I'm going to post all these together and let Jan have a chance to jump in.

This is the last of the email conversation I've been writing about in my last 2 posts.

There were points where Jan and I agreed, and I could feel myself beginning to feel something familiar coming from the opposite side of the chasm, but I was still really pushy with my points. (Me ... pushy! ... go figure.)

If you want to pinpoint focus on adoptions that go wrong, that's the thin end of the abuse wedge, with the big numbers always falling in the bio camp. You call it a crap shoot, but there are certainly fewer requirements to make a baby than there are to adopt one.

There is an entire population of adoptive moms whose daily lives are dedicated to attachment issues, post-traumatic stress, FAE, FAS, lifelong effects of poor prenatal nutrition, and on and on. They seem to get little credit from the birth mom contingent, but rather seem to get lumped into the grasping, spoiled deputation along with all the others who spend their lives loving and caring for kids some would have never think of them as 'real'.

It was looking like a dialog could develop, and Jan's questions gave me a picture of just how different the adoption world looked from her angle. I hoped to give her the same look from my side ...

We come at this from opposite sides of a fence, it appears, and although our pasts are similar, our choices continue to cause friction. Do I think birth parents took the easy way out? Am I angry because they should have been stronger? No. Neither has been an issue since the day a birth mom relinquishes.

Do you resent adoptive moms because they're raising children not born to them? Do the joys of our parenting accentuate your loss? Are you angry at us for being here to take the children in the first place? Is it our fault children are adopted, being that if we didn't exist adoption would not be an option, and therefore regretted choices would not have been made?

Perhaps I over-react. Sure wouldn't be the first time. But what I perceive as a building anti-adoption climate frightens me...not on my behalf or that of other families who'd like to add children, but for the children whose options are already pretty darned scarce. Emma Nicholson, all by her lonesome, has sentenced thousands of kids to life in institutions and early death. Adult adoptees who feel that anyone is better off dead than adopted present to me the classic definition of sour grapes. Birth moms who rankle at any adoptive mom title that may point to what has ended up being the reality for their child chip away at a relationship that is often the only chance a child has.

Yes, I get testy, but I'm afraid. Pendulum swings, unchecked, can cause havoc, and there are too many children in the world at stake to keep my eyes closed and my mouth shut in fear of offending someone presently at the top of the hit parade.

At this point in our 'conversation' there wasn't any trust between us, and although I think we were both beginning to catch a glimpse of the opposite bank, neither had any intention of jumping in without being firmly tethered to something that would hold us on familiar ground.

We both blog in a place where our personal perspective is supposed to be our agenda. You do it well. Your posts sometimes grate, not from any resonance they create, but rather the opposite. Before I decided to chalk your whole blog up to something irrelevant I need not spend time with, I wanted to see if there is a bridge between my place and yours. Perhaps, there's already too much water under it.

Is this sounding like something you felt, too, Jan?

To be continued ...