Becoming Jackie

How do you explain the hurt underneath the happiness that happens when a baby finally finds a family (was the baby really looking for one, or merely happy for a new one?) How often does adoption go wrong or turnout badly or bring heart ache and disappointment? Almost always. What is the fairytale told to terrified teens about how these fairly odd-mothers would make it all better would make their "problem" go away and make their babies legitimate in other people's eyes Women with children of their own, or infertile women who can't help casting aspersions on young girls with inconvenient fertility. Oh, how times have changed. The unwed mother swallowed whole by the Stand alone single mother One wears a cloak of shame, the other a superwoman's cape. Eerily similar our scripts no matter where the adoptee is from for the best, given what others couldn't give Chosen, selected, winning prizes in a baby bonanza Never be able ...

When one could not, the other one could When one would not, the other one would When one did not, the other one did. When one mother gave up her child, the other one took her in When one mother gave up this earth, the other one returned. Locked together forever, two mothers who ever knew each other not their names or their faces not their backgrounds or their dreams for the daughter they shared. The story books from the 60s are wrong. The little house that found happiness didn't choose anything or anyone. The little family in the little house that found happiness had to find pain, tragedy and despair first, through the loss of another daughter, the one who never had a chance at one mother, let alone two. The family didn't choose me, but my souls, looking down at what was in store chose Mom. I chose her, not the other way around. I was never her gift; she was mine. The stories from the Baby Snatch Era of the 1960s sought...