A First Kiss

Over on my personal Live Journal, I'm doing a 30-Day Meme to get me back into the habit of writing daily. It's been working well for the most part, but today's question, "Your First Kiss, In Great Detail" stumped me.

It took me a while, and in the end I drew inspiration not from a torrid and wonderful, love laced past or doe eyed adolescence, but from an amazing few days in which I've been thanked for a perspective on adoption by a local adoptive mom...and cried on during a chance and wonderful encounter with a birth mom. She is a woman I've known for a while, a woman I never knew had a son she gave up, and who is back in her life, as her son in adulthood. Our stories are different, but needless to say, both encounters gave me serious pause to reflect, once again, on this topic.

So, I'm sharing a version of my meme response here today. It's pertinent to the topic, from my perspective as an adoptee.

Read on...

Your First Kiss. In great detail?!

I think that the immediate conclusion one feels they should make from the question posed is that they must dredge the recesses of their memories to find the file marked, "My First Time Kissing a Boy/Girl Based on Sexual Preferences Exhibited in Early Childhood".


I disagree. A kiss is a kiss, unless it has a meaning behind it. Truthfully, I have memories swimming in the miasma of time of kissing a boy in pre-school when I was about 3. He ran up to me and stole a kiss on the playground. We were toddlers. It was also the day that he came to pre-school wearing his sister's barrettes in his hair. I'm not even sure that such an encounter could possibly count as a first kiss. After all, how seriously can you take a boy with barrettes in his hair?

Trudging ahead, there is a memory, but I'm not even sure that it's truly real, of kissing my neighbor when I was probably around 12. He must have been 13 or so. It was a "real" kiss. But even then, my memory tells me that I thought it was rather meaningless. It was an experiment. We had passed the Making Out With Our Pillow stage of adolescence and wanted to try the real thing. We'd known each other since childhood, but we weren't close and didn't play together as young children. Yet, it was a safe kiss. There were no sparks. I don't really remember ever kissing him again.

I could even say that my "first" kiss was one I'd already written about in another entry in my Live Journal. It was a first kiss from M. It had meaning. There weren't just sparks, there were lightening storms. But it wasn't my first kiss ever. Just the first one that I remember meaning much of anything at all. And in some way I can't help but wonder if every first kiss, in every past relationship doesn't somehow count as "your first kiss".

Maybe I'm just stalling because I never really liked kissing before I met M. Maybe my body knew what my brain did not fully realize (that I didn't care for kissing) until I met M and my life changed forever, and so before that point, my body chose to give me a mildly repulsed reaction to the act of kissing?

Ultimately though, I know when my first real kiss was. This is it, in great detail. Brace yourselves...

It is a day in April 1975. I have spent almost a month between a hospital and then, a foster home. I am brand new to this world and I don't think I've found a home or a bond that will last. I don't know what my foster mother or father look like. I don't know if I've kept them up each night, as newborns do. I don't know what room I am in, what my crib or bassinet is like, or even where I really am.


I know that I am fed formula. A lot. And on this day in April 1975, I am bundled into a blanket, and then into a car. 

I am taken somewhere else. There is a hand over to someone else. And then another one, again.

A woman takes me, with something like tears in her eyes. She looks into my blanket and I look back. She looks happy, shocked. And then she kisses me softly on my forhead and says, "Hello, little girl. I'm your mother."
 She is not the woman I was born to almost a month ago. She is not the woman that has been feeding me and changing my diapers for the last month. She is, in fact, my very own, real mommy. For the first time in my short life, I am kissed by own mommy. It is the most enduring first kiss that any child will ever have and it lasts forever.

I don't know that it actually happened that way, but I like to think that it did.

What do you think?

Adoption - It's For Life, Not Until the Warranty Runs Out

I've been largely offline lately, owing to a recent surgical procedure and subsequent regimen of medication that has rendered me useless in any venue requiring coherence, so this morning, I thought I would catch up on some news over breakfast.

What a mistake. After seeing this headline, Russia Furious Over Adopted Boy Sent Back From US, I choked on my eggs. My blood pressure rose and parts of my body that were only throbbing twanged with renewed pain. It's true, stress and anger manifest themselves physically.

The crux of the story is this: A woman in the US adopted a boy from Russia who, after a period of time, she claims became too violent and difficult to handle. So, she bought him a one-way ticket back to Mother Russia, with the equivalent of a "Return to Sender" note pinned to him.

As adoptee, birth mother, and general advocate for adoption in general, I was outraged. I've seen it too many times in forums and in anti-adoption websites (Google it. Have fun reading)..."it" being this notion that adopted children are malcontents who come pre-packaged with issues beyond the norm and no reasonable parent-in-waiting should be asked to burden themselves. It doesn't matter whether the child is adopted later in life or as a newborn, it's an industry we must not feed, producing demon spawn that will eat our generous souls.

Adoption, whether done here in the US or overseas, is expensive. Yes. It's no guarantee of familial bliss either. I can attest to that, remembering the own misery I inflicted on my family. But they didn't send me back with a note. They rode out the storm and are still my family to this day. They, unlike Ms. Nancy Hansen's daughter, understood that family comes in all forms and that adoption is an agreement to be that family, for better or worse. It's, in fact, a larger committment than marriage. You don't normally divorce your children when they lash out. Instead, you seek help.

Ms. Nancy Hansen, the returned child's adopted grandmother, vehemently denies charges of child abandonment. After all, she claims, the boy was under the charge of a stewardess for the entire flight, and her daughter, the boy's adopted mother, had paid a stranger some 200 US dollars to pick the child up in Moscow.

Think about your families for a moment, whether blended, adopted, or biological. Think about your special needs children, your children with emotional problems - especially those of you who gave birth to those kids. Are there days you wish you could return them? Of course! Do you find yourselves clambering over them, demanding they get back to whence they came, right now!! No. Responsible, loving parents, no matter how they came to be, weather the storms, understanding that parenthood is a sacrifice, but that ultimately, they are responsible for fixing what is broken.

This Russian child has already been "abandoned" in his own mind once, by parents who could not, for whatever reason, raise him and gave him over to the state. He realized a dream that many children in orphanages around the world, including here in the US never do, and that was to find a family of his very own. Now, he's been abandoned again, by a woman who clearly doesn't understand that parenthood, whether natural or adopted, is forever, bumps, scary emotional rides and all.

What sort of precedent will this set in the end? How many children waiting for adoption will be affected by this woman's now public rejection of "broken goods"? How many other adoptive parents will ultimately follow this lead? And what sort of renewed voice will this give to the anti-adoption set?

As a mother, an adoptee, a birth mother, these questions will haunt me - as will the fate of that troubled little boy.

It's Her Story, His Story & Our Story

Whenever we endeavor to start something, we have a vision. We see how it “will” go, play out, and we set about to make that vision unfold outside of our heads, in real life. So it was that I had a vision for this blog and the vision inspired the name. I would write about all aspects of being a mother in the reserve, the wings, the auxiliary – and that also included blogging about being a birth mother, one of my two roles in the adoption triumvirate. On several occasions, I sat down to write about it. Something I saw, something I read, something that triggered a desire to talk, share my opinion, do what it is that a blogger should do.

Each time, I stopped. And chose another topic. I realized that my role as a birth mother to a wonderful young man (now – wow) was only a small part of the story and to take his story, and that of his family, and put it here for all to see was something of a violation of his, and their, privacy.