e-mail
I’m rarely rendered speechless. (Just in case you missed that after a year of reading my blogs on this site.) However, as I was reading blogs yesterday via my Google RSS reader, I had to sit and stare at the screen for awhile. I then had to message a trusted friend, a non-birth mother, to see if I was totally off base in my confusion and offense. Once she had a similar reaction, it still took me a majority of the day to figure out why the wording on a shirt bothered the living snot out of me.
What did the shirt say?
Adoption is the new Pregnancy.
Now, I’m all for funny t-shirts. I’m also all for shirts that promote things that people believe in. But when it tramples all over another group of people, I kind of lose my sense of humor. So, why does this shirt rub me the wrong way?
Adoption doesn’t exist, in any shape or form, without someone else being pregnant. Newborn domestic open adoption, my specialty, has the birth mother right up and in your face. However, even in international adoptions, some mother, somewhere, was pregnant with a child and gave birth. Children don’t just materialize out of thin air. If they did, well, I wouldn’t look like I swallowed a watermelon right now. I’d just think really hard, “Hey! I’d like to have a little boy!” And I’d wrinkle my nose, nod my head and, POOF! Baby Parker would be here!
That’s not how it happens.
Adoption is not the new pregnancy. I’m sure the shirt, featured on a celebrity baby gossip site, was a play off of the recent influx of adoptions in the Hollywood crowd. I’m sure, to some people, it’s cute. To me, it’s not cute. One of my pregnancies resulted in an adoption. That pregnancy was not a figment of my imagination. That pregnancy was difficult, emotionally and physically, once putting my own life in danger. To trivialize it, to diminish it, is insulting. It’s demeaning. The reasoning the creator has stated the shirt was made only further rubs salt in my wounds:
Often times, new moms who adopt get lost in the shuffle and don¹t enjoy the “perks” of pregnancy, but Blessence Maternity changes all that with their new tee. This tee shares the sentiment that moms are moms no matter where the baby came from.
Now, hear me out. I’m all for adoptive mothers feeling like real moms. THEY ARE! But, argh, so am I! Without birth mothers, adoptive mothers don’t exist. Someone’s pregnancy, at some point in time, resulted in another mother’s title of mother for whatever reason. I would love to be told that, no matter what, I’m a mom, too… no matter where my baby went.
I’m sad right now. I don’t often let trivial things like this get under my skin. I’ve toughened up over the years after many insults have been thrown my direction. I’ve learned not to take ones that aren’t specifically directed at me or my family to heart. But this was unexpected. And I find it unfortunate that, again, one mother has to be diminished for another to be exalted. I’m really lost as to why we can’t all accept that we need each other in various ways.
Adoption is not the new pregnancy. No, not at all. In fact, if I wanted to diminish others’ roles, I would make a shirt that read this instead:
Adoption doesn’t exist without pregnancy.
But I’m not willing to stoop to that level. I’m a mother. I know I’m a mother. I don’t need a shirt to prove it to me. Neither should you.
//
For more, read:
1. Questions in Public: Privacy vs. Secrecy.
2. Why I Don’t Wear a Shirt that Says, “Hey! I’m a Birth Mom!”
3. But Why Do I Wear My Adoption Hat Online?
//
Photo Credit.
The shirt is insensitive.
What you said in the following nailed it:
I find it unfortunate that, again, one mother has to be diminished for another to be exalted. I’m really lost as to why we can’t all accept that we need each other in various ways.
Amen to that, Jenna. Amen!
Not only is this unfair to birth mothers, it’s offensive to everyone involved in an adoption, or who cares about children and parenting on any level. Insinuating that the adoption of a child has anything to do with being trendy, and inferring that a child is just an accessory is disgusting. I’m so sorry that you have to feel terrible because someone out there is insensitive enough to find something like that cute, and I’m sorry for anyone who is ignorant enough to see that shirt and laugh at it.
I’d have to agree with JudyK.
You “nailed” it in those two sentences.
WHAT were they thinking?! Oh, thats right, they weren’t.
I have seen another shirt geared to adoptive moms that said “Paper Pregnant”.
That did not seem to offend me in the way this does, I thought because it implies that you are “Pregnant” with the paperwork, but now I am having pause to consider it too again.
This shirt however hit me right away as very insensitive.
Another excellent post from you though Jenna.
“Adoption is the new black” comes to mind.
Perhaps folks should try to make some attempt to be sensitive even if they cannot understand why it is offensive.
Also adoption really isn’t something for trendy fashion statements.
Just another stupid idea from some clueless twit who thinks they’re clever that has the effect of trivializing all aspects of adoption. Not only does it insult birth mothers, as you have well explained, but adoptive moms and kids, too.
Adoptive moms don’t want or need to pretend we’ve created and gestated, as our part in bringing kids into our families has required efforts of a different kind that we can also be proud of, and we can relish our role. To indicate otherwise diminishes us, as well, and harkens back to the days of secrecy and lies and lifelong games of ‘let’s pretend’. We are better than that.
At the same time, it denies kids their heritage and attempts to blur lines that they’re entitled to have well-defined.
I can’t even really find words to describe what’s going through my mind right and to say I’m “offended” is almost an understatement. I feel almost as if I’ve been spit in the face, although I know I shouldn’t. I’ve definitely learned over the past 6 years that if a person has not placed a child for adoption or has never been involved in adoption, there is no way for them to understand, so I shouldn’t be upset, I should feel bad for them for not being able to experience what myself and many others have. I am pretty sure that if I ever actually saw someone wearing this shirt myself, I would have a very difficult time not approaching them and asking them what they really think that means, or do they wear the shirt just because they don’t know anything.
That shirt is very insensative to say the least how about we make another one??
Adoption: Cultural Genocide!
I know that would be totally wrong, but I’m tired of being treated like a second class citizen. Us birthmothers (and I use that word lightly, I am a mother and always will be) are people too. Please treat us with the respect and dignity we deserve as such.