Current mood:	angry
Entry tags:	rant

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
I watched a bit of Brat Camp on ABC. I won't be watching anymore of it ever.

It's a reality show about teenagers who are so incorrigible their parents send them to boot camp to straighten them out. While I have a fascination of these kinds of things. What would make me send my kid to this kind of boot camp? What do they do at this place so I can implement it to make sending my kid there unnecessary etc.?

Anyway they had this thing where the parents send what was called an "impact letter" to their kids telling them what they did wrong. They showed the parents and a caption underneath said "Brian (or whoever, I don't remember the name)'s mom" . Then they showed another woman and the caption said "Lisa's Adoptive Mom". Why I'm never watching this show again.

In the middle of all this waiting, I'm confronting my own demons about adoption. The fact that the rest of the world will not see me as anything more than a stand-in for better parents. Adopting from China will make this more than obvious. I will be responsible for this child, for molding her and fanning the flame of her interests. Yet to the rest of the world I am little more than her babysitter.

I see it sometimes in the way people act towards D (who is adopted). He was 5 days old, and yet when people find out he was adopted they always ask. Hell Iasked. "Have you ever looked for your birth parents?" One time a doctor encouraged him to begin a search to find out the medical history. (needless to say we never returned to that doctor.) I don't want them to act that way towards my daughter.

There are times that I get furious at the things that I know I am supposed to do. At the things I must do.

I don't want to say nice things about my daughter's birth mother. I know it makes me a horrible person, but I am an infertile white woman. I cannot understand why someone would abandon a child just because she was a girl. I don't get it. I don't want to get it. Moreover I don't want to speak with respect about a woman who left her child to die! I don't want to speak with respect of a woman who left my child to die!

Yes, hopefully my daughter will have been found in a marketplace or a busy intersection. But what will I tell her if she was found "by a river" which really means "in the river"? What then? How do I look into the almond eyes that I already love and tell her that the woman who carried her in her body put her in the river just because she was born female?

I'm a writer and a storyteller. I want nothing more than to invent a beautiful story about how her birth mommy wanted her very much and so forth and so on. I can make a story that she will believe and I want to do it. But I won't do it. I will not let myself weave a dream about her birth only to be truly crushed when she dismisses my story for the smoke and mirrors that it is.

I'm so scared. I'm so scared that I won't be a good mother, that I won't be able to do the hard adoption-related stuff. Then I get so furiously angry and jealous at the women who have carried their child in their bodies that don't appreciate it for the gift that it is. Or worse, some of them who think that it is their right to have as many kids as they can and then they don't discipline them or teach them to be responsible--instead deciding it's the school's job, and they get sent to my husband.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm jealous that my child's birth mother was able to give birth to my daughter--and I wasn't.