How Will She Feel?

I have about forty drafts of blog posts waiting to be finished, edited, polished, and published. At least five of them are different versions of the same post, which I scrapped months ago but have yet to delete. I know all this because I just went through my drafts to see what I might be able to use for this month of blogging.

I have to say, I'm not very excited with what I've got. Today is only November 2nd, so I've got a bit of time to figure something out. In the meantime, I thought I'd answer a few of the questions I've been asked. Maybe by the time I've gone through the list I'll have thought of ideas for the rest of the month!

As usual, I've paraphrased:

I'm sure you've come across the same blogs I have written by adult adoptees who feel cheated or harmed by "the system" in their adoptions. Do you ever read these and worry about what your daughter will think when she's older?

Honestly? Every so often I do. There are no guarantees in life. I can't say definitively that Roo won't ever have negative feelings towards me as she gets older. I don't think it's likely at all, but you can't always predict these things.

And sometimes, if I'm having a more emotional day, I'll think about it more. I should mention, I don't actually read those blogs, for the same reason that I don't ever watch those videos that PETA produces about how animals on farms are mistreated: I don't enjoy seeing - or reading about - the pain and suffering of a living creature. Nothing in the world that I can do will take away the pain of these people, and reading about their pain just makes me feel miserable.

Anyway.

My mother has been a great comfort to me when I've been a worrying worried worrywart. She was adopted as a baby, and she reassures me that she has nothing but love and respect for her birth mother, that being adopted was the best thing in the world for her - even though her birth mother could have raised her and been an excellent mother, that she has never suffered or felt damaged by being adopted.

I know and know of other adult adoptees as well, and not one of the ones I know personally are of the angry, wounded ilk. I think what it comes down to is the parents, and how the issue of adoption is handled. Roo has phenomenal parents. I quite honestly wish they could have adopted me, too. And she will always know that she was adopted, and why, and who I am. It will never be a secret, or something to be ashamed of. Any questions she has about where she came from will be answered. And like I said, she's got great parents, who have read more books about adoption than I even know exist. They will be able to explain things to her in an appropriate way as she grows.

Honestly, as much help as my mother is, P and M are the reason I worry as little as I do. I could not possibly have found better parents than they. There are, as I said, no guarantees in life, and only time will tell what sort of person Roo becomes. But I placed Roo with her parents because they were the only people I met that I trusted implicitly to raise my baby to be a strong, smart, well-adjusted, content and happy woman. I feel confident that as Roo grows up, she will understand her adoption, and that it will be a non-issue.

In Which I Answer a Question No One Asked

I'm a little late in the day to post, but today is still November 1st, and this still counts as a post for today. I think it's a good one to kick off National Adoption Month as well.

I was asked not long ago to explain what open adoption means to me.

I'm sure that the person who asked was hoping for a definition of sorts - what do I consider to be an open adoption? How would I classify their idea of it? What are the requirements that I personally have for an adoption to qualify as open?

Well, too bad, question asker, because this is my blog, and I am obstinate. When I read the question, although I was certain of the context, I couldn't answer it that way. When I read the question, answers came to my mind. They're probably not the answers that you (whoever you are) were looking for, but they're what I've got. I've got answers to the question that no one has asked but that needs to be asked.

What does open adoption mean to me?

Open adoption means that any time I want to, I can turn on my computer, open the right file and watch Roo take a few shaky steps, or watch her dance with her sister, wiggling her hips and squealing with glee.

Open adoption means if I want to know how she's doing, all I have to do is ask.

Open adoption means I know the baby I placed, the person I love most in the world, is a happy, healthy, clever, sweet, gorgeous toddler.

Open adoption means Roo will never wonder who her birth mother is, what I look like, what sort of person I am, and why I placed her. She will know.

Open adoption means I will never wonder who my baby is, what she looks like, and whether she has a good life. I will know.

Open adoption means I know, every single day, that I made the right choice for Roo, because open adoption brings peace and reassurance.

Open adoption means that when I grieve, I grieve for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. I grieve out of love, not regret, out of sadness for myself, not for my baby.

Open adoption means that Roo is happy, and it means that Roo's mommy and daddy are happy, and it means that Roo's birth mom is happy. It's win-win-win. We all get to be happy. We all get to have peace and joy.

Open adoption means that if something needs to be said, it's said, and we make adjustments, and we're happy again, even happier than before.

Open adoption means that Roo is loved by more people than she will ever know. It means she gets to meet some of the ones who love her who are not her forever family, and that the rest of them that don't get to meet her still know who she is and that she is happy. Open adoption means an abundance of love for Roo and for all of her families.

Open adoption means that even though my heart broke, it's healed stronger than it was before. It means that I am a better, stronger person, for Roo and for her parents. It means I try every day to be someone they can be proud of.

Open adoption means I never have to wonder and I never have to worry. Open adoption is the happiest sad, and the happiest happy.

Open adoption means that placement wasn't goodbye; it was hello.

(And if you keep having the tagline "Love means never having to say your sorry" stuck in your head after reading this list, don't worry, I do too. And it's crap, because love means saying you're sorry whether you really are or not.)

Two Things ...

1) I am feeling much, much better since I posted last. I know that there are people who think that it's not good to deeply feel negative emotions, and that's fine for them, but I'm the sort of person who has to let something out before I can get past it, and that's what happened. I let it out, and I feel a million times better. Also, I got a new Roo video that day, which pretty much made my month.

2) November is National Adoption Month! I'm still debating whether to take Mrs. R's challenge to post every single day. I did it last year and it was exhausting. But I think maybe I can do it. I'm going to try it for a few days and see what happens.

That is all. Thank you :)

Good Times, Bad Times

For the most part, I feel like I am doing remarkably well for myself 13 months post-placement. I have good days and I have bad days, but mostly good days, and the bad days aren't as bad.

Usually.

Today is the rare exception.

I've made a conscious effort to be less negative on my blog (I've been criticized for my negativity in the past) and I think I've done fairly well. I no longer feel the need to express every thought I have in such a public forum. I might have done so in the past when fewer people read this blog, but the more people that read it, the less comfortable I feel sharing certain personal things. I have another blog for Roo, a private one, where I do write every thought I have about her and about her adoption. I've thought about giving P and M access but I worry that they'd think less of me for some of the things I've written. Or that they'd worry about me, and I don't want that. Of course, that probably happens enough with this blog. So I don't know. I've never been a fantastic communicator, and even after all this time I still find myself re-reading my e-mail to P and M eight or nine times to make sure it sounds okay, because I think that if I say the wrong thing, they won't like me anymore.

(Much of my relationship with H is a blur now, but I can recall him once telling me affectionately that I am "action-packed with issues." I think he said it affectionately. Although in retrospect it might have been more like disbelief. Either way, he wasn't wrong.)

But all that aside, this blog is still first and foremost a place for me to write about what it's like to be Roo's birth mom, and that includes bad days, of which today is one.

Sometimes I can actually feel a bad day building up. I'll have a sniffle or two here and there, but no major sob explosions for a while. Then I'll realize that my bouts of sniffling are getting closer and closer together. At the same time I'll find myself thinking of Roo more and more often, and the next thing you know, my mental dam bursts and everything comes out. I'll sit and cry for a bit and miss Roo. Then I feel a bit better.

Except sometimes, today for instance, I don't sit and cry for a bit. Sometimes, like today, I will be fine one minute, and the next minute I'm choking back sobs and wondering if I could possibly leave work early because I'm having trouble breathing and holding myself upright.

Today, I miss my little Roo so much that it physically hurts. I feel a little sick, actually. I just ... I miss her. I miss her, and that sucks. Most of the time it seems strange to think that I ever had a baby, that I was ever a mother for a few brief weeks. But on days like today, it's all I can think about. On days like this, all I can think is, I used to have a daughter, and now I don't.

It feels wrong to even put this into words, but sometimes I wish I didn't love her so much. I think, if I loved her less, it would hurt less. It seems unfair that I have to love her as much as I do but that I don't get to reap any of the benefits.

I hate feeling like this. I hate the selfishness of it, the fixation on what I have lost rather than on what Roo has gained. But hate it or not, it's there, and I'm stuck with it for a while.

I wonder if I ought to even post this. I'm not sure. It's hardly beneficial to anyone at all, is it? But then, I think maybe when Roo is older and she reads it, it'll help her know how very much I love her.

In Which I Tell a Story I've Told Twice Before

This is probably going to be a little TMI, so consider yourself warned.

Today marks two years since a home pregnancy test showed two lines instead of one. I've written about it before, here and here, but I like to reminisce, and I'm putting off doing something unpleasant, so I'm going to write about it again.

I've said before that I knew I was pregnant before I knew I was pregnant. (Here's the TMI part.) My period was militantly regular. I had never in my life been so much as ten hours late - until October two years ago. Things should have started on the 20th, but didn't. Each day that passed increased my sense of foreboding. It put a bit of a damper on my birthday as well, because all I could think was, I'm three days late. I tried to talk myself out of a panic. I'd been sick a few weeks before. Maybe the antibiotics had messed things up a bit.

That got me through my birthday. And each day that passed, as much as I worried, I thought, today's the day. Well, the 24th wasn't the day, either. I told myself that if nothing happened the next day, I'd buy a home pregnancy test. Nothing happened. I bought a home pregnancy test. I can still remember - like it was this morning - driving home from Target with a sick feeling completely unrelated to pregnancy hormones. I already knew the truth. And all I could think of was, my brother is going to be so disappointed in me. In retrospect, it seems funny to me that my first thought was not for myself or my baby or even my mother. My first thought was, what will Scott think? I have let him down.

I love my brother. He is one of my favorite people in the world. I'm sure he's done stupid things in his life, but nothing major, nothing serious. And he's the sort of person whose goodness inspires others to be as good. I felt like a failure. I didn't want him to know how badly I'd messed up because I was afraid he'd think less of me for it.

Well, as I'm sure you know by now, after I waited the prescribed amount of time, and two pink lines appeared in the results window of the test, and I swear, I could feel a chasm form in the space-time continuum. Now there was only before, and after. I was desperate for the peace and safety of the before, but there was no going back from the after. There was a grand canyon between the two, and that terrified me more than anything. I had made some serious mistakes before, but nothing I felt I couldn't sort of take back through repentance.

This was something I most certainly could not even dream of taking back.

My mother had gone out shopping. You may recall that my father had died only about seven weeks before all this happened. In those days, my mother distracted herself from her grief by leaving the house and getting a head start on her Christmas shopping. Many times she had offered to take me with her, and several times she had pleaded with me to go with her, but I almost always declined. I've never been one to distract myself from my grief. I wallow. And on top of my grief over my father's death was worry about a fight I'd had with H. After our breakup in July we'd tried to remain friends (and obviously we still saw each other on occasion) but I had a hard time separating my emotions and I'd fought with him. I was afraid that the words I'd said in anger had permanently ruined any chance of even friendship with him - he being of course the only man who had ever been interested in me.

(That didn't sound right grammatically, but I'm too lazy to look into it, so please ignore it if it bothers you as well.)

Once I got over my initial, heart-stopping shock, I numbly descended the stairs and collapsed on the couch in front of the TV. I had thought about turning it on to distract myself but I couldn't seem to remember how to work the remote control, so I sat there and cried.

My mother came home not long after, excited about her purchases, which she immediately removed from their bags to show me. I tried hard to look enthusiastic, to smile and give the appropriate responses, but I have the world's worst poker face. The fact that I hadn't quite managed to stop crying was probably a clue as well. My mother asked what was wrong, and I just shook my head. In retrospect, it seems sort of odd that she'd ask about my tears when my father's death was so recent. Perhaps, being my mother, she could sense that there was something different about my unhappiness that day.

She persisted. I cried harder. "I can't tell you!" I sobbed. I realized later that as I spoke I had nervously shredded a number of half-used Kleenexes and set them in a pile on the ottoman in front of me. This, too, might have been a clue to my mum. She urged me to tell her, saying that I could tell her anything. At this, I let out a half-sob, half-cry, and tried desperately to get my vocal cords to function properly. No such luck. I hadn't even used the word "pregnant" out loud to myself. I sure as hell couldn't say it to my recently widowed mother.

I remember crying harder then. My mother kept asking me to tell her why I was so upset, and I kept refusing, shaking my head and sobbing and shredding Kleenex. Finally, she said, "The only reasons I can think for you to be this upset and not tell me are that you've got AIDS or you're pregnant. Which is it?"

I looked up at her. The good news, I thought, is that I don't have AIDS. But I said nothing. I couldn't. She knew just the same.

"You're pregnant," she said. I nodded.

We both cried then.

It's funny to remember it now - I can remember it so clearly, and yet it feels like it happened to someone else. Now I can't fathom being that selfish and blubbering and weak in the face of such a thing. I suppose that at this point in time I've simply been through enough that almost nothing fazes me anymore. I suppose it's because I experienced something that made my selfish and blubbering and weak that I'm no longer any of those things.

I guess part of what has changed my perspective is Roo. As hard as things were, I'd do anything in the world for that little girl, and if I had to go back and do it all again I'd move heaven and earth to get her here and to the point she's at now. She is happy and healthy and so very loved. She has phenomenal parents. She had to get to them in a rather unorthodox way, but I'm okay with that.

I am as happy today as I was devastated two years ago. The apparent cause of the devastation ended up being my saving grace. I don't know where I'd be today without Roo. I don't like to think about it. I don't like to think of what my life would have been without her, or what the world would be like without her.

Two years ago my life changed deeply and forever, and I am forever grateful.

You Say it's Your Birthday

I'm going to ramble a bit today. I've decided I'm allowed.

It's October 23rd again. That always happens this time of year :) It's my birthday, and it feels kind of weird. My birthday always feels kind of weird for some reason. Kind of not quite normal.

I feel like my birthday two years ago was the last normal birthday I ever had. Which is sort of funny, because my dad had just died. So maybe my 25th wasn't the last normal one, my 24th was. Except that when I turned 24, my dad was being treated for brain cancer. Which is also abnormal (in every sense of the word). So maybe my last normal birthday was four years ago.

I'm not sure I can even remember four years ago. I'm sure I must. I'm sure something happened that year. As I recall, I had just graduated from beauty school, so I must have been happy. I think the lack of any strong memories of that year is probably a good sign that it really was my last normal birthday.

But the reason I think of 2008 as my last normal birthday is because it was two days after that birthday that I had one of those moments when you know the rest of your life is going to be marked by before and after. Two years ago, I found out I was pregnant. Two years ago, my vibrant, darling, cheerful little ray of sunshine was a jumble of dividing cells still a week away from a heartbeat. That seems crazy to me. I can hardly remember my life before Roo. Which is just as well, because it can't have been half as happy without her.

When I was about eight months pregnant, I bought a super cute outfit for Roo. It was size 3-6 months, and I decided it was going to be the outfit I dressed her in on my birthday. She would be 3 1/2 months old then, but I knew she was just going to be a tiny little thing and it would fit her. I remember thinking how much fun my birthday was going to be as a mommy. Instead of the usual boring picture of me, there would be a picture of me and my daughter. I could picture myself going out to eat, baby in tow, getting a free birthday dessert and a million compliments on my baby.

What's that saying again? Something like, "Man plans. God laughs."

Right after placement, I remember opening the wrong drawer in my dresser by mistake, and instead of my shirts, there were Roo's clothes. And right on top was the birthday outfit. It just about killed me. A few weeks later, on my birthday, I kept myself busy, but at one point I did go back to that drawer and pull out that little outfit. I wondered what Roo was wearing that day instead.

I've been thinking about that a lot this week. I don't know why. I guess because since I was seven or eight or so, I haven't had a birthday turn out the way I'd hoped or planned. Many of those years, it wasn't just a change of plans, but some ... some event, or something unhappy that made my birthday unhappy. Some years it might be something little, like the Yankees winning the world series. (That was a joke. Although I do hate the Yankees.) But there was the year the girls at my birthday party, spurred on by the suggestion of one girl in particular, passed around sheets of paper with everyone's names on them and rated them on looks, personality, popularity, and other things. There was the year that my mom, desperately worried about me, dragged me to the doctor, who prescribed antidepressants, which I still take ("Give 'em a year, 18 months tops, you'll be done with 'em," he said, back in 1998). There was the year that, on the way home from school, my parents and I were in a car accident. There was the year that my church choir practice ran late, and when I got home for my family party, I found that my extended family had already cut into my cake and some were ready to go home.

Birthdays and I don't get along.

Hmm. I'm sure there was a point to this post. Or then again, maybe there wasn't.

Gee, this is embarrassing.

.
.
.
.
.
.

Oh, I've got it! Birthdays. Right. So, I think of 2008 as my last "normal" birthday, but if I'm honest, last year was probably one of the best birthdays I've ever had. I think there's something to be said for that. Finding out I was pregnant was one of my life's defining moments. But I wouldn't trade any of the before for the worst day of the after. I am so much happier now. My life is so much better. I think the world is so much better, because it contains my favorite person in the world.

So, you know what? To heck with normal birthdays. The abnormal ones are exponentially better.

Okay. I'm done rambling. Thanks for reading.