Atrocious sacrifices

Cooper has a lovely new post today about paying tribute to his sons' birth mother. That post and some of its comments inspired me to say this.

I am the mother of two adopted children, and worked as a foster parent for a few years before adopting my two kidlets. In my experience as a foster parent I saw a variety of situations with birth families. Many times the father (sperm donor) didn't give a sh!t about his children and ignored the fact that he had any. This was the case for the two males who fathered my adopted children. Many of the mothers were very young and had no clue and/or no resources for raising kids. Some were selfish, not willing to make the sacrifices required to raise children.

In the case of my son Sproing, I'm not real sure about his mother. She released him for adoption as soon as he was born, and we got him straight from the hospital when he was 4 days old. She was somewhat older, 36 when he was born. A nurse, she already had a 7 year old child she was raising, and was unmarried/un-partnered. Her beloved mother died after a long degenerative illness the day before she had the cesarean section giving birth to Sproing. I think she wasn’t emotionally capable to parent him, and I admire her willingness to see that and take steps to find him a family who wanted him. The sperm donor was a man in his late 50s or 60s who had no interest in her beyond sex and certainly no interest in his child. I never actually met either one of them. I got this information from the attorneys and the court records we saw at the time of the adoption.

My daughter Diva’s birth mother was only 16 when her baby girl was born. She also had an older child, a boy age 2 or 3. She pretended to parent my daughter for a year. We got the baby at 14 months old. Mama and the baby’s father were living together until he beat the crap out of her (the mother, not my baby). Papa ended up in jail for the abuse. Mama and the two babies were in a homeless shelter. I met the birth mother. She was ape-shit crazy, and totally unfit to parent. She was wise (?) enough to place the baby for adoption before protective services took the baby from her. That way mama had at least a little bit of say in what happened to the child. I also met my daughter’s maternal grandmother. Ape-shit crazy runs in the family.

Unfortunately the insanity is at least partially inherited. We’ve been having some trouble with Diva and took her for psychiatric evaluation. I mentioned this in a previous post maybe 2 weeks ago. The test results are interesting in a frightening way. The scariest thing in the report, to me anyway, is the doctor’s suspicion that she may be pre-schizoid. The child has an active fantasy life and has trouble differentiating between truth and fantasy. Her ability to read social cues is hampered. She is willing to do almost anything to gain favor with someone she wants to befriend. Her judgment about what makes a good friend is distorted. Did your mother ever say “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?” Diva would probably follow a friend over the edge of a cliff. I’m afraid she might do exactly that some day in a metaphorical sense.