If you have read other “adoption profiles” or “parent profiles” (or if you haven’t yet and you want to, you can find lots online) you may have noticed that the vast majority of them begin with the obligatory, “Dear Birthmother” letter*.\u00a0 These often include phrases such as, “we admire your courage” and “we know this is a very difficult decision for you,” etc.\u00a0 And if you HAD read lots of these other profiles, you might have noticed that our profile doesn’t contain a letter like this.\u00a0 Leaving that letter out was a calculated risk on our part.\u00a0 If we leave it out, does it imply that we DON’T admire her courage?\u00a0 Or that we can’t empathize with her pain?<\/p>\n
Early in this process, when I was poking around on the internet, looking at adoption information and I read the first letter like that, I thought, “Wow!\u00a0 What a great letter.\u00a0 They’ve really reached out and tried to see the situation from her point of view.\u00a0 That’ll definitely communicate their thoughtfulness and kindness to her.”\u00a0 Then, I read the next sample.\u00a0 Hmmm…. similar words that began to lose their “wow!” factor for me.\u00a0 By the third one, I wanted to say, “get on with it!\u00a0 Yes, I know that you think she’s an amazing human being, and that you will never be able to understand what she’s gone through, yadda, yadda, yadda, but what she has come here to find out about is YOU!\u00a0 Who are you?\u00a0 What kind of family would you provide for her child?\u00a0 That’s what’s going to set you apart from every other couple listed here!”<\/p>\n
I was talking with my sister about this concept and she wisely pointed out that if we lived in bizarro world and birthmothers had to put together profiles that adoptive parents would pick through, would I want to read (over and over again) “we will never understand the pain of your infertility” or “we admire your ability to love a child that isn’t biologically related to you.”\u00a0 no thanks.\u00a0 Why force me to read through those painful phrases over and over and over again?<\/p>\n
And so we left those words off.\u00a0 I don’t have any doubts that I personally like this approach better, but there is still a teeny, tiny, itty-bitty voice in my left pinky toe that sometimes wonders if it will look like an intentional omission that indicates that we don’t care about or respect the woman who may eventually entrust us with her child.\u00a0 Because we DO admire her courage, but we also want her to feel free to show us her cowardly, worried side whenever she needs to.\u00a0 And we DO assume that this is a very difficult decision for her, but we have no idea what her particular circumstances will be and have no idea what individual difficulties she has faced and it seems somehow…. phony to say those words until we know her unique story.\u00a0 I just hope that our words and photos will be true representations of us and will speak to the right woman at the right time who will understand (and maybe even appreciate) why we took this small, calculated risk.<\/p>\n
*I’ve also read that “birthmothers” don’t really like to be referred to as a “birthmother” until they’ve actually given birth and made the decision to place their child for adoption.\u00a0 Until then, they’re just an expectant parent.\u00a0 Also, this phrase sort of cuts out the Dear Birthfather if he’s in the picture.\u00a0 Or the Dear Birthgrandmother.\u00a0 Or the Dear BirthBestFriend.\u00a0 Kind of a loaded phrase, really.\u00a0 I advocate avoiding it altogether.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you have read other “adoption profiles” or “parent profiles” (or if you haven’t yet and you want to, you can find lots online) you may have noticed that the vast majority of them begin with the obligatory, “Dear Birthmother” letter*.\u00a0 These often include phrases such as, “we admire your courage” and “we know this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riftraft.jayandcarissa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}