Category: serious as a heart attack

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The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

A parent (client) told me recently, “Motherhood is an endless series of opportunities to feel bad about yourself.” She said it flippantly and we laughed. Today I thought, “Adoption is an endless series of opportunities to feel like you are having a psychotic break.”

Like early adolescence when your emotions and hormones change second-to-second, I do not know how I’m going to feel hour to hour. It’s been almost a year since we started this process.

Last week, a birth mother “picked” us. In the insanity of this roulette wheel, I did not make time to post about our enthusiasm, trepidation, and guarded optimism when we thought we might be parents in April (!!!). So many things happened between then and now, it hardly seems worth mentioning.

Today, our agency called us to tell us that the expectant mother had been working with multiple agencies and multiple families simultaneously.

We had talked to her daily, for at least an hour a day, for the past week. I am not here to wax poetic about grief; we hardly have any. It has been such a short time. And I am more than fully aware that a birth/expectant/first (or whatever your term of choice) mother’s journey is not easy. We do not believe that we had any “rights” to her child. And whoever she is, whatever she is going through, I can honestly say that I do wish her the best.

Nonetheless, what we have come to learn about this woman leaves us guarded, confused, frustrated, tired, and (at times) paranoid. I am not sure why she picked us. I am not sure why she lied to us about working with at least one other family at the same time. I am not sure why she lied to her partner (supposedly) about having picked us. Yet, all of this seems defensible to me– it is a scenario I cannot imagine. But then, at the end of the day, I cannot come up with any reason why, after our agency contacted her and said they would no longer work with her, that she would continue to communicate with us as if nothing had happened. I am not sure she was even pregnant.

There is no tidy conclusion to this; just the ongoing insanity of it all. The frustration, sadness, and humiliation of having to go back and “untell” everyone that we told, “unmake” the arrangements.

We go back to waiting.

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Be Human

Some days it feels like we just embarked on this parenting journey. But then I remember that really, we started this whole thing around the time I started this blog… which was quite a while ago.

Now, we are well on our way. Not to say that we don’t still have doubts. I think we both have doubts pretty much constantly. But the weird thing is that they still feel pretty abstract… so they’re not super bothersome.

To be honest, I feel pretty detached from the whole process. We both do. And I think it could be easy to blame it on “adoption”, but it’s not that. Even when we were (briefly) considering biological “conception”, it never really felt real. I wonder if biological parents feel this way. Probably, but you never hear them talking about it. Other than the fact that our life is now filled with so. much. fucking. paperwork., nothing has really changed.

Sometimes it makes me feel like a robot. I have literally spent my entire life preparing for “how I would feel” about becoming a parent. I spent much of my professional training and now my day-to-day work life with parents, thinking about parents, dedicated to parenting. But… when it comes to planning our own family, I honestly feel…. nothing.

Not in a bad way– of course I feel dedicated and excited and I want to do this. But right now, it’s so abstract. Which to me, seems totally normal. Yet, what you hear about from basically any parents starting their family in any way is that it is so emotional. There are books, podcasts, blogs, and articles about it.

I spent a lot of time predicting how I would feel at each step of the way. Thinking about and planning for these overwhelming rushes of emotion. But… it hasn’t happened. I keep attributing it to the fact that we’re “not very far along” in the process. Which is potentially true. But again, reading/hearing all of this content, I hear other couples describe things we’ve gone through, which felt relatively minor to me, as intense or traumatic.

For example, it feels like it should have been more difficult/impactful to decide exactly what path we want to go down to form our family. And don’t get me wrong, it WAS difficult, but not in the way I thought. I kept expecting to feel something I didn’t feel– some grief about having to even consider “nontraditional” parenting, some strong drive for biological parentage, some jealousy of my pregnant friends…

But I just didn’t feel it.

I never felt any of those things. The strongest thing I felt was guilt and confusion for NOT feeling those things. And I felt deeply pragmatic. Which I guess should not be surprising, because that’s sort of how I approach everything. Still, should I really be approaching this most monumental of decisions with data analysis?

I don’t know; maybe I have a kind of parenting Aspergers or something. It makes me sound like an ass, but at the end of the day i just can’t force myself to get fired up about any of the pro-birth/anti-natural-birth/pro-breastfeeding/fed-is-best/IVF-insanity/PPD/pro-adoption/anti-adoption etc etc etc etc etc things on social media. In spite of the fact that I adore my mom friends and that their experience is important to me, the content-in-and-of-itself always feels like just… not that big of a deal.  (And so help me, if anyone dares to tell me I ‘just don’t understand” or “it will be different when you have your own child” I will stab them). You know what is a big deal? Whatever is a big deal to YOU. For me, loving a child is a big deal. Being a honest, humble, and a good human is a big deal. So far, all of the rest is just details.

I think that everyone’s experiences and feelings are valid. (Some are more offensive than others, for example if you have orange hair and hate the american people, or if you had baby animals… just saying.) But as someone who grew up in this bizzaro-land social media culture, I’m still trying to make sense of this experience of pre-interpreting your feelings. We already PLAN how we’re going to feel. And whatever we do actually feel measures up against that, for better or for worse. It turns out, a lot of the internet is posturing. Probably, even this post is posturing, if I’m honest. I want people to see me the way I see myself, even if I’m not exactly sure what that is.

I joined this particular facebook group a while ago.  It drives Sharon crazy in a lot of ways because I seriously spend way too much time on the group. It’s a “confessions” professional group, where people can post whatever they REALLY feel (within some limits, of course) about themselves and their profession. The motto/tagline is: Be Honest. Be Humble. Be Human.  And okay, like everything else on social media, some of it is posturing. And appearances. But its also just transparency, and honesty, and humility. That’s why I love it so much. So many corners of the internet proclaim to be this. But how many people can say that they are a part of a social media group where people ACTUALLY admit their faults? And when they fuck up, rather than digging themselves deeper into a “I’m right and you’re an asshole” trap, they ACTUALLY apologize. That’s my group. Sixty percent of the time at least. 😉 (Which is better than the 20% you get on the rest of the internet.)

I want that for parenting. And family-ing. In any capacity. I want for all of us to be able to put ourselves out there and say, why don’t I have any feelings?? and I don’t want a “you’re-doing-so-awesome-you’re-so-amazing-you-said-the-same-thing-100000000-other-people-have-said-but-you-said-it-so-perfectly-#metoo” response. And on the opposite pole, I don’t want a “passive-aggressive-I’m-your-friend-but-this-is-a-little-confrontational-or-trolly-response-or-i’m-an-actual-troll-so-i’m-just-gonna-be-an-asshole” response. I want people to say real things to me, like they would say in person, whether “positive” or “negative”. Maybe that can’t really exist on the internet the way it is now, I don’t know.

If my revolutionary online group experience is any indication, plus the latest episode of Longest Shortest Time, Being Human is the next iteration of the internet. Being Human is the next iteration of families, not gender or biology. I’m okay with that. Being Human means that I can say I don’t feel how I’m supposed to feel about becoming a parent. I don’t feel how you feel.

I know you might feel compelled to praise this post, or dissent it, in an act of all-or-nothing social media pseudo-“democracy”. I’m okay with that, too.

But if I were going to misappropriate a quote of nebulous origin, I would say:

In a world where you can be anything, be Human. 

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#metooAND. My story.

Here is a tough one. I have a lot of anxiety about sharing this, but I’ve been I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time. A REALLY long time.

Maybe I’m writing this today because I had a really bad week. Bad-bad. Not like dying-of-ca

ncer bad. But more like, friend’s-child-died-of-typhoid, one-work-fiasco-after-another, selling-childhood-house-full-of-memories, crying-multiple-times, listening-to-weakerthans-on-repeat bad. That kind of bad. Not serious bad, but more like cumulatively bad. (But what is this, the grief Olympics??)

I know I’m late to the #metoo story. It took me some time. But here’s the story—my story.

#metoo.

Like 1 in 4 American women, I was raped. More than once.

There, I said it.

And by “raped”, I do mean raped. As in, forced to have sexual intercourse against my will. And you’re probably wondering who, or when, or how, or what were the mediating factors. Was it someone I knew? Was there alcohol involved? How did it happen? And the ever important question, did I say no? Did I say no enough?

But this story isn’t about the act or the details. It’s about saying it. And why I didn’t, for so long. Even in an era where EVERYONE was speaking up and telling their stories on social media, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it now for the same reasons I couldn’t bring myself to do it years ago. The questions reverberating in my mind—

Is my experience “bad enough” to be real?

Will I be put on trial for my experience and judged based on whether it is valid enough for me to say my words and feel my feelings?

Is this really necessary?

Why are you being so dramatic?

Do you really want your parents/grandparents/siblings/boss/coworkers/friends being able to know about this?

Nope. Not really, actually.

I don’t want everyone knowing about it. But when I asked myself why I didn’t want everyone knowing about it, deep down, the answer was, because I don’t want them to judge me. I don’t want them to think I’m “too dramatic”. That I’m “weak”. That I’m “jumping on the bandwagon”. That I’m “damaged”. That I am “overreacting” and that my experience “wasn’t really that bad”.

And that’s the problem.

Because we can say #metoo, but we can’t say #metooAND.

#metoo AND I’m survivor. #metoo AND I’m not a victim. #metoo AND I’m an advocate. #metoo AND I am whole.  #metoo AND I am not ashamed. #metoo AND I forgive you, or  #metoo AND I’m still pissed as hell. #metoo AND I’m confused in all this noise.

I thought about, for years, whether or not it was worth saying it aloud or on paper to you, my 12 loyal readers (ha). But recently I just kept hearing these quotes on radio and podcasts and social media that brought me to my knees. Sometimes literally. A year ago I heard a caller to the podcast ReplyAll talking about her own sexual assault and it just killed me because it was so close to home. She was talking about whether or not she should tell her partner about this part of her past, after all these years:

“Because then he knows stuff that I don’t really want to tell him. I think that if what I had to say about what had happened to me was like, “There was a dark alley and a stranger,” I would have said that 10 years ago. But that’s not what I have to say. What I have to say is, like, a nice person… who is a nice person that everyone liked, blah blah blah, like did these things that… you know, in retrospect, were bad.”

And then she TRAILS OFF.

Why is it so hard to put it into words, this thing that we face as women? (or people. Note that sexual assault can happen to anyone regardless of gender.) And why is it so hard for us to claim it when it wasn’t a dark alley and a stranger?

Last week, This American Life had an amazing piece about this. And not just about sexual assault, but about the culture that creates it, and all the shades of gray. And the way that we talk about it, and how words are just. So. Potent.

In this passage, the host is interviewing a girl, who was raped as a teenager. And her friends were also raped. And they all struggled with how to describe it:

“Kristen noticed her friends doing the same thing, describing their experiences with boys in different tones, in different arrangements. And then there was the friend who wouldn’t say anything about it at all, except she was upset and didn’t want to talk about it. …

Kristen: All those times when we were mad at those boys because of what they did to us. We were mad because they raped us, you know. And there was like, several of my friends where it took us a really long while to put the word to it.  …Like they [the boys] were playing a game to see what they can get away with, that’s what I kind of realized from it, the way a guy is going to screw you over most likely isn’t going to be he’s going to rape you in an alley. It’s going to be something that people might doubt. And it’s not going to look like the worst examples of things or the most clear cut. And it’s intentional, and that’s why it’s scary… actually, I think maybe they don’t believe that what they did was wrong, because it doesn’t look like what they consider rape.”

And that’s the whole thing. No one is allowed to say they were raped unless they were “capital R” raped. It takes women and girls years to say this. And I feel like after all this time, not much has changed. (Side note, I have A LOT of feels about this concept of what is sexual assault, abuse, harassment and general uncomfy-ness. And frankly it makes be ENRAGED that we’re still in this place where the reporter is the one whose “on trial” about whether their experience was real, valid, and worth responding to. But that’s a separate post.) Because even now, when someone posts a #metoo story, EVERYONE including women, including victims, (including me, I confess–) are really quick to judge—

Does this count as Rape?

Who is the “villain” and who is the “victim”?

Let’s figure that out real quick so we can black-and-white this shit and box it up and feel better about ourselves. Where is the line and who is responsible? Then we can all shake our heads in contempt and go on with our days feeling better because we are more aware about “social issues”. But we don’t really hear the real story. (Don’t get me wrong, I 1000% believe perpetrators should be held responsible. That is SO important.)

That’s why Five Women really spoke to me. It wasn’t about the act or the reporting of it or the news coverage. It was about lives. People. And who they were before and after. And why it took so damn long for everyone to call it what it was. Their stories, and realizing that their story is not everyone’s story. And there should be no “right” or “wrong” to how we tell our stories.

So here’s the truth. Not THE truth, but my truth.

I was raped by two different people, one man and one woman. I loved them both. Neither one truly remembered the event, for different reasons. One acknowledged the situation and was willing to have an open dialogue about it, and one denied my experience and told me I was making it up. Other people told me I was “overreacting”. Some people didn’t know what to say at all.

And then I got silent.

I got more than most—many women don’t ever acknowledge or confront the people who hurt them. Both times, it destroyed me. I still feel the effects to this day. My relationships, my self-worth and confidence, my job, my heart. Never a moment without second-guessing my decisions, my responsibility. (I did get a lot of healing and recovery through therapy, hard work, and loving relationships. But don’t think for a second that it very “goes away”.)

I forgave one easily, harder with the other. I never saw them as Rapists, I saw them as humans. We are all “victims” and “aggressors” in our own way. We all lived on, impacted by this in ways seen and unseen, acknowledged and unacknowledged.

No one of us less valid than another.

#metooAND #beyondblackandwhite #grittyisgraceful

**Note: if you want to learn more, do more, and expand the conversation, I encourage you to visit the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (https://www.nsvrc.org/). They have a wide range of valuable resources, useful and accurate information, and research-based programs to prevent sexual violence in all forms.