Thought Provoking Conversations

In the past couple of weeks I've had a couple of interesting conversations with complete strangers. It always amazes what people will come up with and while I usually like to take the opportunity to educate them on the positives of adoption, sometimes I just have to let it slide.

Take the lady who assumed that I gave birth to Baby K. Those of you who know my girls, know that we do not look even remotely related-there is no match in our skin, eye or hair coloring.

Baby K and I go to our local mall and walk several times a week after we drop G off at school and most of our "walking friends" know about our adoption experience. This one particular morning, we encountered an older lady that we hadn't met before and the conversation started out mundanely enough about how thin I was and how it was such great exercise to walk with the baby in a Baby Bjorn.

This nice lady then started to tell me about her granddaughter who had gained 50 lbs while pregnant, didn't have good eating habits, didn't like to exercise and was going to be carrying that weight for a long time and how lucky I was to have lost it so quickly, blah, blah, blah. Not only was I finding it hard to get a word in edgewise, I was also finding it hard to get away from her. It was at that point when I realized if she was going to talk so harshly about her own family, it really wasn't my job to educate her about mine.

My next interesting conversation was the lady who said, "I just don't understand how a mother could give up her baby?" Again, this was an older lady and so I feel that some of these thoughts can be accounted for because of the generational difference but I didn't back down this time. I told her how much respect I had for both of my girls birthmothers and how difficult a choice it must have been for them to put their girls well-being before their own. I also took the opportunity to educate her on the conditions that these women live in-the poverty and the lack of education-and most likely the conditions that my girls would have been living in had their birthmother's decisions been different.

I'd like to think that I was able to convey how blessed we are to have two such wonderful girls because of these two women who for the most part are anonymous to so many. There is not a day that goes by that I don't look at my girls and see their birthmothers, it's impossible not to, and there is not a day that goes by that I don't say a prayer for these two women who have given me the most precious gifts in my life.