Birthmothers

While today I claimed that I had a heart of stone and ice, just like Dan Savage, because of my lack of emotional response, I did have a response to Melissa, just not to the naming or adopting of 'the kid'.  My mother was a birthmother to a family once and so I've heard her story many times from her words.  When I first came to the idea of open adoption through Savage's book, I was very against the idea.  I've never considered myself the type of person to oppose change just because this is the way it has always been done, but open adoption seemed messy to me.  Allowing the birthmother to move on with her life and forget about her baby seems clean and easy.  But I'm completely shocked that I could think that when I look at my own mother.  She thought about her baby constantly and it obviously effected her greatly even though she was given the closed adoption ideals of never seeing the baby and pretending this part of her life had never happened.  I know that there is even more that she hasn't showed me everything about her incredibly complex feelings about her experience and I wasn't there to watch her through it.  Seeing my mother's relationship with her birthchild (who she found 20 years later) has helped me understand a little bit about the magnitude of her feelings about giving her up in the first place though.  My constant questioning of why anyone would ever want to have a child in the first place (especially after reading the Cusk) can be answered by that magnitude for me.  And this same magnitude of feeling is experienced by the young gutter punk Melissa.

Her sobbing is the only view of emotion that we experience from her throughout Savage's relationship with her.  Nothing seems to please her or effect her besides the boys she lives with, her family, and even more than these the giving up of her child.  The name she gives the baby especially drives this home for her, David for her current boyfriend, Kevin for the birthfather, and Pierce for her father.  After the harm that her own mother has caused her the only loves left in her life are male, including her brother, father, boyfriends, and adoptive fathers of her baby boy.  But at least as much as she's willing to open up to Dan and Terry the only earth shattering emotion she shows is when they leave the hospital with her baby.  Although I'd never thought of it before reading Melissa's story, I know now that my mother went through exactly the same thing with her baby.

Savage used the most convincing argument for open adoption that he possibly could have in his chapter on the logic of an open adoption, Melissa's presence.  Her suffering and her bond with the baby are both so strongly portrayed through Savage's writing and these seem like his entire argument.  Which is part of my problem with the entire book.  In the opening chapters Savage admits that the had to write this book because of a contract rather than because he had anything to say.  His process seemed so easy compared to other couples that he didn't have much to say.  Melissa did and she shines through the narrative.  Savage's true reasons for wanting children were mundane and he states that they were more disturbing than if he wanted to be a child murderer.  This mundanity speaks to the fact that he had relatively little to say about his experience with adopting a child.  I feel like Savage's book about raising his child would be much more relevant and moving than the story of him adopting a child, which seems so similar to other couple's experiences.