Birth Parent Blogs

 When I'm deeply frustrated with our daughters' birth family I go in search of blogs about adoption. I'm looking for that perfect blog that tells me the whole story over years and years. The blog that reveals how it all turned out in the end. That honest blog that is honest about how difficult and frustrating these relationships are and then reveals how every decision the adoptive family made turned out in the end. 

It makes me feel panicky to be in the middle of this story. I want to know the end. I desperately want to flip to the last page and skim it to find out--everyone still okay? alive? whole? healthy? 

But, since it isn't an option to flip to the end of my life story, I keep browsing adoption blogs hoping someone else out there has told their story. I haven't found what I'm looking for, yet. Either adoption blogs are written from the adopter's perspective and they start out hyper idyllic and then quickly fade away, or, the blog is from the perspective of the birth family and they are written about events long in the past. The birth parent blogs always include a deeply bitter tale of the evil adoptive family cutting them off for no reason. 

Here's what I want to say to the bitter birth family blog writer: there are always two sides to every story. 

I know that the girls' grandmother would say all kinds of horrible things about us. I know she either isn't willing to, or truly isn't able to, understand why we make decisions. I know she cannot put the girls' needs above her own and therefore she cannot conceive of why we make the choices we do.

And that's what I see echoed in so many birth parent blogs when I read between the lines. It's all about them. The adoptive parents' actions are mysterious and cruel. The birth parent is sad and angry and hurt and confused. The child is missing altogether. They never wax poetic about some trait or words the child said the way parent typically do. They never report observations about the bond between the adoptive parent and child. That dynamic--how adoptive parents parent in front of birth parents in cases of open adoption--is utterly missing. And, when the adoptive parent alters the open adoption plan, they never wonder about what is going on in the child's life such that an adoptive parent would need to drastically change the open adoption status. The child, supposedly at the center of the triad, isn't even relevant to them.

While it is frustrating to find the same old trope in blogs again and again, it is also oddly reassuring that I'm not imagining the type of relationship I'm stuck in with our birth family members. She will always be self-centered. I will never be able to trust her. I will never have a relationship with her because she is not capable of forming one. She was not granted custody for a reason. 

That's the mantra I keep repeating. They lost custody for a reason. They are broken people who will not ever understand. They are perpetual victims who will always need to blame someone else. My role, and that of the children, is actually quite irrelevant to her story.

All the same, I would so love to read a story that broke the mold. I'd really love a good it-all-works-out-in-the-end story where each side writes openly and sympathetically about the other. And then I'd love to copy every successful thing those writers did.