adoptive parents
- PEAR Announces the Formation of its Education Project-
Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR) announces it's new initiative to develop a model education program for adoptive parents. We believe that all parents should receive a comprehensive and realistic education prior to adopting. PEAR also feels many parents come to adoption inadequately prepared for the challenges of adoption. We hope to create a parent friendly HONEST education program that will give parents what they need and want in order to assist them in this amazing but often taxing journey.
As part of this initiative, PEAR will be collecting the thoughts, opinions and experiences of current adoptive and prospective adoptive parents. We have created a Yahoo group to help facilitate the easy collection of this information: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PEAR-ED.
If you wish to contribute, but do not wish to join a yahoo group, you may submit your input directly to PEAR at reform @ pear-now.org. After collecting information, resources, and adoption community opinions, the PEAR-ED project intends to create a model education program for use by adoption agencies and prospective adoptive parents.
- Please tell us what you think was helpful or useful about your adoption preparation, what was bad, what could have been better, what you would like to have read, experienced or participated in.
- Tell us what articles, books, educational materials or programs were best for you and why.
- Tell us what is needed to prepare parents for the journey of adoption.
- Review any existing programs you have participated in.
We invite you to contribute your own writings and opinions and lists of information. (for large articles, please contact the list management via PEAR-ED-owner @ yahoogroups.com) We invite you to REFER us to the work of others you feel are useful - please do not copy and paste the work of others due to coppyright issues.
PLEASE DO NOT CONTRIBUTE UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO HAVE YOUR WORDS AND WRITINGS PUBLISHED at a later date as part of this project. You may contribute anonymously. Please list your name at the top of your article/list/information *if* you would like to be credited. All materials contributed are deemed to be freely distributable by PEAR-ED.
- The Spirit of Open Adoption
- b-mother-
I didn't expect to like this book. There's something about the slightly precious use of the term "b-mother" in the title and the tiny infant one-piece pictured on the cover that made me think this might be a novel that wrapped up all of its' endings into a tidy bundle of happy birthmother/happy adoptive family.
But Maureen O'Brien surprised me. The novel begins as Hillary Birdsong heads to a clinic for a pregnancy test, and unfolds over the course of several decades as she relinquishes her son Tom, graduates from high school and then college, and builds a life for herself in a tiny seaside town in Maine. Though she chose Tom's adoptive parents, and they write to her once a year with news of her son, she is not permitted to contact him or them until he turns 18.
The writing gets off to a clunky start, and the early parts of the book feel a little strained, but O'Brien eventually hits her stride and writes compellingly - and believably - about Hillary's experiences. When her friend at the maternity home gives birth and then bolts without signing papers, consigning her daughter to foster care, you understand why it was easier for her to do that than to put pen to paper and make it real. When another friend at the home gives birth and announces "I made them happy. I really am quite brave," Hillary thinks to herself: "she's like a baby doll. Pull her string and watch her go."
As she gets older, Hillary's desperate need for letters and news about Tom and her total inability to contact him or his parents begins to feel absolutely paralyzing. She loves Tom's adoptive mom, and this is a bit of a balm to the reader, and to Hillary herself, knowing that her son is being raised by the mother that she wanted for him. But she's not drinking the adoption Kool-Aid - her relationship with her own mother dwindles to almost nothing for many years after the relinquishment, and she is aware that she is not interested in intimate relationships because the relationship she wants most is one she cannot have. Even as she builds a life for herself in Maine, she is painfully aware that she's in a holding pattern that won't end until she is able to have contact with her son. When, 18 years after she relinquishes Tom, her father refers to him as "Small Fry," it becomes suddenly obvious how Hillary's parents - who pressured their daughter to relinquish Tom - have been impacted by the loss of their grandson in ways they have never been willing (or able) to talk about.
The novel is moving and the characters are complex and believable. The ending is not a surprise, but it's satisfying all the same. The book is insightful and the writing beautifully illustrates one woman's experience in living with tremendous loss. It's well worth a read.
- Openness in International Adoptions-
There's a great, great article in this month's Mother Jones by Elizabeth Larsen titled, "Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption". I encourage you all to read it; it's a terrific piece. An excerpt from the article:
Is it ethical for an adoptive parent to push for information about her child's birth family? Or should that be a decision left to the adoptee? And what about the birth family's right to privacy? "You can't compare an open adoption in the U.S. with an open adoption process internationally," says Susan Soon keum Cox, vice president of public policy at Holt International, an Oregon adoption agency whose founders launched transnational adoptions in the United States. The child of a Korean woman and a British soldier, Cox, who was adopted in 1956, found her Korean half brothers when she was an adult. Yet she cautions against too-hasty birth family searches. "The stigma of adoption in many countries is still very powerful and very real. Women place their children for adoption and slip back into society. It's a very different thing than the acceptance of single parents and adoption in the U.S." In China, currently the greatest source of transnational adoptees—6,493 U.S. "orphan" visas were issued to Chinese adoptees in 2006—relinquishing a child is illegal, and families sometimes abandon their children to avoid running afoul of the one-child policy; birth mothers found to have done this can face prosecution.
...
Openness, Smolin notes, would also make it harder for parents to think of adoptions as "rescuing" children. "There are cultural reasons why people give up children for adoption," he says. "But when you have a situation where money alone, in relatively small quantities, would allow the birth family to keep the child—under current law you are allowed to take the child and spend $30,000 when $200 would be enough to avoid the relinquishment." - Allison's Guilty Plea-
Today, Allison Quets pled guilty to international kidnapping. In case you can't place her, she was the 49-year-old mother who had placed twins (conceived intentionally, through in-vitro) then took them to Canada over Christmas-- without their adopting parents' consent.
- An unspeakable tragedy-
In Texas last week, the media carried far and wide the kind of story that makes all of us in the adoption community shudder and cringe.
A licensed vocational nurse with five biological kids was convicted in Corpus Christi, for murdering a four-year-old child she and her husband were preparing to adopt through CPS (by way of Spaulding).
- What about S-
For the first time in a very long time, just the other day, School Girl asked about her birthfather.
- Girls in Trouble-
Having just finished the book for the second time, I'm more aware of both the good points and bad points presented in fictional format.
- One door open, one door closed-
I've been thinking about writing this off and on. I have another blog, but I've stopped writing about our adoption there altogether. Some of it is to protect my daughter's privacy, and some of it...is why I'm writing this post.
