May 10, 2010

Adoption Math

At the risk of becoming a blogger who just sends you elsewhere, I want to point you to a piece from the New York Times this weekend by a first mom in an open adoption:
In the months before I gave birth, when my boyfriend and I were just getting to know the couple we had chosen, I was able to comprehend the coming exchange only on the most theoretical of levels, but it seemed like gentle math: Girl with child she can’t keep plus woman who wants but can’t have child; balance the equation, and both parties become whole again.
...
I had spent my entire life without a child, but I was newly born that night, too, and my old self disappeared. I could no longer imagine how a mother could give up a child and live. Adoption was not simple math; a new mother cannot know the value of the thing she subtracts. It is only through time — when my son turned 4, and I was 27; when he turned 6, and I was 29; when he turns 10 this year, and I am 33, and ready for children — that I begin to understand the magnitude of what I lost, and that it is growing. 
It's a powerful example of why it's so hard to pin an open adoption with a single label of success or failure, good or bad. Go and read!

11 comments:

Michelle said...

What a wonderful article! Weird that it was in the NYT under the "fashion and style" section.....?

Anonymous said...

That was an incredible article! Thanks for sharing.

Eva said...

Cool. I haven't read my Sunday NYT yet. Thanks, Heather!

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for this link!

Ginger said...

Wow...Awesome article. Thanks for sharing the link with us.

Wishing 4 One said...

Thanks for sharing, super article. Although I am not directly connected to adoption in any way I always find open adoption amazing and so interesting.

kperdue said...

Thank you for sharing this. Wonderful, beautiful article

Anonymous said...

Please keep sharing. Everything you've shared recently has made me think harder and I, in turn, have shared it with my husband. This will prompt similar discussions too.

Anonymous said...

seeing that people are willing/able to do math with children is frightening. it seems that we have forgotten that children are humans, not objects.

not everyone, always of course.

cindy psbm said...

I found this article before you posted it, but I really like that you did.
I really idenitfy with the writers POV.
The part of it that got me the most was this sentance
"Open adoption is an awkward choreography; I am offered a place at the table, but I am not sure where to sit."
Both literally and figuratively, I have been there.

Sara Groomsell said...

good stuff - what an amazing woman

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