Red Thread Adoption Society, an otherwise respectable group of paps and adopters, has been running a series of desperate and childless- generated inspirational quotes to remind us how special adoption is. How special adoptees are. These sweet inspirations are.kinda verbal versions of a Thomas Kinkaide print. Eye-catching but easy to dismiss.
The other night, though my gears got ground to the bone when this one rolled across my screen:
Now, I have a lot of adoptive parent friends, and I doubt if they would call themselves warriors. If they did I’d have to assume they’d joined a weird church.
My adoptive parents would be puzzled by this kind of rhetoric. All they did was adopt me. They didn’t even tell their best friends they were trying to adopt until it happened..See, back then people weren’t buzzing around communication circles cooing over Baby Bumble, getting paper pregnant, running off to Third World countries to save orphans and spread the Gospel, or spreading their adoptive kid’s business around Front Street. Dare I suggest that back then adoption was normal–an intimate family matter, not the public spectacle it has become today. But, in our confessional culture nothing is private, nothing is intimate. We are all simultaneous sellers and buyers and blabbers.. Words on the internet pursue legitimacy, mumbling through an echo chamber. In other words, in the attempt to make adoption “normal” the adopter class and its industrial friends have made it abnormal.through a constant barrage of braggadocio and publicity.
The reaction to the meme is predictable with Bastards and Birthers beating up on paps and adopters.
The keeper of Red Thread is shocked, I tell you, shocked, that so many “disturbed” bastards and their mothers are ” insulted” by the beautiful sentiments the Red Threaders enjoyed.
.You have issues. Seek help!
Not that responders, Primal Wounds seeping profusely,, were any better, Something about “infertile parasites.”
Of course,adoption and its bickerers are a symptom of the much larger problem of American consumerism and entitlement to anything and everything including the babies of compete strangers..
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I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of wounded warrior language grows out of the anti-abortion catechism. If you’re not pushing on somebody or something, you have no purpose. The fall of Communism dug a chasm in the psyche of America that must be filled. “Saving babies” is a righteous push, not only filling up the American psyche’s chaism but the gaping wound of the babyless middle class.
If paps are warriors who are they at war with? “Their birthmothers,” adoption agencies, stuffy social workers and courts? How about adult adoptees who won’t take their sentimental guff? My old friend Suzi Kidnap, suggested someplace (she was apparently removed from the Red Thread thread) that they are “wallet warriors.
The irony is that the real adoption warriors are those adoptees, first parents and adoptive parents who have fought and continue to fight the lawmakers, adoption industrialists, and deformers in the trenches, who put their lives and their money and their time into overturning the adoption mythology that the Red Thread memes perpetuate.They are the warriors. They are the heroes.
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.I usually let these kinds of meming and other adoption annoyances go. Over the last 20 years online I’ve seen them all. Birthparents can’t keep their pants on. Paps have a Constitutional right to a child. My child is being held hostage in Viet Nam (or Guatemala, or Russia or Haiti) Adoption = world peace. The US is indeed a dysfunctional country,and …
…this numbnuttiness is all part of the US obsession with children (anybody’s) and fake pediacentricity. We are are all expected to bow down and lick the boots of parents (natural and adoptive) and the spawn they possess. The irony is !if Americans really cared about their children we would’t need welfare, adoption, or have crappy schools. Up until a hundred years ago children were farmhands. Now, they are heart menders and hole fillers.