Uncategorized | Writing My Wrongs

All posts in Uncategorized

State of the (re)Union

by Suz on 2011/09/28 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments

I received an email from a new blog reader. She was complimentary (thank you). I appreciate feedback and support. I regularly waver between writing, not writing and considering deleting the blog. I tend to hang around. Feedback from new readers supports my argument to stay around.

Interestingly, the reader stated she was curious to know how my reunion went. This question surprised me. I thought the status of my reunion was pretty obvious from this blog. Is that not the case? I suppose it is not, at least for new readers. I know many of you have been around for a long time and know that my reunion, well, it isn’t a reunion.

For the reader who asked, I can offer the most simplest explanation. While I found my daughter, she has chosen not to meet me. It has been six years and we have never spoken on the phone, never met face to face and only emailed a handful of times. Early in the reunion, before she cut off contact, I was permitted to send her gifts and email her. She never emailed back and she never acknowledged the gifts. Sometime last year she quoted things like Death of the Author (implying she was the text that stands alone and the writer of the book is dead and means nothing) and stated she wanted no contacted what so ever.

So that’s it. Never met again, never talked, an email every so often from her (most recent one accusing me or someone known to me of harassing her). I will share that I am one of those bad mothers in reunion that I do still send her a Happy Birthday email every year. My hope, perhaps foolish, is that some day, some year, she may change her mind and open lines of communication to either me or her brothers. My belief is that by sending a simple birthday greeting I am conveying that I am open to contact, that I love her and miss her.

Oh, and yeah, I admit to “stalking her’ blog and reading. I do this openly and could be very easily identified by her tracking stats. I used to comment on it (supportively and I never identified who I was) but I was asked by her to stop that as well. I used to follow her on Twitter. I dont anymore. I just stop by once in a while to see what she is up to, if she is still breathing, etc. I like her blog as she writes well and has similiar interests (fashion, literature, etc.) and I enjoy reading what she writes.

For a bit more info on my various aspects of my reunion, I offer the following links to old posts. Perhaps new reader will find them useful or helpful or something.

I Heard from My Daughter [Not Good]

by Suz on 2011/06/28 in Uncategorized with 33 Comments

On today of all days my daughter writes to me. Its been what, over two years?

I wish I could say it was good news. In fact, it is distressing news. I have no other word.

Someone, allegedly someone connected to me has been harassing my daughter via her formspring. Due to the egregious nature of this harassment I am going to do something I have never, ever done. I am going to paste my daughters exact words to me. I am also going to include an image attachment that she refers to her in her email.

Before I do so, I am going to state that I have indeed shared her formspring with three people. Three decent, honest compassionate people who care for me. I am confident they would NEVER ever do this. However, there are many other people (mostly those in the ehbabes.com group and other) that do know my daughter’s name and where she went to college. It would be easy to put two and two together.

I am simultaneously enraged and disgusted by this. I am enraged that I am the one she suspects (but then again, don’t mothers get blamed for everything?). I don’t know if she wrote her father as well. She may have forgotten that her father, and his wife, and her half sisters could also be responsible. It could also be coincidence (at least some of them). Surely she had friends in school and adopted family members that know she is adopted. I am not going to deny that she draws an obvious conclusion yet I am not going to go on a witch hunt asking everyone I know if they have been harassing her. The tone of these messages, honestly, sound partially like an adoptee.

Regardless, if this is you, or you know who it is, please stop or ask them stop. I can appreciate that person may feel they are protecting or defending me, in some distorted way at least. I don’t need protecting or defending. I can do it well enough on my own these days. The days of needing someone to defend my relationship with my child are long gone. I needed that in 1986, not today.

This was her email to me:

“Suz,

Please see attached.

This is maybe about 10% of the harassment I have been receiving over the past months, and while in general I understand that the internet breeds ignorance, rudeness, and assholes-at-large, this is all so specific that I do not think it out of line to presume that it is in some way connected to you.

This level of targeted harassment is completely unnecessary, and if you are in any way responsible, I would please ask you to refrain from it in the future. If not, please accept my apologies, but given the subject matter at hand here, I do not think I am leaping to any outrageous conclusions to assume that these comments are coming, if not from you, from someone close to you or from someone directed to me through your retweets/links to my blog/etc. I am at a loss for any other explanation.

I have requested that you protect the identity and anonymity of both myself and those close to me before; the fact that I am receiving this level of aggressive and overly negative adoption-related spam and trolling suggests to me that this has not been the case. I understand that we have a difference of opinion and very different needs, and I wish to respect your emotional needs as much as possible given the circumstances, but the extent to which this has opened me up to such direct hate is distressing. If possible, I would appreciate it if you could be sensitive to this in the future.

Thank you for your understanding.”

Image to the left. Click for a larger version.

After cooling myself off, I did respond to her with one sentence and let her know her apology was accepted.