Pain Wars

My pain is greater than your pain. I see a lot of this kind of thing going on in the adoption world. I just read another great post from Declassified Adoptee about adoptees supposedly not understanding the pain of infertile couples. Like Amanda said, adoptees live in the real world too and have the same issues that everyone else deals with. The same can be said for us first mothers. Many, many first mothers deal with infertility later on after losing their children. That child they lost to adoption may have been the only child they will ever have. They certainly know what that pain is like.

I understand what the pain of wanting a child is like. I lived with that pain for 22 years before I found my daughter. I had 2 more children after the adoption but that doesn't lessen the pain of losing the first one. Children born later are not replacements for the first. They are beings in their own right, separate from the first. The longing for the first one doesn't go away. This is what I want to say to people who say that we, as first mothers, don't understand the pain of yearning for a child. I think people who say such things haven't really thought that through. Unfortunately I know it all too well.

People on all sides of this issue have a tendency to live in their own little bubble of self-interest. I think we all behave that way at times, not wanting to hear what the other side has to say. We all want validation of what we've been through and there's nothing wrong with that but we also have to listen to other people's stories. Not all adoptive parents are demanding, greedy and filled with a sense of entitlement to other women's babies. Not all first mother's are drug addicted whores that can't be bothered to clean up their act for the sake of their children. Not all adoptees are angry with first mothers. You know that the big business beast known as the adoption industry is just eating it up. It probably loves to see the animosity between the 3 sides of this triangle. We end up playing this game of "I went through worse stuff than you went through" and then end up bickering with each other.

What is the point of that? Shouldn't we be focused on the children and what's good for them? While there's all these little battles going on out there in the field, there's the industry and it's weapons of manipulation taking more and more prisoners. Those of us affected by adoption all have pain in one way or another. In order to make people aware of what the industry does we have to talk about that pain and show them what the tools are that the industry is using. Maybe I'm dreaming, but wouldn't it be nice if instead of bludgeoning each other with our pain and complaining about how we don't understand each other, we could work together and use it to change the source of the pain?

Peace