There is truth to history, but there is also attendant pain. Some people are averse to pain and knowledge. They avoid looking back. They deal with their aversion by shoving the object of their discomfort under rugs, bowdlerizing texts or erasing certain racy bits ("Omit the reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks," Forster, Maurice),
I am mad. I am fine with the label and all of its meanings. I would rather be mad than stupid and mediocre and self-righteous. If someone is jim dandy with the reunion they have and can joke about the awkwardness in communicating with nfamily, great! But I am not a child imagining problems where there are none, slights where there are none. Seven unreturned telephone calls in two months? I am not allowed to leave voicemail because her husband doesn't like it? Okay. And this is *my* problem in my childish primal woundie cave? No. It's a mess. As my husband and friends and even my sister-in-law have said, it's definitely not my doing or all in my head.
It's about my feelings and MY take on what they mean to ME. I am sad. I am deeply sad that my nfamily are not more like me in temperament and more open to me. I see warm flickers of sameness, and then it's dark again--the light extinguished at the behest of the Matriarch or another player. I don't merit the same courtesies as others (although I have to wonder what those courtesies might truly be). Perhaps I would be a fish out of water in that milieu. I don't get to find out. But it is still my experience to mourn, and I am NOT childish or stunted for doing so, or for feeling a connection to my family. I am doing the work that's right for me. My education and madness and wonderful aparents have taught me not to presume to tell anyone else what their path should be or call them infantile by juxtaposing the primal wound AGAIN to a children's rhyme and the refrain "husha, husha." This was unintentional? Really? I'm not buying your cookies or that perfect adoptee potion that makes it all "just fine."
I'll stick with mad; madness gives me interesting, lovely, batty, fantastic friends.
8 comments:
I think it is very sad that Campbell doesn't feel connections to her family members.
I def. feel connected to my family and my child and that is not something that grew over time that is why it is so mysterious to me.
Everybody is different though, I just think it is sad for her because feeling connected is such a lovely feeling.
It is also something that was there for me. It has changed over time, but it's always been there. With my own kids, it scared the hell out of me because it felt so foreign and weird. What was this "connection"?
I love my afamily and aparents, but I have known them for 42 years and don't have that same connection. We can never say, "Oh, you look just like me! Or you have the talents of so-and-so." My extended afamily loves me enough to check in now and then, but we don't have close connections. It's ironic to me, as I wrote before, that I am heir to their family's things but have no real connection to their history. I am loved by my parents in a real way, but I am an interloper in the larger family. It just is. I have to say that as the adoptee I did my stirring of shit in the family, also, that has long-reaching repercussions. I feel that I was closer to my parents' sibs than to my cousins (I am the youngest) and that has contributed to this vacuum of belonging. I have to take some responsibility for putting up boundaries with some people myself.
I think you are kind, Joy, in taking the compassionate view. I just don't see that it's necessary to mock those who express our view of connection as childish, and that all would be well if we would stop singing rhymes and clinging to babyish ideas. It's far from babyish for me.
And yes, that feeling of connection is wonderful. Nothing can beat it.
Ok. Campbell says because she had PPD that means that mothers don't bond to their babies outright.
That is bullshit. There are plenty of us who do not have a mental illness that bond just fine to our kids from birth.
I'm not putting down PPD, it's a viable ailment but just because she had it doesn't make me some kind of weirdo for knowing instinctually how to bond with my babies.
MOST MOTHERS DO BOND INSTANTLY WITH THEIR BABIES. Campbell can say otherwise but she's kidding herself.
She is a woman with deep issues and instead of dealing with them she tries to tell everyone that she is the normal one.
She's wrong.
She is leading a very sad little life and frankly, the fact that she doesn't know how to form bonds with people proves the PW case tenfold.
Okay. PPD is a pathology. It is real. Women need screening and treatment for it. I am not mocking it. It is hard and hearbreaking. We screen for it at work and support moms who have it. Big time.
But to say that you had it and your experience is the norm and that if another woman felt some immediate bond for her newborn infant SHE had pathology? That's projecting a bunch of weird onto others.
You can have PPD, and I believe and I support you. But medical research in psychiatry and maternal-neonatal bonding recognize postpartum depression as OUTSIDE the norm and provide meds and therapy to help.
Can't argue with those who are blind to their own issues, and especially those who cannot think straight and throw labels at me like "hysterical," etc. Lame.
I am not the child here. I rest my case.
Well apparently she now has a mysterious bond with her son and with others, but just not her random birther woman.
It is so weird to me that she looked her up given the randomness and disconnected feelings she has. Origins are origins, not everyone cares, so why look up some random woman who probably has nothing in common with you to bother. Especially when she would rather you be a secret?
I can't imagine calling some idk woman in my neighborhood approx. 20 years my senior and say I just want to get to know her, what strange behavior.
I can imagine a stranger who is 20 years or so younger than me calling me up out of the blue and wanting to get to know me just because and if that did happen saying, "oh you can't tell the kids I kept" How utterly bizarre.
Of course if that stranger was my child, or that stranger was my mother, than I can imagine it. Of course I did and do feel a deep and abiding mysterious bond with both.
She says she doesn't have a connection with or feelings for her biological people, so I don't even know why she blogs about it. I don't have feelings for lots of people I don't blog about. That's fine and I suppose has a set of benefits of its own, life would be less complicated for sure, but because it is true for her does not follow that it is true for others.
It is weird that she attempts to speak with such authority about a subject she cares so little about.
"I don't have feelings for lots of people I don't blog about."
Precisely, Joy.
I don't blog about people about whom I have nothing invested in, nothing to share with. I also don't understand why you'd bother to search if you don't care, if you said. There has to be at least a kernel of ambivalence to make the effort, I'd think.
It's honestly not worth the effort, and I am banned over there anyway. I just hate the fucking baiting. And when I look at it as the ravings of someone so invested in telling *me* what to feel that she cannot even construct an argument, linear or otherwise, her words cease to matter for me.
I feel sorry for Campbell at this point. She seems to either suffer from amnesia or severe schizophrenia or both in her last post.
Women don't bond with their babies. Women do bond with their babies. She did. She didn't. Which is it?
At this point, who cares?
It's funny to me how she has spent a big chunk of her time in the adoptosphere belittling the experiences of other, even taking information from a forum against TOS and mocking it for her own pleasure and yet, she still sits around scratching her head and feeling "bullied" when her antics are questioned.
I will state again what I feel strongly based on empirical research: MOTHERS BOND WITH BABIES. That is the NORM.
Frankly, I have no desire to give these uneducated,ignorant and apparently completely false anecdotes of hers any more attention.
And Joy does have a very good point. Why this need to contact people who mean nothing to her? And then blog about it ad nauseum if she feels... nothing?
I don't get it.
"Frankly, I have no desire to give these uneducated, ignorant and apparently completely false anecdotes of hers any more attention."
This is my takeaway lesson of the day, Lulubelle, What a absolute waste of time and energy. I am having surgery tomorrow. I should be focused on myself and my family, not on what the cabal spouts about Verrier and how wrong the PW is. These women are insignificant in the big scheme of life, just as I am. I matter in my own life and in the life of my friends, family, and patients, and I will concentrate on that.
Next time Campbell, Maryanne, or whoever amongst them dangles bait, I will turn a blind eye, as I told myself I would when I posted "The Furies." Mea culpa. I got caught in a powerful nexus of first family meltdown and physical pain and let them get to me. All that anger at being mocked seeped out.
Joy and Lulubelle, you are fabulous. Thanks for the support.
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