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There was a time in my adoption journey when I couldn’t stand to see birth parents presented as anything but perfect human beings. Movies, fictional books and news articles that played into stereotypes would wind me into a tizzy of epic proportions. I would rant for days on end about the injustice of it all.
I’m over it.
While I still get upset when legitimate news sources miss the mark on portraying birth parents properly, fictional characterizations of birth parents rarely get me worked up. I had been noticing my changing sensitivity level over the past few years but it really hit me when I read a book last week.
Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by CJ Box is a book that would have, at one time, pushed me over the edge. The plot revolves around a birth father and his dad, a judge, who want the baby back that the birth mother placed with a (loving, of course) family for adoption. The birth father is uninterested in the child. He’s in a gang. He’s nasty. He stalks the adoptive family. He kills their dog. It’s a horrid, horrid mess. The grandfather in the situation is a spectacular kind of awful as well. (As a side note: the birth mother is not involved in the story line.) It’s all the things that would have made my head spin.
Minus the last paragraph, I liked the story.
As the years have passed, I have come to understand that fiction is fiction. Not everyone is going to like how their niche in the human race is portrayed in every fictional book (or movie) about the subject. I’m not saying that I won’t be angered or annoyed if a book comes out that simply trashes birth parents as a whole. I don’t think any niche group enjoys being dragged through the mud, even in fiction. What I am saying, however, if that as long as non-fiction books aren’t portraying birth parents as the be all and end all of all things evil in this world, I’m going to let my blood pressure remain at safe levels.
Have your sensitivity levels changed over the years? I’m figuring, like much of life, this is really an ebb and flow kind of issue. Tell me your experience.
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