Continued from here ...

I was thinking it would sound strange to Jan that the crisis pregnancies of my teen years figured very little in my negative reactions to what I was perceiving as slights from the birth mom brigade, but now that I'm writing it down ... and having a much better grip on what's the same and what's different ... it seems likely that it will make sense to her that this is the case. After all, my bio kids are just my kids, and even with all the baggage that goes hand in glove with being a mom for thirty-seven years, for better and for worse, the load I carry is light in comparison to a burden of regret. I've not been questioned time and again, by myself and others, about motives, nor have I had to explain or justify my decision to parent. I just did, and now those kids are grown people with lives and loves and a child. I'm a mother and a grandmother with no quibbling over titles and no doubt over who gets the blame or the glory.

This is not to say that I don't trot out those tough years when my kids were small and I was on my own when birth moms are slapping adoptive moms upside the head with a sack full of guilt laced with tales of how hard it was for them while they were marrying their college sweetheart, going to grad school and hitching across India during their gap year. The element of "you made your bed, etc..." is a reflex. Like Goldilocks, I'm beginning to understand how different one bed can be from another.

So, the fact that I was pregnant at seventeen, pressured with the prospects of both a back-alley abortion and a home for unwed mothers, but chose to parent neither softens nor hardens my take on birth moms. It's very close to being irrelevant. It's the adoptive mom I am that feels the sting.

As an adoptive mom, it sometimes seems that unless we're sporting bruises and spend a whole heck of a lot of time apologizing, we're prime targets for every birth mom and adult adoptee with a grudge. There are entire web groups dedicated to trashing adoptive parents, and legions of anti-adoption supporters calling us names and laying every personal failure at our feet.

Forums, groups and blogs can come together in your head and begin to sound like one big dis-the-A-parent-fest. After a while, it gets to you. Well, it got to me.

Why?

On one level, I was insulted and annoyed. The more important factor, though? Fear. Fear of seeing programs close down. Fear of children languishing in under-staffed institutions, under-developed countries, under-supervised families. Fear of my own children being made to feel somehow less mine by people reducing my status as a mother by attacking adoption ... of undermining my position through efforts to elevate another's.

If a birth mom is also a child's biological mother, first mom, natural mother and real mom, what does that make moms like me? Seconds? A-moms, APs, apes, unnatural, or something else less?

With the tiny sliver of view I now have through Jan's eyes, I am aware that birth moms, after already having given ... and given up ... so much, worry that it's their rightful position always under threat of being undermined. From that side of the canyon, it's adoptive moms with the power and influence ... perhaps even the popular moral mandate.

Where adoptive moms often feel birth moms sitting in judgment, I can appreciate now that the situation feels exactly the same on the other side. And prospective adoptive parents who feel powerless in the process of bringing a child into their family can appear from the vantage point of birth mothers to be holding all the cards.

I really don't know why it took me getting a hiding from my fellow blogger to catch on to the fact that the grass is always greener over yonder, but it did. Honestly, it never occurred to me that birth parents could see themselves as the weaker of the parent species, and adopt the aggressive stance that puts so many adoptive parents' backs up as a defensive posture.

Continued ...