Many "Choices"

When I get behind a car with a "Choose Life" tag or bumper sticker, I almost always think about what my birth mother's choices were in the mid '50's when I was born. She was a troubled, depressed alcoholic who had most likely been sexually abused at some point in her childhood. She married an older man at 15, who turned out to be a junkie and drug pusher. She divorced him and began affairs with two older men, both married, by whom she bore four children. The first was a girl. She tried to give her to the nurses, so they took the baby to Children's Services for adoption. The second baby was a boy born with Cerebral Palsy. The State took him as well. The third son she kept for fear of having to take the second one back. Someone must have threatened her with that possibility in order to prevent her from bearing more children out of wedlock. She married after that, but the husband left her. That son ended up being raised by our grandmother because our mother left him cold and hungry in an apartment in Memphis. I came along four years later. She hid me in a back room and almost starved me to death before someone told my adoptive parents about my "availability" and saved me from a painful death from rickets.

What were my birth mother's choices? Abortion was illegal, expensive, and dangerous. Birth control was a dicey option at best for an alcoholic sleeping with alcoholics, obviously. Abstention was hard for a woman whose father had died when she was 11 who must have been looking for attention from a substitute father figure. Sex meant attention, even drunken, sloppy, hopeless attention. Her self esteem must have been nonexistent. Her only choice was adoption.

Today we have more choices. Today there's better birth control; safer, legal abortions; and, most importantly, better intervention for severely troubled women like her. And, yes, there is still adoption. However, it's a great deal more complicated and often more painful than those folks with the bumper stickers realize.

This is the beginning

This is the beginning of my blogspot. I have never blogged before but feel that it is time to voice my opinions about a range of issues. I was an Associate Professor of English at a small college in Knoxville, Tennessee, until 2004. I quit because I had a new opportunity, and I was getting very burned out with grading papers and teaching students who didn't seem to get the idea they might need what I was trying to teach them. I found they were woefully underprepared for college. More on that in a later post.

What you will find here in the future is a discussion of adoption issues, both for adoptees and those who gave up or who are planning to give up children for adoption. The topic is a minefield, much like the process itself.

Other topics may include education, politics, Iraq, historic travel, bed and breakfasts and organic gardening. These are not in order of importance.