo and her family proud of me. (I should want my own family to be proud of me, but they know me too well for that. Best to stick to attainable goals.)

I will. I have to believe that. And in the meantime, I will follow the brave example of Liz Lemon:

What's Your Excuse?

Oh, Internet. I can't leave you alone for one minute, can I?

I went to New York City last weekend and when I got back, everyone online was raising a stink about a photograph.

I'm not going to post it here because reasons, but if you have spent any time on a computer in the past week you have probably seen it. It's a photograph of a mother with her three small boys. The mother is wearing a body-baring sports bra and booty shorts, so we can admire her impeccable abs. The caption at the top of the photo reads "What's your excuse?"

"What's my excuse for what?" I thought, because I enjoy being deliberately obtuse. But obviously, this woman is asking what my excuse is for not having a body like hers.

There are a lot of things I'd like to say to the world about pregnancy and childbirth and a woman's body. But Beauty Redefined says it better than I could, so I'll let you go there. The world isn't very kind to women who don't bounce back from a pregnancy with the speed and precision of a celebrity. You know what makes it even worse? Not having a baby to show for it.

I think that even though society has these expectations of new mothers, we're willing to make allowances for a woman if she's pushing a newborn around in a stroller. "Her midsection is doughy," Society says, "but she did have a baby a few months ago." When I went to the store with Roo, my baby belly was excused. I had proof that there was a purpose to how I looked.

After placement? I was just another fat girl. No one could tell that my body had done something amazing in growing a human from scratch. No one could tell that I emotionally gutted myself to give that tiny human a wonderful life. And it didn't matter - in the eyes of the world, I wasn't a birth mother or a woman or a child of God. I was just fat.

I don't like that word, by the way. Fat. I don't like the way it's defined today and I don't like the way that it's used. My sister-in-law doesn't allow her children to say it. They're allowed to speak in terms of healthy and less healthy, but never fat, and they understand that you can't tell if someone is healthy just by looking at them.

I've struggled with my weight and with disordered eating for 2/3 of my life. When I was 19 years old, I finally got skinny. I had flat abs and slim legs and I fit the societal definition of health because I could wear a certain jeans size. It's worth noting that at that point in time I still wanted to lose 10 pounds, because according to the Body Mass Index I was overweight. But, hey, I was skinny - my body looked a lot like What's Your Excuse Lady's, right down to the washboard abs, so I must have been fit, right?

Wrong. I had hypertension, my cholesterol and triglycerides were atrocious, I was sleeping 3-4 hours a night, I was a mental health disaster, and I got winded if I tried to run from the front door to the sidewalk. My physical appearance gave the impression of health, but I was as unhealthy as it was possible to be without a fatal disease.

I looked good, and I was constantly given compliments on my appearance. But my looks didn't tell the whole story.

What's Your Excuse Lady is probably much more physically fit than I was at my thinnest. Or, you know, maybe she isn't. Because all I know about her is that she looks fit. What's Your Excuse Lady might find my body repulsive, and wonder why it looks this way. I'm single and childless - why am I not working out an hour each day?

For the record, here are my abs as of three weeks ago:

Please note the myriad stretch marks. I am very proud of them. Roo gave them to me. When I see them, I think of her and how much I love her. You may also notice a few odd little horizontal white scars. Those are from the surgery to remove my gallbladder. Because when I was skinny and by all appearances healthy, I had gallstones. (When my gallbladder was inspected post-surgery, they lost count at 15 gallstones.)

These are my abs, and I am, at the age of 30 years minus a week, the healthiest I have ever been in my life. I probably can't convince you with the picture above, but it's true. I can do 10 pushups with perfect form. I can hold a full squat for a solid minute. I can do a 20-minute ab workout without a struggle. I can run - not super fast, but I can do it. My cholesterol is on the low end of normal. My triglycerides are perfect. My blood pressure? 93/50. I am happy and mentally healthy and, by the way, I weigh 155 pounds.

So, what's my excuse?

My excuse is that I think there are at least 600 things in this world that are more important than flat abs. My excuse is that "have a perfect body" isn't anywhere on my list of priorities - health, yes, "hot," no. My excuse is that I am so much more than what I look like. My excuse is that I would rather live a full and interesting life and have a doughy belly than spend 365 hours a year at the gym. My excuse is that I have value and worth beyond my physical appearance.

My excuse is that I am capable of doing things, not just being being looked at. My excuse is that I am strong, and strong doesn't have a single look, nor should it, nor should we expect it to. My excuse is that I earned this stomach, stretch marks and scars and all, and I love it. My excuse is that I am happy with who I am, regardless of the fact that no one covets my abs.

My excuse is a precious, perfectly imperfect little four-year-old girl named Roo who is going to take her cues about health and worth and womanhood from the influential women in her life. She is blessed with an intelligent, clever, and media-savvy mother to guide her, and I am so glad! I can't talk M up enough. If I ever grow up I want to be just like her.

I don't know how big of an influence I will end up having on Roo and the woman that she becomes, but I refuse to take any risks. I refuse to sacrifice any part of myself at the altar of "hot," because I don't want Roo to think it's something I place any value on.

I know that her parents will teach her well, as they already have. But if she ever looks to me as an example or a role model or even just as a genetic roadmap, I want her to see a woman whose imperfections give her strength. I want her to see a woman who is more concerned with making the world beautiful than she is with making herself beautiful.

My excuse is that I don't want the person I love most in the world to ever have to feel she needs to make excuses for the way that she looks. She is more than her body. She is precious to me because of who she is, not because of her looks.

I have made a lot of excuses today, but you know what? I don't need them. There are only a handful of things you can tell about me by looking at me, and none of them are important.

FAQ: Do I Want More Children?

November, if you haven't heard, is National Adoption Month - today, in fact, is National Adoption Day. In previous years I did a LOT of blogging to commemorate. Spoiler alert: that will not be happening this year. I am way too busy (those cat videos on YouTube aren't going to watch themselves). I've also been too busy to answer e-mail and my blog e-mail tends to be crazy anyway; if you've written to me in the past 6 months, don't give up hope, I will catch up eventually. I hope.

But I feel like I should do something for November, because I think adoption is really rad. So I'm going to steal - no, let's say, appropriate an idea from my friend Brittany. She's been answering frequently asked questions on her blog each week and I've decided to do the same. I already have a blog FAQbut it hasn't been updated in ages; I had a lot of anger issues when I wrote it and I think I'd probably explain things better if I were to re-write it and I think that I will eventually, but not right now. Wow, that was a beautiful run-on sentence, wasn't it? I think I might look into National Grammar Month; I need it.

Anyway. I have been asked other questions, by friends and acquaintances and by high school students who have been subjected to my story during their child-development classes. I want to answer some of them here. Today's question is courtesy of a teenager who apparently missed the phrase "I always wanted to be a mother" sprinkled liberally throughout my story.

Q: Do you want more kids some day?

A: Short answer, yes. Slightly longer answer, yes, absolutely, but I'd like to be married first.

I would not be me if I left it at that, would I? I love words too much.

I have always, always wanted to be a mother. I know that in today's modern world women are supposed to be ambitious and have their own careers and lives but I've never been that type-A. I think I'm unambitious out of self-preservation; I tend to take things to extremes and when something is important to me I give it 500%. Ambition would be the death of me. Being a wife and mother has always been enough of a goal in my mind. That's probably not the sort of thing a woman is supposed to confess to but there it is.

My pregnancy was a surprise but not an unwelcome one. It wasn't the way I'd planned on being a mother but I was disinclined to be picky. I wanted a baby and I was having a baby. Maybe it's because I know exactly why I made the decision I did, and because I know so many other birth mothers whose decisions were similarly selfless, but I am always surprised when someone assumes I placed Roo because I didn't want to be a mother. Placement had nothing to do with wanting to be a mother or not wanting to be a mother. It was about what was best for the little girl I love so much. It was a choice I made as a mother.

I very much want kids. I know that single women aren't supposed to say that because we come across as baby-hungry and people get these ideas that I instantly assess every date as a potential father, that I've picked out names for all my children, that I can't hear normal conversation over the sound of my own biological clock ticking. Judge me if you will, but I do want children. I would love to have children, and preferably before my fertility starts to nosedive. But I'm not going to do it by myself. If I don't get married, I'm not going to have more kids. I don't care how well-off I end up, how successful or happy or anything else. I will not be a single mother again. I wanted Roo to have two married parents who love each other. Why would I want anything less for any other children I might have?

There's a selfishness behind this determination as well. Here's another uncomfortable truth: my pregnancy was the absolute bloody loneliest time of my entire life. I don't think I've ever felt so alone and I hope I never do again. I hated going to doctor's appointments because I was frequently the only woman in the waiting room without a husband or boyfriend. I invited H to come with me at first but I stopped after a few months because it was obvious he was never going to. I would surreptitiously assess the relationships of the couples in the waiting room and, without exception, they seemed to love each other. It hurt. I'd stare at my hands and wonder what I had done wrong that the father of my child didn't even like me.

I will not go through that again.

I want children, but I don't -just- want children. I want more for my children than I can give them by myself. Which means that although I would dearly love to be a mother, it's probably not going to happen. I'm okay with that. Because I had Roo, and if she's all I ever get, she's enough.

In Which Jill Writes About What She's Not Going to Write About

I spent quite a lot of time on a post about September 9th, 2009 - the day I placed Roo. It felt like what I ought to write about because today marks three years since then. I've written before about placement itself but I've never written properly about the day before placement. So I started to write, and I cried a fair bit, and even though everything I wrote was true and relevant, it didn't feel right.

I did a presentation the other night with P and M. We spoke to the women and teenage girls in a local LDS congregation. I've done these presentations with Roo's parents twice before and I love it. I love talking about adoption with pretty much anyone, but I think it's more meaningful when my audience gets both sides of Roo's story instead of just mine. When we reached the point in the story where I was supposed to be talking about my feelings during placement and what it was like, I had an odd moment. One part of my brain was bringing up the words I wanted to use to describe placement, but another part of my brain was nonplussed. (I have been trying for ages to properly work that word into a blog post, and there it is.) I thought, am I remembering this right? What did I feel that night?

I found that I sort of couldn't remember. I mean, I've read some of my own blog, so obviously I remember in the sense that the story is acutely familiar and of course I lived it, too. But as I was talking (the part of my brain that makes me talk always works three times faster than the part of my brain that actually considers whether I should be saying what I'm saying) I kept stopping mid-sentence and changing direction and finally I blurted out what is probably the least helpful thing I have ever said when describing placement -

"I don't know. It was just - it was a while ago. I've changed so much since then. It sort of feels like it happened to someone else."

A minute later, when my rational brain had caught up, I silently prayed that no one in the audience took that to mean I'd suffered a dissociative episode. But the thing is, what I said was true. I am quite the opposite of the depressed, juvenile, selfish woman who placed her child for adoption and then sat in her mother's Toyota screaming and crying. While I am immensely proud of the choice I made for Roo, I'm not proud of who I was when I made it. I was a wreck of a woman, and I find it nearly impossible to identify with her, even for the sake of my story.

I tried to slip back inside that skin to talk about how much placement hurt, but it made me feel petulant and selfish and it was uncomfortable. Writing about the day of placement, the last day I was a mother, didn't feel right because it was full of such wistful sadness and I don't like to dwell in those places anymore. One of the rather obvious things I have learned about happiness since I started studying it this year is that if you want to be happy, you shouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about sad things.

So, I'm sorry to say, I don't think any of you will ever be reading the paragraphs I labored over earlier. If Roo wants to read them when she's older she will but I don't want to go there with anyone else.

I was just going to write, like, a paragraph about why I'm not writing about placement day today, and look what happened. Words everywhere like some kind of explosion and I'm not even done yet.

I also thought that I should write something about the day my dad died, because today marks four years, but I spent hours on something that still didn't feel right. I wasn't sure why. I edited the heck out of it and re-wrote it three times and I liked what I wrote but it still didn't feel like what I ought to say today. I think I've figured it out.

When I was a kid I took gymnastics classes in the summer and I learned two important things. The first is that I have no aptitude for gymnastics. The second is that there's a pathetic sort of safety in looking back. If you're doing a handspring or a walkover or a flip, it's easier to go backwards because you can see where you're going. If you go forward, you have what is known as a blind landing - your feet face the direction you're headed before your eyes do. I mastered the back walkover, but the front walkover scared the daylights out of me. I didn't know where my feet were going to land and my fear kept me from putting them in the right place. Every. Single. Time.

But in life, as in gymnastics, if you can only go backward, you're not going to get very far. You have to learn to risk a blind landing every now and then if you want to get anywhere worth going. It's like the end of the last Indiana Jones movie. Remember this scene?

Indy had to save his dad (spoiler alert: he succeeded), and that meant taking a step forward, off a cliff. It would have been easier and safer to turn around at that point, but he didn't. (It would have made for a terrible ending if he had. The elder Henry Jones would have died and Indy would have looked like the worst sort of coward, especially considering everything else he faced in the movie, and the two movies before it.) He had to move forward. He couldn't go back.

Neither can I.

There are things I am going to remember for the rest of my life, and when the mood strikes me I will write about them and I may or may not put them on my blog. But I'm drawing myself a line there. The past is a foreign country. You can visit from time to time, but you can't live there.

More and more I find myself taking leaps of faith. Well, not leaps, exactly (which is lucky, since we've established that acrobatics are not my forte), but steps, let's call them steps, into the unknown. I can't see the path ahead of me but I know that it's there. I know that God is there. And even though it would be easier to look back, I'm going to keep moving forward, blind landings and all. I don't know where this path ends, but I can't wait to get there. It's going to be awesome.

Happy Birthday, Blog!

Today is this blog's third birthday! I feel like there should be cake. There should always be cake, don't you think? Not just for birthdays but in general. There should always be cake. I would bake one but I tend not to bake, as I live alone and I lack the self-control to keep from eating everything that comes out of the oven. Although if I'm honest, sometimes I don't even turn the oven on. There's no need to lie to myself. I make cookie dough for eating, not for baking.

I digress. Today my blog is three. Birthdays are a good time for self-reflection, aren't they? No? Well, too bad. To answer the question that no one has asked, I have not gone back and read my blog to commemorate the occasion. I tried that last year and had to have an extra session with my therapist to curb the ensuing bout of self-loathing. (I have evolved since placement, and I quite sincerely thank God for that.) A few minutes ago I read through the first two entries of this blog, and I decided that was enough. I don't need to go back. I know where I've been, because I was there. I will occasionally reflect on the dark days of my adoption experience, but only as a means of gauging how far I have come. Going back for more than a moment or two would accomplish nothing. I want to go forward.

I wish I could achieve that sort of psychological clarity in other areas of my life. I like to think that I possess the right mental skill-set to achieve that. Every one of my grade-school report cards mentioned my critical thinking skills (also, that I seemed to be bored a lot). The problem is that I have not yet learned to use my skills for good. I am like a teenage superhero, doing my best to save the world but occasionally using my superpowers for nefarious purposes by accident. While there may not be any comically-nicknamed villains on the streets of Mesa because of my neglect, there are consequences, and they usually involve a tearful existential crisis* in my therapist's office.

Because in addition to being untrustworthy with baked goods, something I know to be absolutely true of myself is that I am a world-class Monday morning quarterback. I don't know of anyone whose second-guessing skills rival mine, although in all fairness, I have had decades of practice. I am the Muhammad Ali of rumination. And I blame my brain.

I blame my brain for a lot of things, because pretty much every problem I've had can be traced (however tangentially) back to my brain. My brain is a jerk. Have you ever seen the scumbag brain meme? Here's my favorite:

When I found that on Pinterest, I laughed for about ten minutes. I was tired. Anyway. I blame my brain because if it didn't remember things so well, I would have less to ruminate on. Of course, my brain doesn't remember everything well, because that would be convenient and useful.

For example: I've been playing the piano since I was Roo's age, and the only song I have ever been able to memorize is "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." So I have to scan the room before I mention my piano-playing skills. I won't tell anyone that I can play if I'm in a room with a piano, because then they'll want a demonstration, and I'll play my little song, and I can practically hear people think, "Wait, did she say she's been playing since she was three or since she was twenty-three?" It's humiliating. I can play really complicated pieces if I have sheet music, but I'm useless without it.

My brain refuses to remember the notes to a song I have played more than a thousand times, but it will remember conversations word-for-word, and it will remember them for years. This is especially detrimental for someone as socially awkward as I am. I can recall pretty much every stupid thing I've ever said, and the uncomfortable looks on the faces of the people I said them to. I can recall, and my traitorous little brain comes up with other, less-embarrassing things I could have said. Come on, brain! Why can't you come up with better things to say when I can still say them? What good is a snappy comeback three months later?

One of the things I like best about writing, particularly on the computer, is editing. Until I hit "publish," nothing is permanent or fixed. I can take as long as I need to come up with just the right combination of words. For instance, the third paragraph of this post was re-written nine times and I may edit it once more before I publish. I can mull it over, read it out loud to see how it tastes, add and subtract words and phrases and rearrange until it says exactly what I want it to say.**

I can't do that in real life. My car did not come equipped with a flux capacitor.  So while I can remember conversations I've had, and while I can think of how I could fix them, I can't actually go back. Ideally, this knowledge would keep me from constantly editing past conversations. Ideally it would keep me from looking back so desperately and with such agony.

I'm pleased that I've gotten there with adoption. It has taken me nearly all of the past three years to stop looking back and thinking of things I want to edit. For my next trick, I want to stop editing the rest of my life. I don't imagine I can live my life completely without regret. But there's a difference between regretting something, and re-living and editing it at night when you ought to be asleep. I tend to do the latter. Again, I blame my brain.

You know, I would love to say that there is a point to all of the preceding, but I confess I've quite lost track of it. Sheesh. This is embarrassing. Where was I going with all this? Blog birthday, self-reflection, scumbag brain ... hmm.

.
.
.
.
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I think I was explaining why I don't read my own blog. Well, that'll teach me to ask and answer my own questions, won't it?

I meant to self-reflect and talk about how far I've come in three years and I ended up talking about why I should probably be seeing my therapist more often. But you know what? I kind of don't care that I ruminate a lot. Is it really the worst thing in the world? No.

The fact is that I have come really, super far in the past three years. I am a different person entirely. I am a happy person. There was a time when I thought I would never be able to say that about myself, but I'm saying it now and it's true. I am happy. I am happy almost all the time, and sometimes I am really ridiculously happy and people probably want to punch me in the face for it. My life is quite far from perfect, but that feels so unimportant to me. Far from perfect is still pretty rad.***

I'm not where I thought I'd be at this point in my life, and that's not a bad thing. I think I've ended up where I needed to be. I believe that God has a plan for me that's a lot greater than anything I could ever come up with. I know that when I've trusted Him in the past, amazing things have happened. I trust Him now get me where I need to be next.

I'm not the same woman who started blogging three years ago and I wouldn't be her again for anything in the world. It makes me wonder how much more awesome I'm going to be three years from now. I can't wait :)
****






*I am proud to say that my therapist decided last December that I am a sane, functional adult, and I only see him four or five times a year now, just to check in. I could probably see him less often but I've decided it's good for him to see someone who is happy and doing well, even if it's only seasonally, because I know that his office deals with a lot of sexual deviants, and I feel like he probably needs the occasional mental hand sanitizer to keep from crying himself to sleep at night.

**This doesn't mean that I am proud of everything I have ever written. I think most of this blog is crap. But everything I have posted here was, at one point, exactly what I wanted to say and I felt pretty good about it at the time. Even if I'd never say it now and am now in fact slightly ashamed of having wanted to say it ever.

***Sorry about that. Two weeks ago I caught myself using the word "rad" and I don't know where it came from but it's like a virus. I can't seem to stop using it. I counted a few days ago and I described more than nine different people and things as "really rad." I think I need help.

****I was pretty stupid to say that everything I've posted on my blog was, at the time, exactly what I wanted to say. It's not even true. I'm not happy with the conclusion of this post and no amount of mulling has fixed it. The smart thing to do would be to think about it for a while and come back to this post, but if I don't hit "publish" today the post's point, such as it is, would be moot. What I should have said is that everything I've posted on my blog was good enough at the time.
Also, I feel like I should apologize for the sheer volume of my footnotes today. I'm not going to, but I still feel like I should.

Telling

One of the things I used to worry about right after I placed Roo was how I was going to tell people I was a birth mom. A lot of people knew already, but in my head I had a lifetime of awkward exchanges ahead of me, and I dreaded it. I felt good about the choice I’d made to place, but I didn’t trust that the rest of the world would understand. The fact that I was still extremely miserable compounded my worry – how would I ever convince people that I’d made the right choice when I was so unhappy?

I became preemptively defensive, and any time I was asked a question to which my birth motherhood was the answer, I warred with panic and lost. I became adept at explaining away my weight gain, my unemployment, my necklace. I had an arsenal of clever responses that were so well-rehearsed, I wondered if I would ever need to tell the truth.

I knew that in my personal life, I would have to be honest with certain people but I felt that such honesty would be a matter of much thought and prayer and likely panic. My thought was that adoption was such a special thing to me and not everyone deserved to know about it, about Roo. This didn’t stop me from doing presentations at high schools with my adoption agency, but classes full of teenage strangers didn’t bother me. I’d never seen them before and I’d never seen them again. There was no pressure. I had nothing to lose.

I felt that more was at stake with friends and acquaintances and co-workers. I thought more than once that if I said the wrong thing, or the right thing the wrong way, I could ruin a relationship. The first adoption conference I went to offered a class called “Who, When, and How to Tell Your Adoption Story.” I was desperate for this class, which was taught by two birth moms who had the experience and perspective I lacked.

The women who presented had very different ideas about telling their stories. One of them was very open about it. She said she tended to tell men she was a birth mom on the first date. I knew that would never be me. The other birth mom was more private, and she validated my idea that sharing my story was a matter deserving much consideration. Although I liked and respected both women, I connected more with the latter, and I decided to follow her example.

When I did occasionally feel that I needed to share my story with someone, I spoke carefully, mentally filtering out details that felt too personal or too irrelevant. I was careful not to appear too excited, because I didn’t want to give the impression that I didn’t love Roo, that placement hadn’t been hard, that I didn’t miss her. The people I told seemed hesitant to ask questions even when I told them I didn’t mind. Adoption made them uncomfortable and very often it was never brought up again.

I’m a little embarrassed at how long it took me to realize that these people were taking their cues from me. I was awkward about adoption, and it made them feel awkward. I had to ask myself what I thought was going to happen if I were ever completely honest with someone about adoption. I was afraid that they would think less of me. I knew that was stupid. Rationally I couldn’t think why anyone would think less of me for being a birth mom. And I decided that if someone would think less of me for having placed, I didn’t need them in my life anyway. Keeping quiet felt like an act motivated by shame, and I was certainly not ashamed of my choice. Placing Roo is the best thing I’ve ever done. I realized I needed to start acting like it.

The next time a question came up, I didn’t dodge it. I told the truth – that I had a baby girl, that I placed her for adoption, that it was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, that it was worth it, that I love her. And I waited.

“That is so cool!” was the response. I showed them Roo’s picture on my phone, and that was it.

I know that I was lucky – the person I talked to could have reacted very differently. One or two people have, and I'm sure one or two more will in the future. But I decided then that I liked the feeling of being straight with someone about adoption. Once I realized that, it became much easier to talk. Or if not easier, then maybe a little less scary. I don't think I necessarily owe anyone my story. But neither do I feel like I'm doing anyone any favors by keeping quiet. I'm certainly not doing myself or Roo any favors.

The fact is that Roo is and always will be an important part of my life. It only makes sense that the people who get to know me know about her too. So much of who I am is because of Roo. So many things remind me of her. If I keep her a secret, I have to filter every word I say, and if there's one thing I am terrible at, it's filtering what I say (apologies to my mother, who tried her best to teach me better).

Most people who know me know that I’m a birth mom, and they think it’s cool. It like to believe that it doesn't define me in their minds; it’s just one of those things that are true of me like my height or my eye color or the fact that I talk really fast. (I hear things like, "I heard about adoption the other day, and I thought of you" less often than I hear, "I corrected someone's grammar the other day and thought, 'this must be what it feels like to be Jill.'")

So far, every date I have been on has been with a man who knew about Roo before he asked me out. Not that I have been on a lot of dates, but still. I have saved myself a lot of worry by being open about being a birth mom. The men who have taken me on dates knew what they were getting into when they asked me. I didn't have to worry about slipping up in conversation, or about an impending awkward discussion of my past. Everything important is already out there.


I have become that birth mother that was never going to be me. I am the woman who tells new friends, acquaintances, and random strangers that she placed a child for adoption, and I love it. I love being that woman! I want people to know about Roo. I want them to know that adoption can be an amazing thing. I want them to know that even if they know of fifty other adoptions gone wrong, or five hundred or five thousand, adoption can still be an amazing thing.

Roo's adoption is an amazing thing. And I'm telling everyone.