Confusing Lust As Love

A less common definition for Lust is a passionate desire for “x”.

A woman in my all things adoption group wrote – To love someone is sometimes a decision you make every day. Between posts from Second Chance Adoptions and adoptive parents in other groups, I’m seeing a lack of unconditional love in adoptive families. How many times have we seen from hopeful adoptive parents “I’m in love with a child I haven’t met yet.” That’s not love, it’s lust. Some people are seriously confused about what it means to “love.”

Another woman notes something I have long know is true of how most people do define love.

Most people sadly place conditions on their love. I love you as long as you love me. I love you as long as you do what I say. I love you as long as you never upset me. I love you but only if you never struggle. I love you until you say you hate me. I love you until you say I’m not your real parent. I love you until you decide to go live with your biological mom. And the ultimate one, “I love you as long as it’s convenient and beneficial for me.”

I am an unconditionally loving person. I can love even the worst scoundrel on some level. But I agree with this remark – unconditionally loving someone, doesn’t mean, I have to do things for him or her that hurt me or my family. This is where I have sadly had to arrive with my youngest sister, who traumatizes me and leaves me obsessed if I have too much interaction with her. I do love her. I wish her well in the most obvious definition of that word but I have to also care about myself and my other family members.

Another woman defined it this way – Real, true unconditional love has no conditions. True unconditional love comes with respect, compassion and understanding. True unconditional love says that no matter how something may make me feel or how it may make my life harder, if you need it, I will do it for you because I love you.

I think the operative word there is “need”. Sometimes what someone needs is very hard for us to do but we do it anyway. Like when I had to ask the court to determine my sister’s competency to manage her own affairs. That was all that was required, that I ask it be looked at. Of course, she didn’t appreciate it but with our parents both dying, it was something she needed and a family member had to ask for it. Then it was the judge, the social worker and the psychologist who made the determine how much assistance she should have. I am glad that wasn’t a determination I had to make. I do value freedom and self-determination and I never wanted those taken from my sister and for the most part, the judge has left her free except in the overall management of her finances. She is still able to spend her budgeted allowance any way she choses.

Another woman stated her honest opinion – Oh, I hate that shit! “We’re so heartbroken that the biological mom decided to keep her baby. We were already in love with her.” Like, baby isn’t even born yet but don’t tell me you wouldn’t take absolutely ANY baby.

To which, another affirmed – Right. They’d just move on to the next. It doesn’t matter what baby, as long as it’s a baby.

Then there is the “I chose you” facade so many adoptive parents perpetrate –

My adoptive mom used to tell me that they got to pick me and that biological parents just get the kid they’re given. It’s bs. They didn’t pick me! They took the first baby available. They would have taken the next baby in line if I’d been given to someone else.

Which comment elicited sympathy – I can’t even begin to imagine how it feels to know that. I’m sure most domestic infant adoption adoptees know that, and I’m sure y’all just wish your adoptive parent would at least be honest.

I found this a good analogy – As I told an ex once, “You weren’t in love with me, just with the *idea* of someone to fit the role you envisioned.” I know it is possible to become deeply attached to what someone represents, without unconditionally loving that person.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

One of the interesting things about having become a mother for the first time in 1973 and then becoming a mother for the second and third time in 2001 and 2004 was how much some baby advice had changed.

Back in 1973, I had an acquaintance who lost a baby to SIDS, so I was terrified about the possibility. I would stand outside my daughter’s bedroom door to listen for her breathing. If she didn’t wake up at the usual time in the morning, I would go in to check on her and she was always beginning to wake up – thankfully. Back then, we put a baby to sleep on their stomach in case they threw up, they wouldn’t choke on it.

But by the early 2000s, the advice had changed and I can only assume it was due to statistics that proved babies would be safer sleeping on their backs. And both of my sons also survived their infancy.

The reason this is on my mind today is an awful story I just read about a hopeful adoptive mother.

She and her husband were going to adopt from a “friend”. The pregnant mother changed her mind only a week before she gave birth. And of course, this was a terrible disappointment for the couple hoping to adopt and destroyed the friendship that had previously existed.

Sadly, this baby died from SIDS.

The hopeful adoptive mother admits to conflicted feelings about this. She admits that the adoption failing to go through left her heartbroken because she had become emotionally attached to the developing fetus, thinking of it becoming her own baby to love. The baby now dying has left her feeling like she lost her baby twice. She understands that she really doesn’t have any right to mourn the loss of a baby that was never hers but never-the-less.

The hateful part is that she also feels vindicated, as though it is karma taking the baby away from its original mother, because the hopeful adoptive mother was denied the opportunity to raise this child.

She also admits to being irrationally angry. She believes the baby would still be alive had this child been in her care.

Weirdly, she is relieved the baby didn’t die in her care, if this was the child’s destiny from the beginning.

What to make of all of this ? She is one very mixed up lady to put it kindly, which I would.

However, I don’t disagree with this woman in my adoption group’s harsher response to the hopeful adoptive mother –

What you should be feeling is sad that a baby died, and compassion for the mother. A decent person would stuff their selfishness and feel sympathy. This baby was never the hopeful adoptive mother’s responsibility. Some more advice, you could thank god that baby didn’t have to feel the torment of a mother/child bond being broken before she left this world. I’m sure her Mom’s kisses were what she fell asleep thinking about, as it should be. And this part hurts but you were never her friend. You are lying to yourself about that part. Unkindly, what you are is a predator, mad that your potential prey got away.

What Will The Future Bring ?

I’m not good at predicting the future. Sometimes I misread my intuitions. Even so I trust a kind of momentum and tendency in Life to bring about whatever my heart desires the most as well as protect me from my fears and misunderstandings.

I’ve been writing this blog daily for almost a year now. It amazes me that I usually find something to say. Certainly, my journey over the last two years has been remarkable. Not everyone affected by the erasing of their personal history is able to make the progress I have. My compassionate sympathy for all of those who like my own mom have been rejected when they have made the attempt.

What made the difference for my own self ? I believe it has been a combination of undeserved luck and persistence not to give up. Doors have opened in almost miraculous ways at times that I did not see ever coming into my own reality.

What kind of advice can I give others ? One is to educate yourself as close to reality as possible for stories and delusions do not serve the individual or collective good. Another is to be gently persistent. Furthermore, if someone becomes upset with you, try your best to understand where they are and allow them to work through their own wounds and traumas at their own personal speed and willingness to accept.

I am grateful for all the progress I have made so far. I have no idea where I will find myself next on this journey but I do have some hopes, goals and dreams. I wish you all the best of good fortune and protection for your vulnerable parts as we journey together into the next new decade and the next yet best to be and hopefully with not too many hurts and disappointments.

Adoption – A Mother’s Sorrow

I can relate, though I didn’t give up a child to adoption, financially I lost the ability to raise my first born precious daughter. There are no words for the lifetime of regret and sense of loss that never ends. I remember looking through commercial greeting cards for something to send my daughter on her birthday and nothing related to the kind of relationship I have with her. Eventually, I simply started making them my self where I could modify the text to be more accurate.

At least I knew where she was and who was raising her. Not so for a mother who relinquishes her child to a closed adoption. Open adoptions are more frequent now but adoptive parents can and often do close the door to contact.

It is difficult to generalize about the feelings or experiences of all of the parents who surrender a child. Many may feel that their child will have a better life in an adoptive home and often that may be true if the mother is homeless or financially destitute. Money and love and biological connection are not one and the same. Even so, some parents who surrender a child do so believing that they are putting the child’s best interests ahead of their own, when they make the decision to place the child for adoption.

Grief and guilt are often the outcome for such a mother. I know, I suffered both and still do. Even though my daughter is now 46 years old and we have what I would consider to be a pretty good relationship with each other, I still struggle with the reality that I was not there for her growing up. There is no changing that no matter how I feel about it.

Shock and denial, sorrow and depression, anger, guilt, and acceptance are the various feelings that a parent who has surrendered their child may experience at any given time, very dependent on the overall circumstances.

When the loss of a parent’s child is viewed as a “choice” that parent voluntarily made, there may be little sympathy or compassion and indeed, a strong inclination to ignore the pain and encourage the parent to go on with their life. If only it were that simple . . .

Grief

Mourning does not have a straightforward –
beginning, middle and end
Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons,
like the moon.

In the midst of the initial shock and numbness,
we grieve the best we can at the time.

~ Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman

There are many kinds of grief. The grief my adoptee mom felt when she learned there would be no reunion because her natural mother had died years before my mom knew she had gone. The grief I felt when I realized my mom believed a story about her adoption that simply wasn’t true. The grief my newly discovered cousin felt as first her mother, then her husband died.

Today, an online community friend openly expressed her grief about a debilitating illness with no hope of treatment and though she acknowledges that some acquaintances pity and some empathize, in reality grief is a path we each can only walk alone.

When my mom died, I was thrust into an intensity of huge responsibilities. When my maternal grandmother lost her mom at age 11, with four younger siblings that needed her care and attention, and who knows how her father responded but he never married again, I doubt she had much time to grieve at all.

Life doesn’t come with a guaranteed length for any of us. Some people never make it out of childhood. Others hold on until they are so old, their imminent death is clearly obvious, but the time of their leaving is not. What is certain is that I would suspect all of us will grieve at least once in our lifetime.

Be gentle with those who grieve. Their pain is real and time may or may not heal those wounds.