In my last post, Ralph made the comment that no-one has a perfect childhood and that every kid will have to “work it out” through the dysfunction they’re subjected to. Because problems build character, right?
Well… I agree with him that life lends itself to trouble and compromise, and we’re all given challenges we must address and survive through. Where we differ though is our perception of how each individuals’ personal struggles do or do not threaten society. If only we all could function and react to life in our own little personal vacuums…
I once read a book called “The Lost Boys”- Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them… The book is incredibly illuminating- James Garbarino eloquently describes the patterns of childhood and adolescent environments in which future criminals develop in. Little boys who fail to receive key experiences in good parenting, may be doomed to a future fraught with insecurity, anger and psychiatric antagonism. In other words, when someone down the street fails to responsibly raise their kid, your safety is jeopardized.
When I was in high-school, dealing with a step-dad I loathed coming home to, crying out for help through misbehavior, but with no one capable of pin-pointing where my problems came from, I had to “cope” with my non-perfect childhood- just like everyone does, right? Because my parents and all the prevailing authorities agree that deliberately denying a child their father is perfectly fine and has no negative effect on the kid, my slip-ups, poor grades, and substance abuse was a matter of my own personal character flaws. I waded through the murky swamps of my issues alone with no compass and no keen, insightful adults around willing or able to help.
I remember keeping a full bottle of vodka in my sock drawer, replenishing it once or twice a week. I remember driving my big, heavy old F150 home from parties two or three days a week drunk out of my mind. I was coping! I was numbing the pain and treating the symptoms effectively. And then I was threatening my life and everyone else’s life on the road with my 2,000 lb hunk of metal and “diminished” capacities.
Later, in college, I decided that the reason I was so unlovable by men was because I wasn’t skinny enough. My unenlightened mind kept searching for answers to my abandonment. So I thought about the “easiest” (mom always taught me the pleasures of ease) road to thinness (and love), i.e. meth. Cool, right? I don’t know if any of you have tried meth, but the come down basically turns you into a raging, vitriol-spewing hag. Kind of un-lovable. I lost weight but the self-hatred proliferated.
I did a pretty good job of rebounding quickly, luckily I’m cute and its easy for me to find people to pull me out of misery, but my point is that, if you’ve ever known a miserable person, perhaps a down-n-out druggie or even just a jealous, insecure nay-sayer, you may have observed the ripple of their radiating gloom.
My old best friend from high school, for example (surprise! another fatherless kid) got into heroin real bad and ended up stealing $10,000, yes TEN THOUSAND dollars from our mutual friend’s parents.
All to fill the void of despair.
So please, let’s be honest about the profound consequences of mismanaging the development of our kids. It’s not just their problem. It’s ours too.
I am he as your are he as you are me and we are all together. How many times do I have to say it?
Categories: General
I think this is the key, as Alana noted– when a culture won’t acknowledge a loss, people suffering the loss are left
to blame themselves for somehow not getting with the program.
There will be pain in every human life. It’s being told that
your pain does not matter which is unnecessarily
cruel.
And, good parents try to protect their children from pain.
Also, some people do have happy childhoods. I’ve interviewed these people. Apparently, it is possible.
Hmm, so what’s my excuse? I guess I have to blame my best friend’s parents’ divorce, since when his mom moved out was when we turned his mom’s old office into a drum room, and that’s where we all gathered after school to get baked. And my own parents ultra-responsibility and ho-hum stability (60 years this September 7th!) just seemed drab and boring. I still dreaded going home to their disapproval and cluelessness. So, having an intact family is nice, especially now in their old age and my lost adulthood, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to have problems. Parents don’t really influence people as much as peers and the culture does.
Alana, I agree with both you and Elizabeth that one of the most important issues you describe is the lack of acknowledgement of what you’ve gone through, and I think it’s especially true for donor-conceived kids of your generation, those who went through childhood during a time when there was much less of a culturally-conceived way parents had of talking about all the issues surrounding donation, not just the factual matters about origins, but also the pain and loss that people may feel in their detachment from (and sometimes total lack of knowledge about) their genetic ancestors and the inability to have their voices heard about how they feel.
As a crude metaphor, think about what it was like for gay kids growing up before, say, the 1970s. Except for an extreme few, gay kids before that time grew up in a world where there was no way for them to come to terms culturally with who they were, no words that weren’t pejorative to talk about what it was, and no one to talk about it with. If somehow you were able to do a truly representative study of homosexuals around 1960, I bet you would find the rate of mental illness in that population to have been extraordinary. The answer was not, as most people know now, to marginalize homosexuality more, but instead, to assist them (us) on the path to mental health (and hence the health of their partners, families, and community) by increasing visibility, acknowledgement, openness, and discussion, all things that have happened to a major degree in the decades since.
Likewise, instead of assuming that the answer to what happened to you is to try and make sure the initiating circumstances can’t be repeated for others, how about considering working towards a culture where these issues are discussed from the very beginning, where parents use donation with thoughtfulness and where kids grow up knowing not just the story of their origins, but also knowing that their parents are keenly aware of the issues potentially brought up by ART and empathetic about how these issues might play out in their kids’ lives. When I was growing up, it was important for my parents to demand that we pretend that we weren’t a mixed bio/non-bio family. I truly believe that the absolute reluctance to acknowledge the difference between biological and non-biological bonds was damaging to all of us involved. Perhaps a greater sense of awareness and purposefulness from the beginning would help everyone, both parents and children, to avoid some of the pain and anger that comes from secrecy, shame, and avoidance.
“Perhaps a greater sense of awareness and purposefulness from the beginning would help everyone, both parents and children, to avoid some of the pain and anger that comes from secrecy, shame, and avoidance.”
Sure, talking and openness about something can help, but in the situation of a donor conceived child or a kid born to a single mother with an absent father, talking will not completely solve the problem. That father is still missing.
It is possible to help people in these situations to heal, AND to work to ensure that these circumstances are rare. It makes no sense to only treat a problem, when you can also work to prevent it.
If you cut of a kid’s leg, it’s definitely better if you’re honest about what you’ve done, but that doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.
I see your point better today, Alana. You were a step ahead of me in your first paragraph but I must’ve skipped it. Right, it’s not just complaining about our personal struggles, the ripple effects and collateral damage don’t just end with the adults who are divorcing or using DI, and they don’t end with the children, they extend to everyone we share the road with too.
Thank you John for your eloquent reiteration of my point. That’s exactly what I was trying to say.
Also, to you, I’d like to add: I try to be careful not to come off as a whiner and complainer on here. That’s really not what I’m about and if you could spend a day with me I think you’d be pleased by my aggressive pursuit of joyful experiences that make life worth living. I write through FS, because I suspect many kids like me will likely go through the same struggles I went through, and life is sooo much easier when you can put a name and a reason behind it all. It is extremely important for counselors and parents to accurately connect the dots between their child’s mental health and development, and the real reasons that are causing them.
And then its up to society to judge if those pains and struggles the kids go through are worth keeping ART legal and unregulated.
To Ralph:
I have always agreed with that analogy, and find it incredibly ironic. That’s one of the main reasons I feel so at home in San Francisco and among the gay community. Because they’re misfits and I’m a misfit too and we get each other. ….For the most part.
I think the one big difference is, our births are not natural and homosexuality IS. It is so so very natural to be gay. That’s why discrimination against gays is WRONG. 10% of the population of the world is estimated to be gay and I suspect it’s been that way since the beginning of time. Bonobos anyone?
There’s no assuaging the pain of donor kids by building us bars and putting on parades for us. That will never happen, nor would we want it to. And its all preventable. This whole discourse is entirely unnecessary.
Speaking of crude analogies…
homosexuality is like building a stable house, but with radical architecture and decor. It may not fit in with the other houses on the street; people may gawk and talk and start a neighborhood association to get it torn down and have some stupid dull McMansion put up instead.
but commercial conception is like building a “normal” house, an attempt at fitting in, but not paying attention to the foundation. So even though it SEEMS to fit in, the house is unlivable. The foundation is cracked, the pipes don’t work, and it may have more problems than meets the eye.
you can convince me of the beauty and worth of the first house, the second however, doesn’t really seem like a step forward.
It appears we may be at an impasse here, Alana. I hear you and your story about your suffering, of the cracked foundation of your house, as you say, but I don’t see it as a universal indictment of donation. I look at my two kids and see two very happy (at this point) children who are doted on by their Dad and Papa, two parents who have dedicated themselves to try and be diligent, loving, and empathetic. We have a close-knit extended family, a welcoming community where we live, and a vibrant synagogue that we’re active members of. I don’t believe your experience to be any way close to being a necessary outcome of the way our family was created. I don’t mean that to disrespect you. And I don’t mean that to claim that our kids will never have any issues with their parents’ choice on how we brought them into this world.
All of the stories I’ve read here describing the catastrophic and life-long personal injury as the result of donation are from folks who, in their own words, have had other traumatic incidents in their life, that, while perhaps were tied to the facts of their conception, seem by no means to be necessarily connected to them. Loathsome step-parents, secrets kept for decades sprung on adult children, and general parental inattentiveness to kids’ needs do not just belong to this issue but to the whole world. They are difficult problems that in any particular circumstance often have no easy answers, except of course, if one is able to project the whole weight of one’s pain onto donation and surrogacy, and claim, ah-ha, here is the source of the problem.
I’d like to stay on this site and interact. I want to hear people’s stories, because, as I’ve written before, I think there is enormous value in learning from those who came before me in this journey, and I want to use those lessons to help me be a better parent. I think too, that it’s valuable for me to tell my story, because I am not the face of ridiculous celebrity donation stories that are in People magazine or other outlier stories that can get trumpeted in the media. I get a hint that, for some folks here, to engage on an even level in that discussion with people like me knowing the intent is to help my children grow up is, in essence, condoning the thing that they are fighting against. Perhaps this will come to seem like the struggle over abortion, where it is almost impossible for the opposing sides to even agree on terms for discussion. I hope not.
It is your site, so it is your call.
Ralph,
I want to say thank you so much for all of your thoughtful responses. The tone and value of your contributions is exactly what we’re striving for.
I’m really happy for you that you have a healthy situation at home. That’s what we want! Health and well-being! So congratulations. I will say that childhood is the easy part with commercial conception. It’s adolescence and adulthood where it gets tough.
Right now, aside from my blogging, I am writing a collection of points I think are the key challenges and worries of commercial conception. I’m going to combine child-development and social science research, mixed with personal experiences, of my own and of other donor-conceived. Then I will present the points in a book, spread it around, see what people say and think, and hopefully we’ll have a better idea of what makes a family healthy, and then give people the freedom and tools to go off and create those healthy families.
we’re also working on a project that I think you’ll be excited about, which will give more invested participants in ART opportunities to have their story heard. And with a wide collection of stories from all perspectives, I think we can create reasonable solutions and recommendations.
For now, please keep reading and commenting. I enjoy your feedback and respect all of your contributions. Its commentary like yours that keep this conversation balanced.
Thanks for that Alana, I appreciate it. I think it is such a great idea to start a project that connects adults that were donor kids with both potential parents as well as parents and children who are just starting out on that journey. How can people learn more about making the choices in regards to ART that are best? What can be done to help make and keep their families healthy, regardless of which way they choose to go?
In my life, the times that I have channeled my pain to help other people succeed in a similar situation have been some of the most powerful and healing experiences I’ve ever had. I hope that will be true for you too.
If you start a writing project about commercial conception, and would like a contribution, I’d be happy to be involved….(you can probably tell I like to write!)
I thought you’d be into it.
You are a great writer. And we would loooove to have you do a contribution.