It’s Not The Same

From personal experience, I believe the biology matters more than the genetics. The bonding that occurs when a baby grows in the mother’s womb, is kept close to her after emerging in birth and nurses at her breast for an extended number of months. The love I experienced at the moment of each of my three children’s birth was instantaneous and overwhelming. Unmistakable.

Certainly, children are usually easy to love. The innocence and purity of their new lives unsullied by the travails of life’s circumstances.

An adopted child is never really “yours”. That is a mistaken concept. An adopted child is one you care for and in the best circumstances care for equally as you would care for a child that issued forth from your body but what is lost is not replaceable.

You may not love your adopted child “less” than biological children if these are also present in your home but the quality of love is different, it is not the same.

Most adoptive parents are afraid to admit this truth because they’re afraid people will judge them and think it means they love their adoptive kids less. Deep down they know it’s not the same at all. They are lying to themselves to keep up the farce. It will never be the same love. It can’t be. And they can’t deal with admitting that.

Love ebbs and flows in all loving relationships, even between parents and biological children. You never stop loving your children. My mom struggled with the challenges of my youngest sister all their lives. My sister believed, even after our mom had died, that our mom hated her. I know that is not the truth. However, from my perspective on the outside witnessing, my mom didn’t accept my sister was the way she is. My mom was always trying to make her what my mom would have preferred her to be like. That was the source of the tension and conflict between them. But love – I definitely know my mom did not stop loving my sister.

The connection between a biological mother and the child she gestates is different than adopting a child who’s life began elsewhere. In truth, it has nothing to do with loving them or not. It has everything to do with hormones and biology.

So, biology does matter. It doesn’t mean an adoptive parent will treat their adopted children differently, or love them less but it’s not the same because biology does matter. You will never have the same relationship with your adopted children, that you have with your biological children. That’s the effect that biology has. The bond is special and it simply can’t be recreated through adoption.

Lying About The Family Relationship

It is hard to believe but it happens. Siblings will be raised in proximity to one another without knowing they are siblings.

In one such story, an adoptive parent had her child spending time with that child’s biological siblings who had been adopted by another family member but these children are not informed that they are siblings.

In another story, though not related to an adoption – a woman grew up playing with her sister as a child but not knowing that she was related to her. That reality was kept from her.

She goes on to share – “the anger and resentment I have toward my dad and her mom for trying to keep us apart for literally no reason than their own selfishness. I had to sneak and lie and use the pay phone at school to call her and pretend to be a friend of a friend to be able to talk to her to start building our relationship. I was 14 and she was 11. We are each other’s only sisters.”

These LIES bring anger and trauma when the truth finally comes out and in these modern times, it is easier than ever for that eventuality to occur. It really is hard imagine what these children will feel one day, knowing their parents had them play together as cousins, when they were really siblings.

Some adoptive parents take the perspective that they are the legitimate parent now, and the other kinship parents involved are the other kids parents now. They will each parent them the way they want. My parents were both adopted and I know that my dad’s way of coping with all of his unknowns was to sever any attachment to the original parents. As far as he was concerned, once adopted, you no longer belong to the original family. I have never agreed with his opinion about that but maybe it simply made things easier for him as two of his grandchildren (one with each of my two sisters) were surrendered to adoption. Hard to believe but true.

Those of us who understand with better clarity must keep planting seeds of awareness …. and keep trying …. and continue educating.

Attacked Once Again

This always feels personal to me because my sons have ALWAYS been educated at home. Mostly we have tried to fly under the radar so that we can continue to do what we believe is best for our own family. It came to pass that my daughter became frustrated with the school options for my granddaughter in Florida and chose to avail herself of their virtual school offer. She has since acknowledged that she understands the appeal of control and flexibility that homeschooling offers. I would be the first to acknowledge that it is not for everyone. If the parents have to go to work outside their home (we have a home-based business), then it is going to be a real challenge to implement.

One of the more disturbing aspects of educating my children at home has been when a case of child abuse becomes linked to the fact that the parents hid behind homeschooling in order to hide their abuse. This often brings calls from those who’s attachment is to public schooling for more oversight and regulation of those of us who have made a personal choice. I am fortunate that the state of Missouri has good supports for homeschooling choice due to a large population of conservative Christians. I am grateful to them though we are not homeschooling for the same reasons they do.

So today, I read yet again an allegation that everyone dislikes homeschooling because it is a front for abuse as the Coronavirus has forced schools to close and children to stay at home.

Can it really be true that abusers have to wait for an official sanction of homeschooling to cover their abuse of their children ? Or that many people homeschool simply so that they can abuse their children ?

More than once, I have encountered arguments for the advantages of school as required for the socialization of children. It is not the blind leading the blind (children of a single age group influencing their peers to bad behavior) for my sons. They have been socialized to the entire spectrum of humanity – from babies to the elderly. We have often been complimented about how well behaved they are in places where some parents’ children are running around like wild heathens.

In this time of Coronavirus, maybe it isn’t so much about socializing as it is that parents are stressed from being home all day cooped up with their children. We have always valued every single minute of time that we spend with our sons.

One could ask whether schools in the US just “holding cells” for the dependents of people who have to work or so that they can have their days off free to do as they please, until their children are released to come home from school ?

As long as society is so “intertwined” with our government that people become upset that those who chose to do so can school their own children or judge those that do as doing so to hide abuse or that well intentioned people must protect other people’s children from being schooled at home, nothing will ever change for the better in a society of free people.

You Can Just Adopt

The world already has enough people. More and more, deciding to remain childless is an option people are choosing deliberately. My husband and I don’t even know whether our sons will ever marry and/or have any children. There will never be pressure from us in that regard.

The decision to have children occurs within a pronatalist social context. When I was a senior in high school in 1972, I knew I was going to continue getting advanced education, work full time, get married and have children. No wonder I failed. Some women may excel at the SuperWoman effort but I did not. I never got a degree, I ended up divorced and financially unable to provide for my child. But I have had to work at some kind of revenue producing effort all of my life.

Why do those that cannot have their own children think that domestic infant adoption is another way to build their family? I suppose because it has been promoted as a good thing and socially acceptable for decades now – at least as far back as the 1930s.

Our culture views parenting as an essential part of achieving fulfillment, happiness, and meaning in life, and as a marker of successful adulthood. When my husband told me that he wanted to be a father afterall (after 10 years of being grateful I had been there and done that and no pressure on him), I was a bit shocked and it was not an easy path for us. I am still grateful medical science had a way to make it possible, even if it involved some non-traditional sacrifice on my part. Having children did deepen and expand upon our relationship as a couple, making us a family. As we are aging without any other family nearby, we are grateful our children may be there for us.

Remaining childless by choice (AKA childfree) is still an outlying path, a move that raises questions and is met with prejudice and even moral outrage. This is particularly true for women, whose gender identity and social value have long been tied to fertility and motherhood. Thus, women who decide to not have children are commonly viewed unfavorably.

Though I now see the problems and emotional fallout of adopting children, I also do recognize that a mature person can love any child genuinely. It is not necessarily a selfish motive or ego stoking decision. Children are easy to love for most well balanced and emotionally healthy persons. Sadly, there are people who are not that and should not have children. Personally, I respect any mature person who knows themselves well enough to know they shouldn’t take on the responsibility of raising a child. There should be no negative perceptions from anyone else towards those who make such a choice.

Parenting And Maturity

I’ve been known to say that I think Nature got it wrong to make us so fertile in youth and have that period of reproduction end so early in life. True, the body ages and there are impacts to that.

Yet, I find that men who are ready to become parents do a better job. Even when we are ready, as I was at 18, we may not really be mature enough to understand the difficulties of life well enough to avoid unfortunate outcomes.

When I became a mother at 19, I could lay down on the floor and color with crayons in a coloring book with my daughter. I also did foolish things like partying with her in tow and we are both fortunate she survived my immaturity.

When my husband and I had sons late in life (he was 48 and 52, I was 47 and 50), we definitely had the maturity to put our children’s interest ahead of selfish preferences on our part. I have seen that my husband has been an excellent father and will drop whatever instantly when one of his sons asks for his attention.

Me, not so much. I’ll also admit I have had less patience with what seems utterly un-necessary than I did when I was so young. I have more wisdom too – for which I am grateful. I do think the hardest thing for me as an older parent has been learning to let go of that instant urge that mothers develop in answering their infants cries and let my sons “wait” a little bit as they get older for gratification of their demands.

Health considerations certainly were not given enough weight when we decided to have children late in life. It was a shock to realize I will be 70 when my youngest son turns 20. And my body is changing in the ways that aging brings, though I do my best to maintain the best health I am capable of.

For my second husband, he waited until we had been married 10 years to decide he wanted to have children. By then, we needed a lot of help and thankfully medical advances gave us enough to succeed. My husband needed to feel financially secure before he could commit to parenting. It was in 2001 and 2004 that our sons were born and our business was thriving then. Along came 2008 and the financial collapse and we’ve yet to recover. We have tightened our belts as much as we can as we have had to. We do worry about our future ability to adequately support this still young family (our sons as 15-1/2 and 19).

I suppose we have good management skills and we do about as well as most people in the parenting skills department.