A brief history of my last 20 years

How we got here
Why we got here
What we’re doing here

Book One

Big Ass Belle posted a very personal account back in January on the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision that led to legal abortions in the US. I direct you there for her story, but say here that it really made me think.

I guess it begins with the essence of me. I don’t know how to put that into words, but I’ll try. I am a gentle soul. A peacemaker. Sympathetic to a fault. As long as I can remember I’ve been concerned about the welfare of others. Usually if I have something and someone else needs it, I’ll share or give it way. I draw the line at chocolate, though. I’m reluctant to share my chocolate.

The Christian faith appeals to my nature. The Bible teaches love, grace, compassion, and such. It also teaches judgment and condemnation, but as do all Christians I know, to some extent I just skim over those parts I don’t like. I have been a member of a church almost constantly since I was 13 years old.

One tends to pick up the ideas and philosophies of those with whom one associates. In my mid-twenties Superman and I joined a very conservative congregation. We had been somewhat conservative before that, but we became even more so in that church. As we have moved with his new jobs we joined churches of the same denomination and held firm to those ideologies.

I believe in the right to life. I have been against abortion for a long time, but recently have softened my stance there. I still don’t like the idea, but am no longer willing to dictate or judge someone else’s decision about it. But I still consider myself to be pro-life. Semantics is tricky with this subject, as it has been so politicized over the years. Can I claim to be pro-life but not anti-abortion? Tricky.

Beliefs come alive with action. I do what I can under the circumstances, but the point is that I do. This is passion. In the late 1980s when Superman and I first joined the church I was compelled to put action to my pro-life beliefs. He was at the very least supportive if not a driving force in this decision. I can’t recall exactly who decided or how it was done, but the outcome is that we worked with a local adoption agency as foster parents. This agency helped women in “crisis pregnancies” to make plans for their babies. Some women (and sometimes with their partners) chose to parent their children, others awarded custody of the child to a relative, and others chose to release the child for adoption.

We lived in Macon, Georgia. In those days the laws in Georgia allowed a 10 day grace period for parents to change their minds after signing the papers relinquishing parental rights. A child was considered to be in foster care for those ten days even if he was in the custody of the family who was to adopt him. Sometimes these young birth parents changed their minds, taking the baby back to raise themselves. You can imagine how traumatic that is for an adoptive family. The agency we worked with tried to put the babies in one of their foster homes rather than with an adoptive family for that waiting period.

Many of the clients were carrying minority or mixed race babies. Those are the little ones we cared for. These precious babies often have such vivacious personalities even in the first few weeks and months of life. It breaks my heart that it was (and still is) sometimes hard to find adoptive homes for these children.

We wanted to be parents, wanted to be responsible for our own children. Adoption was always a probable part of that plan, but we chose to try to have biological children first. I always said “Let’s have one, see how it goes, then decide what to do next.” I knew I didn’t want to have only one child, but beyond that I was open to many options. In 1989 I gave birth to Light. When she was about 8 or 9 months old we decided to try for another one. Twitch was born 19 months after Light, on Valentine’s Day 1991.

Pregnancy wasn’t nice to me. I didn’t have too much trouble physically; they weren’t high risk pregnancies from that perspective. The problem was with my hormone balance and the emotional turmoil I experienced. Part of the problem was that I was clinically depressed but undiagnosed, therefore untreated. After Twitch was born I suffered nasty post-partum depression that hung on for I don’t know how long. Years. Superman didn’t want me to go through any more pregnancies, and I suspect he didn’t want to suffer through another one of my pregnancies. He figured this out early. He scheduled a vasectomy before Twitch was even born, and had the procedure when Twitch was 3 weeks old.

Neither of us wanted to stop at only 2 children, though. As I mentioned, adoption was always something we’d planned to consider in the future. A major motivation for adoption was our pro-life belief. If we believe that unwanted pregnancies shouldn’t be terminated, we should be willing to want, to love the “unwanted” children. It makes perfect sense to me and always has. Frankly I have always felt that way, even when I was a young child myself. I remember figuring that out when I was about 12 or 13 years old, and wanting to someday adopt.

Stay tuned for Book Two, in which our family increases asexually (after a fashion)