It Was a Very Long Line

Today at the pharmacy I was about to get in line at the counter when I saw an older man with a cane hobbling along.  I said for him to go ahead and get in front of me. It was very busy and I figured we would be waiting a while.  He said I didn’t have to let him go in front.  Of cores I don’t, but some day some one will do the same for me I say.  We stood in line and chatted.  He asked about my Bluetooth earpiece and whether I could just listen or whether people could hear me when I talked into it.  I told him that they could and that I walk around all day looking like a crazy bag lady talking to myself, minus the shopping cart.  That is, unless I am shopping and then I just look like a crazy lady shopping.  I laughed.  He didn’t

It was a long line.

He wondered what technology is going to be like when you are my age he says.  Wow, I don’t know I said, I can’t even imagine.  For one thing I bet we will just have the Bluetooth installed in our heads.  I smiled.  He said he had cut out and saved an article many years ago about what technology would be like in the future, and he hadn’t looked at it since.  He said when he got home he would dig it up, because now he was curious about how accurate they were.  I should have given him my digits, because now I am curious too.   I told him about my grandpa and how he loved new technology and some things he never thought he’d live to see...some, he didn't.

It was a very long line.

He got up to the counter and gives the pharmacist his name and says he has 6 prescriptions to pick up.  He was old you know.  And she went to get them; she rings them up and says "$933.00 that is very expensive".  I don’t hear what he says and I can’t see his face, but I turn away, because suddenly my eyes are filled with tears, I don’t want my new friend to turn around and see them.  Were you expecting it to be that much? She asks, this one cost $300 and this is $150 and that one is… 

And the line is longer.

He pays for is insulin and syringes and whatever else it was he needed to keep him alive.  He thanks the lady and wishes her a nice day.  He turns around and thanks me for my place in line and for chatting with him.  He said he enjoyed the company. I did too, I tell him, now go home and find that article; I bet you’ll get a kick out of it.  And I wondered what it said about the cost of prescription drugs in the future.  I wondered about the cost of prescription drugs in my future.  And I wondered how on earth our elderly retirees on fixed incomes can afford to stay alive.  And I wondered…

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Stuff Amélie Says

Yesterday Amélie (5) insisted she wanted chocolate milk. She did not drink it, so we put it in the fridge and gave it to her at dinner tonight. "Excuse Me! Why can't you solve the mystery? I decided I do not like chocolate milk!" she says.  

Are there any mysteries you just can’t solve?

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What If

I saw a couple of posts last week about by adoptees, like these by Amanda and Von about what might have been. Based on this quote by B.J. Lifton Amanda had post on her blog:

"Those adoptees already in Reunion need help in integrating their two selves—the one who grew up adopted and the alternate one who might have been" (Lifton, 2010, p. 8).

Even though I do not have two separate families that I could contemplate what life would be like with one compared to the other, it did make me stop and think about the “what could have beens” in my life. I am certainly not discounting all of the wonderful people I had in my life instead; my nanny, my foster parents, teachers, social workers, surrogate parents, staff, the Word Family, and my friends have all been a tremendous blessing in my life, but what if:

What if my mom and dad never got divorced?

What if my mother never left us with my dad?

What if my mom had not came back to get us, and took her to live with her?

What is my dad would have paid for a nanny for us like he did when we lived with him and he worked full time.

What if my mom would have paid for a nanny to take care of us while she worked full time?

What if my mom would have left for work an hour later and got us up and out for school instead of eating breakfast in the cafeteria before work every day?

What if my mother came home after work? 

What if she ate dinner with us, or at least made it?

What if my mother didn’t go to her support group EVERY night?  What if she didn’t hangout for coffee with her friends afterward EVERY night?

What if my mother would have allowed my older sister to come back home to live (at 16) and help take care of us after she had run away?

What if I wasn’t (literally) tortured and beat up by my older brother on a regular basis?

What if my mom would have gotten a baby-sitter while she was hanging out?

What if I would have been better at taking care of myself?

What if I didn’t hate school so much that I wasn’t going unless somebody was going to get me up and out the door?

What if I hadn’t become so angry?  

What if my mother believed all of the experts and people who told her that kids need rules and consistency (parents)?

What if my dad would have/could have stood up to his wife for ANYONE including himself about ANYTHING , EVER ?

Where or who would I be now?

I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t be nearly as resourceful as I am today.

Any one of those things would/could have changed my life

But…

I will never know beyond that, because it never happened.

Like Von said…It is what it is, I am who I am.

What are your what ifs?

 

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Random Chatter

• I’d like to take a moment and thank everyone for stopping by and reading Anastasia from Sweet Butter Bliss’s guest post yesterday.  I would also thank those of you who stopped by her site and read mine, I appreciate the support!  

• I spent yesterday “preparing” for today’s colonoscopy, so fun…I am, at the moment no longer full of crap I am pretty sure I am not full of anything at all, and still a little loopy from the meds.  It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t so bad…so if you need one get one.

• CoCo continues to pee on the potty.  Every time she starts to pee she starts giggling her little head off, I wish I thought it were that fun to pee!   Sadly I am not the only one blogging about pee and potty… The Good Lord Giveth and the Good Lord Taketh Away...

• It made my day to see some posts about reforms in the Ethiopian human trafficking baby selling market adoption industry.  Check them out:

AdoptionTalk

Voice of America

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Show Some Restraint

When Anastasia from Sweet Butter Bliss heard about the death of a Child due to restraint in a Texas Residential Treatment Center (RTC), she asked me to do a guest post for her blog on what it is like for the kid being restrained.  My gut reaction was “I still have a very hard time talking about that…"  (That must mean it is something I need talk about.)  So I agreed, and asked her for a trade.  I would do a guest post for her on being restrained (here) as a child and she would do one for me as someone who has to be willing to restrain a child as part of her job.  Here is what Anastasia has to say:  

I work at a Residential Treatment Center. An RTC for short. I work with kids who were either given up or taken from their homes. Sometimes it's because the parents did nothing wrong but they just can't handle the kid. But usually it's because the parents are asshats and the kid has been raised by said asshats and came out with any number of sociological and psychological  problems. And the asshats throw their hands up in the air and shipped them off .

If I think too hard about the treatment of some of these sad faces I get angry. And their is nothing I can do about it. I try to focus on the girls now and do what I can to get them to trust me and I try to make them laugh as often as possible. They haven't had enough laughter in their lives. Not to get all hippy on you here but I feel like their problems all stem from not getting enough love from day one. So I try and remember that when they are trying our patience. It's all attention seeking behavior. 

Recently a boy in a Texas RTC died from a restraint. He was basically smothered to death. According to the news story the boy was restrained by one person, in a closet and died from asphyxiation.  My first problem was why the fuck were they in a closet? Secondly one man restraints are frowned upon, they are unsafe for the child and the restrainer. And the smothering, it takes some time to smother someone to death. It's not like in the movies. The child would have gone limp after losing consciousness and the employee should have let go immediately and called 911.  Obviously there's no proof, but the employee would have had to continue to "restrain" (i.e. smother)  him for a while after he passed out for him to die. And if you dig further you find out that Texas Department of Child Safety already had this treatment center on probation. Because two other children had died during restraints, and the staff had made two developmentally disabled girls fist fight over a snack. You know what they're probation included? No new placements. What the fuck? Two children die and the staff manipulating mentally ill children. But they are still open? The government had a hand in this boys death. Period.

I'm sorry. I'm ranting. Where I work we only do restraint if the child is going to hurt themselves or someone else. And some kids we don't even do restraints, either they are too big and will hurt us, or because it traumatizes them more. It has to be a two person restraint and if the child goes limp we release immediately. We have constant classes on restraint reduction. Restraint is our very last resort. 

At the beginning of my shift I had to perform a short personal restraint. That just means I held their arm or hand to prevent them from hurting me or themselves. And I still feel bad about it. I feel like I violated her space and should have talked to her more. Every time I feel bad, during it and afterwards. It makes me sick to think of Sunday going through the things she went through. I want to hug her, but she probably has trust issues.  

These kids are put in a place that they are supposed to feel safe and have people they trust in their lives. And when the kids are abused, mistreated, neglected or manipulated they just retreat further into themselves and we wonder why they age out and go right back into the system as adults, or why their children end up in the system. I wish I had some call to action to give you, but their aren't any petitions to sign, or bills to get passed. These are the forgotten children. If you have them, just go hug and kiss your children and try really hard not to be an asshat while raising them.

STATS: 1988 to 1997 - 27 restraint deaths; 1998 to August 2006 - 48 restraint deaths; TOTAL RESTRAINT DEATHS TRACKED BY CAICA: 75

Photos from The Ann E. Casey Foundation

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Princess CoCo

I have been a very naughty blogger!  If I’m lucky I might get a little spanky, LOL.

I have been a slave to Princess CoCo of the Pee-Pot and her porcelain throne!

First we get MRI results, and then she commences to decide to finally learn to crawl (after walking) at almost 3 years old. Now this…

The other day she says “I have to go potty.”

“Oh yeah...I’ll be there in a minute”  

“No, RIGHT NOW” (yep she learned that phrase from me.  I end every statement to her 12 year-old sister with… “Right Now”)

Ok, I drop what I am doing and I kid you not, I put that kid on the potty and she pees!

About an hour latter she says “I have to pee” and again…she does.

Now I don’t know if this happens with anyone else’s kids but with mine it happens like clock work.  First comes the whining, irritated, and generally needy kid.  Then comes the emergence of regression in behavior, I was sure we were well beyond, me wanting to pull my hair out, and wondering WTF is going on with my poor kid.  Around the time I think I am about to lose my patience I think “This always happens before a break through, I wonder what developmental, emotional, or intellectual leap this kid is about to make.”

Now maybe that is just a mental game I play with myself to keep myself from setting my hair on fire and putting it out with a sledge hammer, or running away from home to join the circus (I have one hell of a high wire act), but it works.  I steel my resolve to get this kid over what ever whatever proverbial hump they are facing.

A good 2 or 3 days into childhood insanity, it happens…they walk, they crawl, say their first words, they get a back-walk-over on the high beam, they get an A on their algebra test.

I don’t know why this happens, but in my experience it always does.  Maybe the brain can only handle so much.  But in a few days I get my old kid back and I am glad I didn’t runaway, or bash my own head in.  

If you see me in the next few days it is safe to assume I will be wearing Princess CoCo of Piss-Pot on my hip, in the sling that I thought I had put away for good.  But her pants will be dry…so it’s all good.

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Will You Wednesday: Children Aren't Puppies (revisited)

She is right, there really are NO words!   Will You Wednesday: Children Aren't Puppies (revisited)

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Lesson Learned

The other day I was talking to my mother about one of my posts, and we got on the subject of one of my biggest pet peeves in the adoption (foster care) world…

“Your mommy loved you so much she gave you away…”

“The most loving thing a mother can do for a child is to give them away…”

(Every time some one says or writes such nonsense it truly pisses me off.  Let me tell you as the one on the giving away end it doesn’t feel very loving at all.  It feels like awful, overwhelming rejection!  It doesn’t look loving on the receiving end either it looks selfish.)

It is funny sometimes I can "get" and understand my mother’s adoption issues, and I can get my foster care experiences, and I know that a lot of her pain and inability to parent come from the pain and chaos of her childhood.  Sometimes I don’t always connect the dots.

As we were talking about the fallacy of “the most loving thing a mother can do for her child is to give them away”, and what I crock we both thought that was, that I said “How many times were you told that growing up?  No wonder you kept trying to get rid of us and dropping me off all over creation, that is what loving mothers do after all.”  I was kind of laughing, because I was over come with the absurdity of it.  I don’t think my mother thought it was so funny, but what are you gonna do, it can’t be changed now?

You never know which of the lessons you teach your children are going to take hold, or how.  So keep right on saying that “the most loving thing a mother can do is give her children away”, especially if you are looking forward to raising you grandchildren too.

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At Least she's Got A Pot To......

CoCo is a good Momma

I think Mad’s cough is finely calming down a bit.  She started antagonizing her little sisters yesterday so I packed her up some cough drops, gave her some codeine and dropped her 12 year-old butt off at the bus stop…hey at least I waited for the bus to get there before I gave her the boot!  (All day I was waiting for a call and lecture from the school…something like ‘WTF were you thinking sending her here with the plague’ but alas, they kept her.  –Thank God!)

The first blog I ever read was this post Cerebral Palsy Baby in January 2009, just after bringing CoCo home from a 3 day stay at the hospital for what they called a febrile seizure.  In my heart I knew what the deal was after reading some of Shannon’s posts, but she gave me a real sense of comfort.

Which brings me to…drum roll, please – CoCo peed on the pot today!  (Not that I’m too hopeful, but she said she had to go.)  Along with all of the other stuff I was reading about CP, even Mild Cerebral Palsy and or Global Dyspraxia, I had read that potty training could be challenging because of the lack of motor control.  I have never pushed it much because I feel like kids let you know when they are ready (18 & 20 months for my other ones) at 33 months I haven’t really had the impression that CoCo was any where near ready.  Besides if you saw the video of her crawling, you may have noticed she is very unsteady, it would only take one glance down at her shoes and she could do a nice gainer right off the pot face first.  And goodness knows I spend enough time in the ER as it is! 

Amélie has decided she doesn’t want to live with me anymore; I am the meanest mommy ever!  I asked her who was gonna fix her bowls ice cream, PB&J, and go get her juice for her?  She said “MAD!  You can go and we’ll stay here!”  I think she forgot that even the meanest mommy in the world is nicer than her Big Sister.

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What's Not To Suck?

I got a comment today that said “I’m sorry your experience sucked”; I thought it was cute and sweet.

…But, for me it was not the foster care experience that sucked, it was the fact that I was there at all was that sucked.

Not that I am saying it was like going to a 7 year sleep away camp filled with fun activities…oh, maybe it was JUST like a 7 year sleep away camp.  And the best thing about it for my parents it was FREE.  Good thing they wised up and learned how to use the system between the years they sent my sister to boarding school and me to foster care.  Imagine all the extras they were able to afford for them selves with all of the boarding school tuition they saved.  

I am very grateful to all of my non-parents and the influence they had on me, most of whom were amazing selfless people, and I credit those strangers for who I am today. 

So, I didn’t have a bad foster care experience –being in foster care IS a bad experience. 

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What about U.S.?

Another illuminating post by Malinda AdoptionTalk: "Get out of my way, I'm entitled to adopt!"

"Those 100,000+ foster kids are waiting for ya'll to get as excited about adopting them as ya'll are about protecting your rights to adopt ANYONE but them!

Um, yeah, as an American Foster Care Alumni, I definitely would have preferred my life in foster care over being shipped out of my country, no matter how much junk my new family could have bought me or how much they loved me. I'm so glad you asked since US foster kids seem to be the last thing on the majority of perspective adoptive parents minds!"

"Another thought: I wonder if the 100,000+ children eligible for adoption in the American foster care system would recommend permanent foster care as preferable to adoption."
a commenter asked",

I said:

...On the other hand maybe the Swiss would be willing to take some of our foster kids, since they seem to be the last thing on the minds of most of the Perspective Adoptive Parents, here in the U.S.

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I Owe You Nothing

“I owe you nothing!  …You did what you were supposed to do!”  I love this scene from guess who’s coming to dinner, I can so totally relate.  Except for that in my case my parents DID NOT do what they were supposed to do, but expect the gratitude any way.  Oh, well...

I am catching up on some reading, I thought this was an interesting post Adopted children as emotional assets by O Solo Mama

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Good Bye National Adoption Awareness Month

This has been one long month!

I had no idea going into National Adoption Awareness Month that it was going to be so looong!  Race, religion, genocide, human trafficking, pre-birth matching, pass out cards, 40% off clearance sales, Hague Convention, zealots…

The message I would like to get out is that there are 1400,000 kids in the foster care system that need permanent homes.  They need support, time, honesty and respect. 

All kids come with some issues, but the ones foster kids come with are no more insurmountable than their international counterparts and apparently more attractive competition by any means.   

I have read a lot of great posts this month and I would like to thank al of my readers and my fellow post a day bloggers:

The Daily Bastardette

Real Daughter

The Declassified Adoptee

Once Was Von

The Adopted Ones

AdoptionTalk

I don’t think I could have done it with out you!

If I left you off please let me know, I am running on fumes.

(I swear my oldest has whooping cough, neither of us has slept in days, but after hours in urgent care prescriptions for antibiotics and cough syrup with codeine, I am hopeful tonight will be better for both of us.)




* This post is a part of my National Adoption Awareness Month, a post every day in November campaign, to remind perspective adoptive parents that there are 140,000 kids for whom family preservation is not an option, who through no fault of their own are currently available for adoption in the U. S. foster care system, right here in our own back yard.  If you are considering adoption please consider adopting a foster child or becoming a foster parent.  It could change a child’s life.

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What in God's Name?

So how is it that well meaning people get it so twisted up? 

We have private adoption agencies offering up black children for adoption at a 40% discount, or as commenter Maryann pointed out 3/5 of the value of white children. (Anyone remember that from your High School History Class?).    

We apparently have some people who feel like they are “forced” to adopt internationally because they can’t afford a domestic white child and do not want to adopt a lower cost black child.

Some believe and I fear that what we have are some “racists” adopting cheaper black children.”

It has been my observation that people who hold racist beliefs do not view themselves as racist.    I absolutely think it is possible that white people who have racist views would adopt children of color, and believe that they are doing a wonderful thing in the process. 

When I clicked on the link to the Judge Judy commenter’s blog, I found that this infinitely wise and spiritual avid Judge Judy watcher is in the process of raising the “ransom” to pay for her yet unborn female infant who is apparently residing in some other woman’s uterus in Ethiopia.  She says this unborn child is already hers, because god has predestined it:

“This child belongs to no one. And she is female. She has no power. Any intellect and ambition that may be etched in her soul and personality would be cast aside in the daily struggle to survive. If she survives at all in a land of desperate statistics. We, by contrast, have all the power in the world. We're educated, we're healthy, we're wealthy, we're well connected. There is little we could not accomplish, if we chose to do so.”

“Somewhere there is a woman who is pregnant with a girl. The woman will make a great sacrifice to give her life - either by her own death, or by handing the child who has kicked her womb for months to strangers with a desperate plea for them to care for her. The sacrifice will not be easy. The sacrifice will be costly.”

 “We will give her our name so that all the world will know that she belongs to us and is a rightful heir to all of the riches we possess. We will ask her to call us Daddy and Momma and we will always answer her when she does. Then we will bring our child back to our life and our family and our home and our hearts and she will be an orphan no more.”

 ~ Missy At it’s Almost Nap Time

When I read these statements, I do not see “god’s love”, I do not see the beauty of charity or benevolence, as I am sure the author wholeheartedly does.

What I see is the images in my Jr. High Humanities book, my High School Black History book, clips from Roots flash through my head, I recall passages of The Autobiography of Malcolm X .  I am sorry, I do not see beauty.

I see an image of my Mother’s father in a bar trying to sell her to payoff a gambling debt, I story I was told so long ago, that I do not ever remember not knowing it. 

I see the British colonization of India, the Dutch colonization of South Africa;   I see The Trail of Tears, I see a long history of “Christian Missionaries” taming savages contingent on the acceptance of their god and their ways.  I see human trafficking.  I see the slave trade.   

I see an Ethiopian mother facing the choice of selling her daughter to ‘wealthy, powerful, connected Americans who could accomplish just about anything they choose’ to provide for her family. 

These saved, 'orphaned', bought children will grow up and go to your church and you will teach them about Moses the original so called Angry Adoptee, to your schools and learn about slaves like Nat Turner (He thought he was following god's plan too.), check out books from the library, will read poems by Langston Hughes, hear quotes by Malcolm X, see clips from Roots and they will see what I see.  They will not be grateful to be stolen from their land, their home, which you call hell, they will not be grateful for their stolen names, they will not be grateful for their stolen religion, they will not be grateful for their stolen culture.

They will learn math and they will see that with all of your wealth you chose to destroy their family, so that you could ‘ransom’ them and make them ‘your own’ rather than save their brothers, sisters and Mothers.  They will calculate that with the cost of a $1,600 plane fare to rescue your ‘ransomed’ infant from their rightful place on earth you could have provided for their entire natural family for 8 years.  They will calculate that the tens of thousands of dollars you paid for their ‘ransom’ could have feed their entire village and provided the women with free birth control for a decade.   They will not see your act as charity; they will learn to see it as it is, commerce, arrogance and American greed.

These bought children will grow to read, calculate and think for themselves.  They will come to have their own vision of the truth and they will not see their desperate mothers and countrymen as their captors from which they needed to be ‘ransomed’.  They will reserve that judgment for you. 

And they will be ANGRY.

No, I do not see the face of Jesus in the buying and selling of children. 

There are 140,000 kids who through no fault of their own are currently available for adoption in the foster care system, right here in our own back yard.  (No 'ramsom' required)




* This post is a part of my National Adoption Awareness Month, a post every day in November campaign, to remind perspective adoptive parents that there are 140,000 kids for whom family preservation is not an option, who through no fault of their own are currently available for adoption in the U. S. foster care system, right here in our own back yard.  If you are considering adoption please consider adopting a foster child or becoming a foster parent.  It could change a child’s life.

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Q & A Gym Mom to Gym Mom / Coach

This was a great question I got from one of my readers, it could have been written by me 10 years ago!  I decided to reprint it (with permission) because I think so many of us as parents have been in this spot ourselves.

Thanks for the great question.  

Hi !

Here is my situation.  L is my gymnast.  Always has been very good motor skills, very, very physical and utterly fearless. She tried gymnastics starting last spring.  It was a class where the parent was the spotter, which made me more relaxed.  It also meant I could help her to remain focused.  I didn't really have to say much to do that, but I think my just being there did.  This fall they decided to move her up to a new level because she is ability wise beyond that class she was in.  but this has meant a new coach and parents are not on the floor. The new coach has a much quieter personality and L is not as engaged.  Also the sequences that they are supposed to remember are long and seem to be more than I would reasonably expect a 3 year old to retain.  Ex:  crawl through the tunnel to the incline, do a straddle roll, run to the tumble track, jump on each of the dots, forward roll into the ball pit, slide out.  She seems unable to remember the sequence so she might do tunnel, skip the straddle, jump the track and go down the slide.  Also they are working on their own and not spotted until they get to the beam or the Uneven Bars.  Also the warm up routine varies weekly in this class and L definitely craves routine. She had the warm-up down cold in her old class and this one keeps changing up. Do you think it would be pushy to bring these concerns to the owner (who was also L's former coach?)  I know that her present coach is new to the gym and I don't want to cause any problems but I want my daughter to be safe and confident.

Thanks and sorry for being so long winded! :-)  L

Hi L,

I love your email!  I guess first things first:  pre-school gymnastics always looks a lot like herding cats to me no matter who is coaching!  It is never as chaotic in reality as it LOOKS.  Both of my older daughters have done pre-school classes, I coach kids 6 and older.  

The first think I would do is to ask the new coach if you could talk to her privately, (away from the other parents) after class, and explain your concerns in terms of your daughters age possibly being an issue.  Not that that is the whole picture but people (coaches) are more receptive to “helping” your child than feeling like you are criticizing them and their job.  Being new her coach may just be trying to find her groove.

“L seems to be having a problem remembering what she is supposed to be doing in the circuit, and in warm-ups. I am wondering how we can help her with that.”  

Maybe your daughter can be put between two older kids who she can watch for reminders, which is something I tell my gymnasts to do, watch the person in front of you for clues and if I have kids with attention problems I put them behind a kid I know will remember the instructions.  Our warm ups and conditioning are always the same, and after about the second week I start asking the kids “what do we do next?”  Sometimes I have kids who have a hard time paying attention or tend to slack be my leaders and demonstrators that added incentive can bring miraculous results.

If after your chat you do not see any changes, I would absolutely talk to the gym owner.  Don’t ever let the fear of being labeled a “Pushy Gym Mom” keep you from advocating (respectfully) for your child.   We are all labeled that from the moment we submit payment for the class!  ; )

 I hope this helps!  Please keep me posted.

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Race, Religion, Foster Care, Adoption, and Cultural Genocide 2



The way I understand the evolution of lower adoption fees for black children is that initially it was meant to encourage black families to adopt black child with the assumption that adoption fees were prohibitive for blacks.  Some may find that racist and offensive with in it’s self.



My experience tells me that there is more “adoption”, foster care, and kinship care going on in the black community informally than the record may show.  As the same (black) family that took me in and “adopted” me as a teen and young adult had also taken in and raised a boy from down the street.  A good friend of mine lived with a woman for 7 years and was never formerly in the system.  One of my “nieces” is now raising a child of an acquaintance, with out intervention from out side.  The assumption that the black community dose not adopt or take care of their own, would be unfair and inaccurate.  I also believe a long standing mistrust of government agents and the disturbing thought of paying for another human being could well explain the hesitancy of some black families to adopt formally.  



Going back to Malinda’s post at ADOPTIONTALK on Race-Based Adoption Fees, I assume she posted it and I was reading it from the perspective of how sad it is that our society thinks some humans are more valuable than others, and that it is outrageous!  But of course that is how I would take it, I was reading it from the perspective of the child.  



To some Perspective Adoptive Parents (PAPs), the outrage in the fee differences is not that it is offensive that some children are valued more than others, but that the children THEY value cost more to adopt and that is unfair to them, the PAPs.  Forcing some PAPs to chose international adoption instead, settling for their second choice in child styles, rather than settling for their 3 choice (a black child).  What ever the case when money is an object to PAPs and they chose to settle for the Ford Focus of children when they really wanted the Cadillac instead, well, it can’t be good for that poor kid to be raised by people who settled for them.    

It was this statement in one of the comments that made me shudder:



Anonymous said...  - “The people who complain most about this issue in my experience are white couples who are less wealthy then the average OR have "money issues" either real or psychological. Some will even tell you they resent that it forces them to adopt a child of color instead. So you have racists adopting children of color as a result.”

How scary is that thought?    

In my opinion no child should ever have to be raised by parents who didn’t really want them, let alone be adopted by them.

 

Fostering and adoption are not for everyone.  It is hard and sometimes thankless work, as all parenting situations can be.  But in the case of raising other people’s children, they come to you wounded and grieving for their natural families on some level, no matter how impossible that family situation may have been for them.  And it is going to take a whole lot more than love and Jesus alone to get them through.  

  

I see some trans-racial /trans-cultural adoptive parents I respect who seem aware of their added responsibilities they have to their children.  Some I have seen out here in blog-land as well in the real world seem generally clueless.

Some PAPs are just utterly clueless.  This was part of a comment that made my blood boil, left by a PAP on a post about whether their was coercion in adoption.

“I know that sometimes a birthmother can absolutely parent and do a wonderful job. And maybe I am just jaded. But as a court appointed child advocate who saw more heartbreaking cases than I care to remember, someone who has seen personally the devastation of children raised by women who were not ready to parent, and just a person who watches society, and hey, an avid Judge Judy watcher where 90% of the cases are a woman with 3 kids by 2-3 different dads suing one of their fathers for the rims she bought for his car or something similar, I very, very rarely see the moms who have a deadbeat boyfriend, little to know support, and no education who do it well. I know they are out there. But it is my opinion that they are not in the majority.”

 And then she says this:

“However. We have a CRISIS of children in poverty in this country. We have a CRISIS of child abuse and it is almost always the mother's boyfriend who is torturing her child. We have a CRISIS in our foster care system. We have a CRISIS of drug addicted babies. We have CRISIS of out of wedlock births which statistics prove is always the primary precursor to child abuse, poverty, dropouts, and repeating the cycle of out of wedlock, ie, unfathered, children. And all of these children were born to women who thought parenting their child was the right choice. I beg to differ."

First things first, if one wants to be viewed as having a valid opinion about society, or a segment of society maybe sighting “Judge Judy” a TV SHOW, as a source of your information isn’t they way to go.  TV shows are not real, dear, they are not a fair and accurate representation of anything other than what some programming director thinks people like you will find entertaining.  They are playing on your need to feel superior, and it is safe to say they have you pegged.

Apparently this PAP thinks “Poverty”, you know…the kind you see on Judge Judy.  American style “poverty” warrants putting ones children up for adoption.

Out of wedlock births…adoption!  If an unwed poor mother doesn’t love her children enough to put them up for adoption, those children just may be poor, drop out of high school and get pregnant.  According to this woman’s standard half of my friends should have relinquished at least one child to adoption, but none of those friend’s children experienced any of her dire predictions.  As a matter of fact most the children of my single mother friends are now in college.  Further more,  if we were to follow her guidelines as a society for what would warrant relinquishment there would be a CRISIS of a whole shit load of kids languishing in the foster care system waiting for some “good Christians” like her to save them.  

Maybe a better choice is to provide low income teens and women free birth control.

Don’t fret ya’ll, this crazy cracker isn’t going to adopt an African-American.   No, she is going to adopt a yet unborn female "orphan" from Ethiopia!

More on Religion and Cultural Genocide later.

 

 

* This post is a part of my National Adoption Awareness Month, a post every day in November campaign, to remind perspective adoptive parents that there are 140,000 kids for whom family preservation is not an option, who through no fault of their own are currently available for adoption in the U. S. foster care system, right here in our own back yard.  If you are considering adoption please consider adopting a foster child or becoming a foster parent.  It could change a child’s life.

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