Many years ago, I saw some TV show. I don't recall what the show was about but one of the stories in the show was about a woman who had given her baby up for adoption.
She was like forty or something and she said she felt like she had given up her entire life when she gave up that baby. As someone who believes we are spirits in the material world, I buy that statement from her as something real.
Her life never amounted to anything. She never had a real career. She was working at a convenience store or something.
In contrast, I think her life would have been quietly a thing that made a difference had she kept the baby. I feel strongly about that.
The backstory was that she was very much in love with the father of the child and turned up pregnant by him. But she was seventeen when she turned up pregnant and her parents insisted she give the baby up for adoption.
The punchline to this story is that she turned eighteen shortly before the baby was born. So she didn't actually have to do as she was told by her parents.
She could have kept the baby because she was now a legal adult. She just didn't quite understand the significance of that until maybe a few weeks after she had given up the baby and then it was too late to change her mind and say "No, I'm keeping my baby."
The other punchline to this story -- the reason I think her life would have made a difference had she kept the baby -- is that she was White and the father was Black. The TV show producers arranged a reunion and you could just see how very fond they had been of each other before the world tore them apart.
I think if she had kept the baby and married the father, simply being allowed to live an ordinary life with the man she loved and raise their child together would have been a big deal serving as an important antidote to the racist garbage America is still mired in. Just loving him and their child would have been a profound act of defiance against so much hatred.
Black families and interracial couples and the like are routinely destroyed by "the system." This particular couple and their child are not the only ones who have gotten crushed under the boot of American racism.
I managed to keep my small family together while homeless. I and my two adult sons managed to stay together and get back into housing as a family unit even though the shelter system is actively hostile to family units with adult children and insists on breaking up such families as part of the intake process. I never found a shelter that would take the three of us as a family unit.
While homeless, I knew a homeless woman of color who felt forced to choose to send her 18 year old son away so she could get a spot in a homeless shelter and I think that likely the difference in outcome between her family and mine was at least partly fueled by a difference in skin color. The world sees me as a White woman. That no doubt helped account for a variety of differences in our lives that added up to her family being broken up and mine surviving the long storm of homelessness.
I've wanted many, many times to tell this story here -- the one about the woman who gave up her baby for adoption only to realize later she didn't actually have to -- and I've started to write it before but I don't recall if I ever actually published it. I publish a lot of stuff and I sometimes redact stuff and I've recently redacted a lot of stuff, so it not being currently live anywhere (that I recall) is not evidence that I didn't at some point tell it.
The point I wanted to make with that story originally is that the time to change your mind is the point at which something pertinent to the decision changes. In this case, that would have been her age. When she turned eighteen and became a legal adult, that was game changing. She was just too slow on the uptake to take proper advantage of it, unfortunately.
Most people seem to not be very good at recognizing that pertinent details have now changed and NOW is the time to rethink their course of action and wonder if they should do something else. Most people seem to do like she did: Go forward with the decision made previously even though something important has changed.
The point at which you need to revisit your plans or course of action is the point at which something has changed or the point at which new information reveals that your underlying assumptions were in error. People slow to do that get less optimal results than people who are more proactive about saying "Wait a minute. If that detail has changed (or that fact is not what I thought it was), I need to rethink this and decide if this still makes sense or not."
I've been slow to tell this story -- at least I THINK I haven't previously told it, though it's been on my mind a WHOLE lot for many months now -- because I had reason to fear that people who were behaving badly towards me would run it through their warped minds and it would end up biting me in the butt to tell it.
And I am not feeling like that anymore. So here it is.
She was like forty or something and she said she felt like she had given up her entire life when she gave up that baby. As someone who believes we are spirits in the material world, I buy that statement from her as something real.
Her life never amounted to anything. She never had a real career. She was working at a convenience store or something.
In contrast, I think her life would have been quietly a thing that made a difference had she kept the baby. I feel strongly about that.
The backstory was that she was very much in love with the father of the child and turned up pregnant by him. But she was seventeen when she turned up pregnant and her parents insisted she give the baby up for adoption.
The punchline to this story is that she turned eighteen shortly before the baby was born. So she didn't actually have to do as she was told by her parents.
She could have kept the baby because she was now a legal adult. She just didn't quite understand the significance of that until maybe a few weeks after she had given up the baby and then it was too late to change her mind and say "No, I'm keeping my baby."
The other punchline to this story -- the reason I think her life would have made a difference had she kept the baby -- is that she was White and the father was Black. The TV show producers arranged a reunion and you could just see how very fond they had been of each other before the world tore them apart.
I think if she had kept the baby and married the father, simply being allowed to live an ordinary life with the man she loved and raise their child together would have been a big deal serving as an important antidote to the racist garbage America is still mired in. Just loving him and their child would have been a profound act of defiance against so much hatred.
Black families and interracial couples and the like are routinely destroyed by "the system." This particular couple and their child are not the only ones who have gotten crushed under the boot of American racism.
I managed to keep my small family together while homeless. I and my two adult sons managed to stay together and get back into housing as a family unit even though the shelter system is actively hostile to family units with adult children and insists on breaking up such families as part of the intake process. I never found a shelter that would take the three of us as a family unit.
While homeless, I knew a homeless woman of color who felt forced to choose to send her 18 year old son away so she could get a spot in a homeless shelter and I think that likely the difference in outcome between her family and mine was at least partly fueled by a difference in skin color. The world sees me as a White woman. That no doubt helped account for a variety of differences in our lives that added up to her family being broken up and mine surviving the long storm of homelessness.
I've wanted many, many times to tell this story here -- the one about the woman who gave up her baby for adoption only to realize later she didn't actually have to -- and I've started to write it before but I don't recall if I ever actually published it. I publish a lot of stuff and I sometimes redact stuff and I've recently redacted a lot of stuff, so it not being currently live anywhere (that I recall) is not evidence that I didn't at some point tell it.
The point I wanted to make with that story originally is that the time to change your mind is the point at which something pertinent to the decision changes. In this case, that would have been her age. When she turned eighteen and became a legal adult, that was game changing. She was just too slow on the uptake to take proper advantage of it, unfortunately.
Most people seem to not be very good at recognizing that pertinent details have now changed and NOW is the time to rethink their course of action and wonder if they should do something else. Most people seem to do like she did: Go forward with the decision made previously even though something important has changed.
The point at which you need to revisit your plans or course of action is the point at which something has changed or the point at which new information reveals that your underlying assumptions were in error. People slow to do that get less optimal results than people who are more proactive about saying "Wait a minute. If that detail has changed (or that fact is not what I thought it was), I need to rethink this and decide if this still makes sense or not."
I've been slow to tell this story -- at least I THINK I haven't previously told it, though it's been on my mind a WHOLE lot for many months now -- because I had reason to fear that people who were behaving badly towards me would run it through their warped minds and it would end up biting me in the butt to tell it.
And I am not feeling like that anymore. So here it is.