Michelle Put These Thoughts In My Head

Okay. First, go read this if you have not yet done so:

http://wwwjusteatit.blogspot.com/2009/10/be-bwave-fursday-or-be-bwave-fwyday_29.html

It was written by our lovely Michelle and I just can't stop thinking about it and it is pulling thoughts out of me like crazy and I've already commented THREE times on it and now I want to talk about it some more.

The long story short is that Michelle is a pediatric nurse practitioner and she is talking in that piece about a drug-addicted mother who has given birth to ten children, all of whom are in state custody. The mother won a lottery which gave her $100,000 and so she has the money to support her habit. Her children are not what our society would describe as highly adoptable because not only were they mostly born with cocaine in their urine but are black. These children have come through the newborn nursery where Michelle sees babies after birth.

Okay. Let's get some stuff out of the way: I have great compassion for this mother because something in her life happened which was so horrible that she has been able to ignore the strongest emotion and instinct that I believe a woman can have, which is to protect her children and keep them with her if at all possible.

BUT- does this mean that in the interest of not getting into a person's freedoms at the level of ordering her sterilized or forcing her to have a birth control device inserted, she should be allowed to go back out and have who-knows-how-many-more-babies who will have, at best, a vague sliver of a shot at a life of health and happiness?

See- I don't think so. Not because I am not passionately compassionate for the woman but because I feel more of that for the children. I think about tiny babies who will not be delivered into the arms of a mother who desperately wants them, but who desperately wants to get out of there to get more drugs. I think of them having to go through withdrawal, I think of them being taken to foster care, I think of them growing up knowing that their mother abandoned them at birth, knowing that they have many siblings whose lives they will not be a part of and I don't think that the woman is practicing a victimless crime by abusing drugs.

Michelle said that her first reaction was to feel all sorts of Rush Limbaugh-like thoughts. That this is wrong and should be stopped. But then she tried to think about how the mother feels and tried to imagine WHAT the mother would feel.
She put it so well:

How does she feel? Is she tormented? Is she in unbelievable psychic and emotional pain? Was she brutally sexually abused as a child? Has she considered suicide? Does she not care at all? Does she not love her babies? Does she hate them? Does she want them back? Does she worry that they will spend their childhoods in foster care? cause there's not a chance in hell they'll get adopted Or is she thankful that they're in foster care?

Can she care?

And she cited me in a post I wrote about a mother who abandoned her baby in a hospital bathroom. I feel so honored that Michelle would use that post to try and make herself feel more compassion for this mother. To try to understand why she did what she did. But I have to say that I think this situation is more complex if only because of the number of children abandoned to state care.
I don't think there is any rationalization for allowing this woman to keep on having children. There. I said it, as Michelle might say.

I wonder why the mother has not been arrested for drug use. I don't know the law on this, but it seems to me that anyone testing positive for drug use can be, if not arrested, then at least put into a facility to help her try and get off drugs. I say "try" because if she doesn't want to get off drugs, the odds are very low that she will. But come on- you have to start somewhere.

There's just so much in this story that makes us uncomfortable. The unadoptibility of the children because of their race, for one.
As Michelle pointed out, black children are very much apt to be passed over in the adoption process. Why else would so many Americans go to all the effort and trouble to go all the way to China to spend vast amounts of money to adopt a Chinese girl when there are so many children here desperate for adoption who are of different (darker) races? This is a sad and hideous truth. And we, as mostly bleeding-heart liberals here at Bless Our Hearts (well, at least that's how I describe myself) try to pretend that race doesn't matter which is fine if we're talking about ourselves but sadly delusional if we are talking about the realities which exist in our country.
So there's race.

And of course there's drug use. I tend to lean toward the libertarian position of drug use. You want to ruin your life and loose your teeth? Go ahead and use meth. You want to feel love for all of humankind and dance your ass off? There's a drug for that- Ecstasy. Want to feel a little mellow? Try weed. You want to flush your life down the toilet? Do all the crack and whatever-form-of-cocaine you can peddle your ass for. Want to pretend you're a jazz musician? Heroin will help you on your way.

You get my drift. We all use drugs of one form or another, legal and non-, except for the purest eschewers of alcohol, caffeine, sugar and chocolate among us.

How about irresponsible sex? Again- I have no need to tell anyone who they should or should not have sex with and I can't even begin to say that some reasons for sex are better than others. In a perfect world, having sex as a part of love is the ideal but sex is odd and a very powerful thing and as we speak I am certain that millions of people around the world are having sex that has nothing to do with love.

Not my business.

And honestly, it isn't my business what this mother does or doesn't do except for the fact that as a part of society, I would like to hope that I would look out for the best interests of children, however that may be. And this woman's actions are having the most profound negative effect on her babies that anyone could imagine.

BUT, and again, I have to say but...where do we draw the line? There are lines drawn, of course, about what constitutes parenting so horrible that society must step in and take the children for their own safety. Neglect, abuse, etc. And I would assume that this woman's actions fit into all the categories therein. And I didn't get the idea from Michelle's post that the woman has fought for her children. But can I look at another mother whose ideas about parenting are vastly different from mine and accuse her of being a bad mother?
No. I cannot.

I don't want to be a Rush Limbaugh groupie here either. And I'm not. In the slightest way.
However, if he said that this woman should be prevented from having more children, I would have to agree with him.

And there- that is my truth.
Not because I disapprove of the woman's actions or lifestyle. They are the result of things I don't know or understand. They are part of a very serious and hard-to-treat disease.

And I'll go on record as saying that I don't think Octo Mom should have had eight babies at once, either because I don't think she did it out of love or sanity and I don't think she's able to take care of all her children the way children should be taken care of. If she really wanted a whole bunch of kids, she could have adopted them. I think I know of ten siblings that need a really good loving home and she wouldn't have been risking their lives to bring them into the world in such an absurd way.

I know I've made some pretty bold statements here. I know I've probably crossed some lines which others may perceive as rights and freedoms and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But this is the way I feel.

Because while the mother's rights and freedoms and liberty and pursuit of happiness are to be respected, the fact remains that she is bringing innocent life into the world which she has no desire to take care of, much less love and raise and provide for or try in any way to guarantee those same rights for them.

Well. That's my soapbox today. Michelle- I love you for writing about this in the first place. You are, as you say, in a position to observe some of the realities of life that some of us, in our little liberal palaces don't directly see. You observe, you relate, you make us search our hearts.

And there's part of me which says I have no business writing about this because it's not my story and I really have nothing to offer but my feelings, many times removed from the reality of it all. But once again, it's something I can't stop thinking about and mostly what I'm thinking about is a tiny baby, lying in a plastic nursery box, crying for his or her mother and never, never, NEVER going to get her. Not her arms, not her milk, not her love, not her support, not her caring, not her touch, not her voice, not her heartbeat, ever again.

And that thought just fucks me up. We all know this is not the only time this sort of thing has happened, which just fucks me up even more. This is just one I've personally heard of from someone involved. And so when I speak of "the mother" I am speaking of many more mothers, of course. Although this one's situation is somewhat unique in that she won the lottery and appears to have an incredible fertile reproductive system.

And of course I haven't even begun to discuss the fathers of these children mostly because I don't know any of that situation at all. But of course it's not right that we should be discussing the mother and her problems and shortcomings without pointing out that men got her pregnant and then did not participate in the result. Not fair, but like racism, a part of reality. Women are the ones who get pregnant. And yes, if the father should be able to walk away, I suppose the woman should be able to as well.
In my perfect world, neither would happen.
This ain't my perfect world, though, is it?
I suppose in my "practically perfect world," if the woman had to be sterilized or somehow prevented in having more children, so should every man who has impregnated her.
But there you go- stepping over boundaries which should not be stepped upon.

So in the end, I don't have any answers except to say that children are generally the last to have rights. Their vulnerability is immense. They cannot speak for themselves and so we have to.
Sometimes it's time to just cut the crap and say, "This is wrong."
And I could be wrong. I could be so far from right that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. But this is my little blog, my little place in the world I can say what I feel.
So that's what I'm doing.

What do you feel? There are so many parts of this sad, cruel puzzle. Which parts have I missed? Which parts do you see through the lenses of your own experience?
I would like to know.

From Lloyd with a questioning heart....Ms. Moon