When I got the word that MomCentral was organizing a blog tour around the PhotoWorks Studio baby-themed book I signed right up. Not for ME — for Pennie!

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Read the rest of PhotoWorks Blog Tour (540 words)

this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Come on by and comment!

I’m typing slowly because I’m still sick but I don’t think I’m contagious anymore because the sore throat is pretty much gone and the fever is definitely gone but I’ve got some serious (and sorta fun) vertigo happening, which is way better than the earache that woke me up in the middle of the night last night. Basically I feel stoned but cheerfully stoned. As I was just last week discussing with Tracy, I don’t like being altered (drugs/alcohol) but a little vertigo is amusing. And annoying but as long as it’s just today, I’m going with amusing.

But I have to type slowly because of the typos. The typos I may type were I to type quickly. Because of the vertigo.

It’s sunny out. The children let me nap. One of Madison’s birthday presents arrived in the mail and so that is all good. Also my to-do list is mercifully short, which is fortunate because of the s-l-o-w typing. Speaking of all that (again) I better hop to that list because the one thing on it is probably going to take a very very very long time.

No related posts.

this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments so far | Come on by and comment!

Scene: Thursday on the couch while we as a family cuddled under the giant polarfleece blankets my mom made us and waited for Pam and Jim to have their baby.

Noah: I love you, mama.

Madison: I love you, too, mama.

Me: Thanks guys.

Noah: You are the BEST mother in the whole entire world!

Madison: Yeah, you are the BEST … wait, except for Pennie. YOU know. You are the best ADOPTIVE mother in the whole entire world! But Pennie, yeah, best birth mama.

Me (laughing): Thanks.

Madison: It’s just, you know, hard with the adoption and all. You know, with Pennie like the best mama because I love you but I love Pennie more. You know, because of the birth mama and everything.

Me: Sure.

Madison: But I love you, too.

Me: I know you do. I never doubt that you love me. I love you, too.

Later Madison told me that with adoption, the reason you love your birth mama BEST is that you love her FIRST.

Madison: See, if you adopt another kid, it will know its birth mama FIRST and love her and then it has to MEET you before it can love you.

Me: So it’s about loving your birth mama the LONGEST so you love her BEST because it’s the LONGEST.

Madison: Right. Because you’re in her uterus and everything.

Me: Well, that makes perfect sense to me.

Madison: Good.

And it does, too.

(I told Madison I was writing this on my blog and she said that was fine. Just so you know.)

Related posts:

1. I’m editing
2. Real real mama
3. Yesterday

this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments so far | Come on by and comment!

I had all of these great blog posts to do but I woke up at 2am last night from having fever dreams with my throat on fire. I feel a little better this morning (ibuprofen is a miracle drug) but I’m not going to do anything useful today. NOTHING. The kids said I don’t have to and promised to fetch and carry.

I was thinking about the responses to my last two posts and about the terrific (I mean that both as a measure and as kudos) diversity in openness in adoptions and was thinking again about how I wish I had time to do more with OpenAdoptionSupport.com. I want to invite other people to be a part of it. If you have any ideas for the site — if you want to contribute content or create a group or WHATEVER — please let me know. My goal has always been that it be sort of community-owned and operated and through several incarnations it’s had more participation and then less again. I’ve always wanted it to be a one-stop resource for anyone seeking more information/support around openness (all kinds) and I don’t mind how it’s morphed into a frequently asked questions repository (the community wisdom category). But I’d love it if anyone else wanted to blog there specifically about news stories re., openness. Like if there’s a show on television or a story in the news or WHATEVER. And someone who might want to write about research as it comes up. And someone who might want to use it as a way to interview whatever experts in the field that they would love to interview.

I mean, anything really that you think is missing and would be a help to someone. I can add your name to the “About Us” page (I’ll make a contributor’s section) and I’d be happy to write references, etc. if you’re trying to build out clips. Obviously I have no money to pay you but making money on this site is NOT a goal. I pay for the hosting every year and before when it’s come due when I’ve been broke I’ve gotten some help for that but I’ll shut it down before I’d sell it out. You know what I mean?

Ok, maybe I’m feverish again. Argh. I feel so lousy.

Anyway, I can show you how to do stuff — any single person can create a group. I need to check for bugs since I updated to the latest BuddyPress but haven’t had the chance to so let me know if you’re over there and find any. I’m also hoping to build out some functionality for the site and make some “how to” videos but I have no deadline for that ‘cuz I work over there in my free-time, which is a precious commodity around here.

Related posts:

1. Creating a safe space
2. New Open Adoption Support site in beta!
3. Reunion group at OAS

this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments so far | Come on by and comment!

Chanie, who has somehow managed NOT to have a blog in this over-blogged world, asked:

i wonder about this in general, unrelated to the specificity of adoption – when you say ‘openness is an attitude’ – that’s all fine and good, but in general, we have certain values that we want to pass on to our kids – but is attitude enough if it isn’t backed up with concrete actions?
sometimes, that is out of circumstance, or laziness (seeking out opportunities v. sticking with what is ‘easier’) or just because that’s the way life is – we can’t/don’t necessarily actively provide real life examples of all we want for our kids without it feeling forced or artificial.

Well, I was speaking to the specificity of adoption so I’m going to keep doing that but I also think this could be generalized to other relationships. (And here I will give a shout out to fellow adoptive mama Deesha Philyaw’s site CoParenting101.org, which has the fabulous tagline, “Divorce ends marriage … but families endure” since I think her work is a good example of this.)

I guess I’d say an attitude that isn’t backed up with concrete action is a pretty empty attitude. I’d say, perhaps, it is a false attitude. It’s kinda like saying, “I am an environmental activist” and not bothering to recycle. At the same time, I don’t think you can always tell what someone’s attitude is with just a quick glance at their actions and that’s really what I wanted to get at in the last post.

I know some adoptive families who go through the motions — cards, phone calls and even visits — without having the attitude. These are people who keep adoption segregated in their kids’ lives by making the visits private (sometimes even from the kids’ themselves! I know of one family who didn’t tell their child who that woman was who was visiting him all that time!) or by creating crazy hoops for the first family to jump through or cussing & fussing the whole way through anytime there was any contact. On paper, that looks like true openness but it isn’t. To me, that seems like threatened openness. I don’t think those relationships are sustainable or healthy. But they fit the criteria of an open adoption.

On the other hand, those families I cited before, the ones who cannot (for whatever reason) have cards, phone calls and even visits but who have an attitude of openness, they are working that open adoption philosophy, which is about finding ways to give our kids’ connection and honoring their histories. There are A LOT of people in this category and sometimes I think it’s easy to sort of drown out their stories because they just don’t have that photo opportunity flash of adoptions like ours.

So I do think true openness is an attitude but that attitude has to be real and not just lip service.

(Note I did not focus on what makes a successful open adoption for first families or adoptees because I’m not qualified to speak to either. I focused purely on adoptive parents and I hope that when we are “successful” that we are also doing what we can to support success in the rest of our adoption family. That is to say, we cannot create “success” for our kids or their first families but we can impede it.)

Related posts:

1. Valuing openness in adoption
2. I know I’m lucky (and often naive)
3. Open Adoption Roundtable: Success

this woman's work, 2010. | Permalink | 11 comments so far | Come on by and comment!