I was an English major in college, and one topic that we discussed in almost every humanities class involved experience. You see, read, and evaluate everything based on your previous experiences. Unless a zombie eats your brains, you can’t discount your experience. This doesn’t mean that you can’t keep an open mind. It doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from the experiences of others. It just means that your experience is always going to influence what you think and do.
Where am I going with this? I’ve often written that Jack’s birthmother, S, is the stereotypical birthmother. Until I “met” Jenna and other birthmothers, my entire birthmother experience was S, and what I thought about birthmothers was biased because of that.
Continuing with the birthmother theme, I have friends who have adopted from foster care, and their children’s birth parents range from truly dangerous to negligent to nice, but not all there. When they discuss adoption-related topics, they do so from their experiences. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are adoptive parents who are parenting the children of women and men who might have made perfectly good parents, just perhaps not at the particular time they had their children. Dawn of this woman’s work is a perfect example of this. People in this category tend to believe in the inherent goodness of birth parents, while some of the people I know who have adopted for foster care have thoughts about birth parents that I can’t write in a family forum.
Similarly, the experiences of adoptees vary greatly. Some adoptees are very bitter, did not have good childhoods, and hate the fact that they were adopted. In my experience, they tend to be the people behind blatant anti-adoption groups, blogs, and forums. On the other hand, some adoptees are perfectly well-adjusted, have no lasting issues that surround their adoptions, and want to help members of the adoption triad by sharing their experiences. And of course, there are all the experiences in between.
I think everyone needs to remember that his or her experience is not the only one, the only way there is. We need to keep our minds open to the experiences of others, and not completely discount them. When we see another person insisting that his outcome is the only possible outcome, we need to stop arguing and move on. As we head into a new year, it’s good to look back on what we’ve learned, and to look forward to learning more.
