Mr. Pertman, the single biggest thing you could do for open records at this point is shut up.

(At least until you have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, and find within yourself some willingness to stand firm for ’em.)

For those not in the know, Adam Pertman is the Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute which has just released their research paper advocating adult adoptee access to our ‘personal information’ entitled “For the Records: Restoring a Right to Adult Adoptees” (The title alone is a massive problem, it fails to answer the most basic question, which “Right”?) He is also a self appointed spokesperson on adoption and open records, (though he certainly doesn’t speak for me!) and an adoptive father.

This post is not going to be a blow by blow on the report, though.

Let’s be clear from the outset- do I support full restoration of the unequivocal right of adoptees (and Bastards) to access their original unamended State confiscated birth certificates and other personal information held by the State? Hell yes! Does Mr. Pertman? Apparently not.

For regardless of what the report put forward, personal actions speak louder than any report any given Institute could ever issue. And yesterday, via NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” we were treated to a real doozy of a set of personal actions. Mr. Pertman basically undermined any notion of himself as personally standing solidly for open records, let alone any kind of spokesperson for such.

Talk of the Nation’s guests were Mr. Pertman and Tom Atwood of the National Council for Adoption, an organization founded on maintaining sealed records and the Washington DC area voice of portions of the adoption industry. In the course of a slightly longer than half hour format call in show Mr. Pertman personally advocated any number of “compromise” measures that undermine full access for adoptees.

He began with advocating the creation of a ‘national mutual consent registry,’ and went on to advocate the use of internet registries (a woefully inadequate interpersonal measure in the face of State records confiscation.)

Far from seeing States that have contact vetoes as antithetical to genuine records access, he specifically endorsed (? I think, it’s hard to tell, does even HE know?) not only the strategy of contact vetoes, but then went on to personally validate the false framing of “birthmother privacy” and “need for protection” (Enough to make one wonder why they even needed Tom Atwood on the show as Mr. Pertman was doing a fine job of supporting gutting access all by himself.)

“I think women like this need to, need their privacy and need protection and the laws that have been passed and or repealed in several States provide a contact veto in some cases a contact preference form in others that’s protection that no woman has today so in fact they do provide some extra…”

This is man who has not only completely caved and self sabotaged, but apparently desperately needs adoption 101.

When parental rights are severed records are not sealed. The act of birth is not ‘confidential’ nor private. See Doe v. Sundquist in TN, which stated plainly:

“A birth is simultaneously an intimate occasion and a public event-the government has long kept records of when, where; and by whom babies are born. Such records have myriad purposes, such as furthering the interest of children in knowing the circumstances of their birth.”

Records are only sealed upon ADOPTION not relinquishment.

What this means as a practical measure is that a womyn can give birth to twins. She can surrender her parental rights, and if one is adopted and the other not adopted, being moved instead into the foster care system, only one set of records are sealed- those of the adoptee. The child in foster care’s original unaltered birth certificate is still intact and unsealed.

So notions of ‘birthmother privacy’ to ‘hide birth’, or to ‘protect her’ from a child she either surrendered or lost parental rights to are just that- notions. Sealed records were never about her. They may have been done in her name, but none of that translated over into anything meaningful.

A womyn who gives birth and surrenders a child is not written out of the history UNLESS the child is adopted.

And as for that canard put forward by the industry and other ideologues in adoption, “privacy”? Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton both apply to REPRODUCTIVE privacy a period that ends when a womyn gives birth as from birth forward there are now two people, two sets of civil rights, two personal histories, etc.

No State can “protect” a womyn in the future from the historical act of having given birth, as there are now two distinct people, both party to that birth. It is a part of both of our histories, regardless of the fact that we as newborns will clearly not have personal remembrances of the event.

In short, adoptee rights aren’t some zero sum game. Despite the insistence of many to the contrary they don’t come at the ‘expense’ of (“birth”) mothers, as the womyn have no ‘right to privacy’ in birth nor upon relinquishment of parental rights.

Adoptee rights are hard won from the STATE and if they come at the ‘expense’ of anyone, they sometimes prove to be at the ‘expense’ of the industry, as past misdeeds and abuses come to light.

The fact that even the most basic aspects of open records were never once brought up in the course of the NPR mess tells me volumes.

Mr. Pertman was reinventing the wheel, basic pieces that experienced politically savvy Bastard activists understand to the very core of our beings, were simply beyond his reach. Clearly, he simply is not familiar with the real basis, and legal case law open records have been built upon.

The crux of his argument was ‘see, our RESEARCH shows, open records don’t hurt anybody’. (NCFA will be more than glad to provide an ENDLESS parade of those ‘hurt by openness’, in response, I assure you.)

The crux of our argument is the demand that what the government robbed us of be restored as a means towards which we too, may become full participants in and equal members of society, not the second class citizenship we currently are relegated to by policies that hide misdeeds and benefit only people other than the directly affected.

(That’s just a teeny tiny simple little portion of adoption 101, I’ll get more written eventually.)

So I’ll get back to Mr. Pertman. In the NPR piece he showed that he, sitting in his perspective as an adoptive father, appears to have exactly ZERO genuine understanding of certain aspects of the Bastard experience. He went further, equating Bastards who attempt to contact their (original) family members via telephone (in cases where they at that point find out contact is unwanted) to telemarketers!

I don’t know whether to be completely insulted or just write Mr. Pertman off once and for all. Telemarketers are after all, considered maybe half a step above pond scum by many, and are often considered non-consensual, demanding, and intrusive.

Just imagine, here’s a Bastard, now an adult who has waited for this moment for decades, with a massive emotional investment to say nothing of the time and resources spent working towards getting to that phone call only to be rejected- and then further kicked when they’re down by Mr. Pertman saying we’re no better than telemarketers! ‘The scourge of the dinner hour!’ ‘Pests!’ ‘Annoyances!’ ‘Lower than (gasp) LAWYERS!’

Hello? Hello? Mr. Pertman? Yeah, this is empathy calling… .

By way of a final example of how deeply he clearly misunderstands the nature of where legislation comes from and what the fight for restoration of our documentation to those of us it was confiscated from, I’ll provide one last quote, “Good public policy is shaped not by individual experience… .”

While he may jump up and down and emphatically claim public policy must only come from RESEARCH (his Institute’s in particular) he’s only showing he has no understanding of how legislation truly comes into being. It is born directly of the experiences of individuals.

Bastards recognizing their class status (as ‘members’ of ‘class Bastard’) come to recognize that we, as a class are second class citizens, that we are not treated equally, that we are denied basic things all other members of this society have. We gather together, learn from one another, and advocate based on our real world personal experiences of what it is we suffer. No, not some “primal wound”, injustice, inequality.

We, our personal experiences, ARE the RESEARCH, we ARE the experts, we ARE adoption (complete, with all its warts and pixie dust.)

So let me give a couple of pieces of advice. For starters, any time NPR wants to do a piece on open records and has two adoptive fathers on the show, and no adoptees themselves (let alone Bastards) -HINT!- there’s a problem. (Then again, most Bastards are smart enough to avoid traps like this one.)

Your first duty should you even chose to participate, is to point that out. That the most directly affected have no voice here today. (And thus are relegated to trying to get past the screeners to get on air, which was apparently an issue.)

Anytime you find yourself in a half hour long extravaganza of a cavalcade of compromise, yeah, you might want to hang up that ‘spokesperson for open records’ hat. Those of us genuinely fighting for real open records are gonna look at you funny, and might even write a blog post or two about ‘cha. Them’s the breaks. If you set yourself up as pro-open records and then compromise a mile a minute, you have no right to expect anything less.

Never bring dental floss to a shoot out at the OK corral.

And anytime you can’t be bothered to stand for a goddamn thing? Shutting up is far preferable to digging your own hole deeper.

Doubly so if your actions may affect the real work being done by genuine uncompromising open records advocates.

You don’t speak for us. You’re not one of us.

Not today, anyway. Humans are capable of change, but I’m not holding my breath- got too much work to do.

It’s pretty simple, actually, with self appointed ‘allies’ willing to sell us all short, who the hell needs ‘enemies’?

So yeah, Baby Love Child has been quiet here for the last few days. Not because I have nothing to say, but because I actually have so damn much to say.

True enough, I rarely write or respond on ‘blog time,’ constantly filling the noise pipe with the latest shiny object, then quickly move along to the next, nope, not my style. I may be blogging but this isn’t going to be on typical blog timescale.*

I’ve got three posts in draft mode even as we speak, and some of them are simply never going to see the light of day. Today’s post is one of those.

No doubt I’m going to get unending shit for even touching this. So be it.

This is where my post on the unfolding Guatemalan adoption disaster was going to appear. But that’s not what you’re going to get. The more I dug into Guatemalan adoptions, the more I researched the personalities, structures, and organizations at the center of the firestorm was the more I knew I could never write the real post.

My personal opinion: I’ve become convinced Guatemala is being used as nothing short of a baby farming system.

And for the time being, anyway, that’s all I’m willing to say.

If domestic adoption has been a mess and created an incredibly fucked up system for so many, international/interracial adoption is where the truly monstrous real shit lies. Guatemala is but one of many examples thereof. And the horrors of course, are structural, going far far beyond mere adoption. Adoption is just one facet of the far greater system, Guatemala, the U.S. and plenty of other “players” are all party to.

So this is the post I’m not writing. Other than to say that there are real womyn, real parents, and real kids trapped by all this, and that simple fact is consistently ignored.

The Guatemalan “pipeline adoptions” that are already underway look like they’re going to go forward.

Considering the voices of other adopters from other countries where pregnant womyn were previously strip mined for the babies and their pipeline experiences, only to find to their horror the true origins of their kids, let’s just say in the here and now it appears demand for children far outweighs any notion of ever learning any lessons from previous history.

So this is the Guatemalan adoption post I can’t write, yet have to write.

Go find your favourite search engine and get started. Get some Central American history under your belt, then dig down into the adoption mess. It’s bad badness out there.

(* This is shared a way of describing the act of blogging and blog time my partner and I have come up with, credit for such also goes to him.)

Cabbage Patch Kids came from no one. But apparently they do grow on (well, ok, NEAR) trees.

They come from Babyland General Hospital, a former real turn of the century clinic. (A sound measure, it helps assure potential “baby” buyers the non-mothers aren’t giving birth in a back alley somewhere.) But we’ll get to the horrible truth of where these “kids” come from soon enough.

In the mean time, you can order a cabbage patch kid online, or for $3 extra you can choose both their name AND birthday! With names like Aubrey Amanda, Bettina Kimberlee, Juda Christa, or Mekala Kendyll, who could possibly resist? Just stop on by and fill up your “Baby Buggy Shopping Cart.” Can’t decide, peruse the online catalog of “kids.”

The site’s FAQ is also has little treasure nuggets, such as answers to questions like “Where do I find out how much my older Cabbage Patch Kid is worth?” (Hint, unlike real life, cabbage patch kids monentary value actually increases with age.) In other words, what’s the resale value? Yes, even Cabbage Patch Kids can have disrupted adoptions. But as they stay forever cute and young, the seem to have no problem getting “readopted” unlike many real kids who get to face down foster care.

Want to order by phone? Their “Adoption Agents” accept calls Monday through Friday. They’ll take your credit card number and administer the oath of adoption (see below).

If you don’t want to e-bay up your “kid” you can always come on down to Baby Land Hospital in Cleveland, GA like the roughly quarter million other collectors and go SHOPPING! Admission is free, but visitors wishing to take home an Original Cabbage Patch Kid, available only through BabyLand General, must pay an adoption fee ranging from $170 to $345, prices subject to change naturally. Be sure to take the online or tour (or tour in person!) where you’ll be treated to all kinds of “kids,” but no pesky mothers or fathers, you can shop at your leisure without ever being confronted by a womyn in labour!

Nope, these “kids” come from no one. The “Cabbage Patch” has it’s own (horrible!) “birthing” secret! Even “preemies” come from the parentless world of the garden, they are described thusly on the online tour:

“Preemies are perfectly formed Cabbage
Patch Kids that were born early due to an
unexpected frost in the Cabbage Patch.”

Lucky them. Most real kid preemies face a serious life and death struggle. I suppose what with early frost, we should be expecting the new line of Cabbage Patch “snowflake” embryo adoptions any minute now.

Naturally, the “latest crop of newborns” are watched over my a male stork. (Unfortunately, we’ll have to get to the imperative of killing the stork, another related myth perhaps a cousin to the cabbage patch, that depeoples adoption of parents in another post later on.)

Back in the day, the “kids” were referred to as “Little People” but apparently any acknowlegement of “people” being adopted got chucked by the wayside pretty quickly. Most adopters don’t like being confronted with the idea of buying “people.”

Just as in the marketplace for real live kids costs have skyrocketed, the costs for cabbage patch kids have parallels. While cabbage patch “kids” once went for as little as $30, apparently some recent cabbage patch dolls have been “readopted” for as much as $25,000. (Still a bargain compared to some human models.)

But let’s return to the tour and see where cabbage patch “kids” come from, shall we? The magical birthing process of a cabbage patch kid can be found here and in the next 5 frames of the tour, described on their website thusly:

“When you hear the words, “Dr. report to
delivery, we have a Mother Cabbage in
labor”, hurry to the Magic Crystal Tree
to witness a delivery.

Dr. Campbell explains that it is the
Bunnybees who help determine the
sex of the baby.Pink magic crystals
for girls, blue for boys.

Mother Cabbage is dilated 10 leaves apart.
Everything looks normal. “A little
more Imagicillan please.”

Another healthy newborn baby girl.
Someone in the audience names
her Sherry Michelle.

Wait, we have twins! A baby brother is
delivered. He is named Michael David.”

Yup, meet “Mother Cabbage.” Their mother is a vegetable.

Mother Cabbage is dilated. Note that Mother Cabbage never exactly gives birth, she just sort of opens up and ta dah, babe in arms! No messy termination of parental rights, or feelings to be considered here!

Think I must have missed something? Check out the Legend, it confirms, the world of the Cabbage Patch is one of crystals and cabbages, not sperm and eggs, not-birth and not-parents. But that’s ok, most people just plunk down the Visa anyway. No pesky “birth-parents” means adoption with a clean conscience.

Should your shopping trip at the hospital prove fruitful, and you find the “kid” of your dreams, the “oath of adoption” is then administered:

In front of another person, raise your right hand and say:

“I promise to love my cabbage patch kid” with all my heart I promise to be a good and kind parent. I will always remember how special my “Cabbage Patch Kid” is to me.

After which, the certificate of adoption and “birth certificate” (Not an original unammended birth certificate. In the land of the cabbage patch kids there is no real birth, and only one “birth certificate” and “adoption certificate” the ones issued to the adopters, but hey, it certainly cuts down on the State having to store sealed records!) are then be given over to the “adopters” (i.e. the family and child who is now the Cabbage Patch Kid’s “parent.” Wasn’t someone complaining somewhere about ‘kids having kids? Maybe it’s just me.)

If you’re not too traumatised, on your way out, be sure to grab a copy of the Babyland General Store, errrrr Hospital brochure , in which they brag of posing the kids for pictures which are then added to the website. (Good thing this has nothing in common with real life adoption photolistings.)

The “kids” were first created in 1978 hitting the craft show circuit. Coleco (which later went bankrupt) began mass producing ’em in 1982 and that’s when the fertilizer hit the garden. (See this Canadian CBC broadcast from November 1983 titled “Cabbage Patch Kid mania.”) As they call it, “Cabbage Patch Fever” hit over christmas season 1983, when potential “adopters” begged borrowed and stole their way towards whatever it took to get ‘lil leafy’ under the tree.

All I have to say is that what with the cabbage patch world of parentless, birthless, original birth certificate-less, photo listed, storked and leafy “adoptions” it’s an awfully darn good thing life never imitates (pseudo) “art.”

I mean it’s not like the REAL adoption industry, generations of kids and parents, consumer paradigms etc. are in any way affected by any of this, right?

Right?

I mean it’s not like these wretched little plastic saleables have crawled their way into the American psyche.

• It’s not like they’ve gone up in the space shuttle (1985)
• Been named the official mascot of the US Olympic Team (1992) Or had the Olympic Torch stop at Babyland General Hospital (1996)
• Been voted to be one of 15 US postal stamps representing the 1980’s (1999)
• Brought in $60 million in the first year they were mass marketed. (Sales peaked at $600 million in 1985, but they are still seriously collected.)
• Or been mass spectacle pop culture events such as this (which I’ll quote the first paragraph of, as the original page is out of Google’s cache);

JAKKS Pacific, Inc. (Nasdaq NM: JAKK) announced today that the Company’s Play Along division will debut a new generation of Cabbage Patch Kids® in a specially designed “Patch” at the Minneapolis Mall of America on August 18, 2004, from 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. American Idol™ star Paula Abdul and Cabbage Patch Kids creator, Xavier Roberts, will help usher in a new era of Cabbage Patch Kids with a celebration filled with music, laughter and fun, highlighted by a group recitation of the original Cabbage Patch Oath of Adoption, lead by Roberts and Abdul.

No we’re smarter than that, we’d never buy the marketing (or the REAL WORLD kids.)

We’d NEVER erase real parents, or real womyn. We’d never market real children through websites. We’d never skip homestudies. We’d never buy and sell real children.

After all, it’s just a doll, right?

Many of the folks who have seen my little Blog here in these few hours after its “birth” have come across via two main links. Both Marley Greiner, author of The Daily Bastardette and Antiprincess, author of I Shame the Matriarchy have kindly (and unexpectedly!) blogged little “birth announcements”;

Here on the Daily Bastardette

and here over on I Shame the Matriarchy.

I felt Antiprincess’ (antiprincess’?) blog deserved a response post, so even though it’s posted over in her comments, I thought I’d repost it here as it reflects much of my thinking and is somewhat of a response to someone well versed in repro related issues, but new to the maze that adoptionland can be. I urge you to read her post in its entirety prior to reading my response below.

And again, thanks to you both.

---

Baby Love Child’s comment-
Well, for starters, let me first take a moment to thank antiprincess for blogging the existence of my little corner of the Bastard blogosphere, it was unexpected, and very kind. I appreciate the visitors coming across to my little blog as a result of it.

Naturally, I have a lot to say both about antiprincess’ original post and about comments left here as well.

But I’ll begin with antiprincess’ own post. I think it’s actually pretty interesting that you’ve taken the ‘listen and think first’ stance, as the hardest words for most Americans to say seem to be “I don’t know”. In an age when everyone seems to think they know something about everything, to even begin by saying, “I don’t know, but I’m listening” is a rare trait indeed.

Thank you for that. It’s rare that anyone listens directly to those directly affected. It’s all too easy to label us “adopted children” and thus disregard our authentic voices and autonomous decision making, but that’s not what you did. (I’m working on a language post about Bastards and the other terminology used to both describe us and dismiss us, even as we speak. And naturally, as usual, yes, I have a lot to say.)

But going back to your post, without quoting you at length, allow me to provide an alternate ‘root’ to that “voice”. You identify it as a “Myth-of-Patriarchy voice”, but I tend to disagree.

The “Myth-of-Patriarchy voice as Rickie Solinger has pointed out so clearly in her books, particularly “Wake Up Little Suzie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade” varies greatly from where any given pregnant womyn sits.

For some, the “Voices of others” (as I’ll relabel it, among other things, it may just as easily be an attitude conveyed by other womyn in a womyn’s life) may say the pregnancy is ‘wrong/bad’ etc, but for others, the “Voices of others” can be just as strongly insisting they bear to term against their will.

We live in the American hypernatalist culture, wherein birth is often (not always) highly valued, and regarded as “good”, particularly for (many) white womyn. The inverse is of course also societally reinforced, that abortion, is often viewed as “bad” (something I have argued against over and over, this being my opus, if you REALLY feel you must.)

In short whether the “Voice” screams “get rid of it” or “you must bear to term” is not universal, if anything, it varies greatly on one’s social status. It can be dependent upon age, on race, on relationships.

The real trick is to get beyond the internalized “Voices of others” and back to authentic and autonomist voice, of each womyn herself- which I think is exactly where antiprincess ended up.

Now our own authentic voices may also say, “I want to continue this pregnancy regardless of what the “Voices of others” scream at me, OR it may (just as validly) say, in the face of my own poverty, my own situation, my own family, birth for me, would be wrong.

The problem comes in when a womyn’s authentic internal voice comes headlong into an impasse with an external situation- a desperate desire to give birth, but the realization that there are simply no resources for her to draw upon to do so. Thus due to external realities womyn feel forced into outcomes, birth or abortion (as adoption is not a reproductive decision, but a “parenting/custody” decision- when consent is taken into account, it sometimes isn’t) that they felt were in violation of their own internal voices.

This is then complicated by the fact that our own internal voices can also change through time, rewrite our own histories after the fact to line up with outcomes, etc. Desires change from day to day, hour to hour.

Add in the ongoing pressures of cultural expectations, such that womyn are not viewed as fully human if they do not participate in the act of motherhood at some point during their reproductive lifespan, and lots of internal authentic voices get overridden. The consequences of a living a lifetime childfree are seen as mine fields of potential regret.

Couple this mother = ‘normal’ human womyn /vs./ childfree = freak underlying sentiment coupled with the mass infertility many couples are facing and the pressure to get *a* child, *any* child and pressures toward particular outcomes become great.

As for parenthood and punishment, shame and ‘erasing the stigmas’ of ‘unwed motherhood’ through the ‘rite’ of adoption, there’s a book in there somewhere. But yes, many still continue to view motherhood as a punishment for sexual activity, just as they simultaneously embrace adoption and the womyn as parent, never to see their offspring as a ‘flip side of the coin’ punishment. (All dependent upon the usual sets of factors such as race/age/etc.)

Without creating an even longer post, let me just briefly add how much I appreciated antiprincess’ paragraph about how many of us Bastards are indeed adults and that the “Bureaucracy Gods” (love the term!) absolutely hold power and potential threat over our lives.

The mere act of blogging about the current state of adoption could potentially be enough to encourage someone at vital statistics to ‘misplace’ any records pertaining to me in the circular file.

But to paraphrase, well behaved Bastards rarely get their records.

Like almost any other blog, Baby Love Child, starts where it starts.

A week ago today, I was sitting in the Adoption Ethics and Accountability Conference in Virginia. Part of the point of the conference was that there was the bedrock expectation that everyone attending would feel uncomfortable at some point during the course of the two day event. What they failed to mention was that for some of us, it would turn out to be excruciating from start to finish. Yes a few bright spots here and there, but they were certainly the exception.

For the moment, though, I’m going to hold off on writing about the conference itself (I need to pull some quotes first) and instead focus on what happened thereafter, because the aftermath, not the conference itself is what led to the eventual creation of Baby Love Child.

Each night, after a full day of conference sessions I came back to my hotel room, or home and scrawled out a few impressions of the day as a form of ‘core dumping’ and then e-mailed them off to a few friends. The reactions I got ranged from ‘that can’t be happening’ to ‘I had no idea- adoption issues are just never something I’ve had to look at.’ But mainly, my friends began to ask some questions about how all this ‘adoption stuff’ works (or doesn’t, as the case may be.)

For the past ten years I’ve been hip deep in staring at the ramifications of adoption, working with others (inappropriately) “touched by adoption”, and from time to time dipping my toes into adoption related activism. But my main focus in my day to day life has been reproductive autonomy and the ongoing rise of what people constantly mislabel the ‘religious right’. I wanted to support those doing adoption activism in whatever ways I could, but not necessarily end up focusing on, writing about, and fighting day by day in this field. My work constantly touches along the edges of it, but I try to remain as focused as possible considering the already sprawling nature of what I do. “I’ve already got too much on my plate!” I complained.

But it’s never that simple, is it?

Yes, the personal IS political, (but not universal!) but did that really mean I had to end up neck deep in working on adoption? I mean, the language is completely broken, the power disparities are massive and overwhelming. International child marketing and redistribution is almost too much to wrap one’s brain around. Add in reproductive technologies both emergent and old, and it’s enough to give a Bastard a migraine! (And I haven’t even gotten to why I use the word Bastard yet!) All of this on your typical pre-coffee morning is enough to make me throw up my hands in disgust and instead do what I can to help to help those for whom this IS their life’s work.

Unfortunately, therein was where the problem lay. Of course working and speaking as a Bastard is my life’s work; it would be impossible to separate out from the rest of what it is that I do. There is no one working in this field of identity preservation and “rights” that ISN’T completely overwhelmed and overrun most of the time. And that is by and large, a part of why my friends, even friends very clued in on other aspects of my life and work were just plain hearing something they had never heard before.

I come at this wearing so many hats, that those intersections and overlaps are perhaps something I might, on a good day, be able to write towards.

So by way of conclusion, enough people have convinced me that I should try, coupled with the hideous state of affairs I saw from even some of the ‘more clueful’ portions of adoptionland has finally convinced me to try to put fingers to keyboard. I hope you’ll bear with me as I repeatedly “start in the middle” on language, the lay of the land, etc as I try to write what I need to without all the pieces I need to do so having been created yet.

Eventually, there will be all kinds of amazing, and not so amazing posts here, but for the moment, you, dear reader, will just have to be content with a welcome mat and this signpost pointing visitors over to the Baby Love Child about page, which should suffice by way of introduction.