I’ve observed that often every group of people imagines themselves to work harder than any other group. It might be husbands and wives, the so-called “mommy wars” between stay-at-home moms and working moms, kids who are jealous that their parents don’t have to study any more and parents who forget just how hard it is to be a kid sometimes.
Sometimes it’s mothers who’ve adopted their children and mothers who’ve been pregnant and given birth to their children.
I hear parents who’ve adopted their children bemoaning the paperwork, the many questions that sometimes feel intrusive, the lack of control, and especially the lack of a firm due date.
I’ve even heard parents who’ve given birth say that if they were to do it again, they’d “just fork over the money and do it the easy way if I could afford it”.
I’ve brought children into my family both ways. When people hear I’ve adopted, they often ask, “Isn’t it awfully hard to adopt?” Since with my pregnancy I had extreme nausea, bed rest in the first and third trimesters, preterm labor, an emergency C-section, and a complicated recovery, I tend to answer “not as hard as being pregnant”.
Adoption was an all-consuming, emotional and detail-oriented process, and I resent the implication that it’s easy, but more typically I hear people with the impression that it’s very difficult, so I try to share that international adoption is not necessarily all that intimidating with a good agency and an established program.
There are two other assumptions adoptive parents seem to have about birthing children. One is that other parents don’t understand the loss of control adoptive parents experience, and adoptive parents can’t possibly understand how hard it is, as one adoptive parent said, “not to know if your baby is coming in two days or two months!”
Funny, I thought, I had preterm contractions for the last nine weeks of my pregnancy and spent those nine weeks not knowing if my baby would arrive in two days or two months.
From what I’ve said above you can see that I did not feel particularly in control during my pregnancy. Even as I wrote out a detailed birth plan for my caregiver to try to follow, I remember hearing some of the people in my childbirth class talk so seriously about “planning my birth experience”, and I felt like saying, “you know, you can’t plan this like you plan your wedding. It’s the baby’s birth experience, not ours.”
In some ways I feel like adoption actually gave us more control. But I’m also aware that having had a birth child, although with difficulty, we didn’t enter the process already feeling out of control from the infertility experience.
The bottom line is, let’s respect that each of us went through a lot, in whatever form, to bring our children into our families, so on this Labor Day let’s celebrate our families–and ourselves, too.
Please see these related blogs:
Is The Adoption Wait Like a Pregnancy?
Fast Start: Hurrying Up While Waiting
Understanding the Language of Birth
Do You Love Them Both the Same?