Updates from the Mother ship

Ever since it originally aired, I have loved Good Times, that John Amos/JJ Walker vehicle with the quirky good-hearted characters living in the projects.

I’ve discovered recently that it’s on a couple of stations on my cable system and I’ve been catching up on old episodes and I just saw The Baby. I vaguely remember seeing it the first time, but I don’t remember thinking about it.

The basic plot is this.  A friend is expecting a baby, her third, and Florida and her friends decide to throw her a baby shower.  This is especially timely because the friend’s husband has passed away and the friend, who was struggling even when her husband was alive, has now been reduced to welfare and has no idea where her next dollar is coming from.  She is trying to find a job, but it’s hard with two young kids and being heavily pregnant.

She arrives and is stunned to find the baby shower.  She can’t accept anything, she tells them.  They insist, of course, and she explains that she isn’t keeping the baby.  She’s decided to place the baby for adoption immediately upon birth so that the baby has a chance for the better life she won’t be able to provide.  She has two kids, she explains, and it’s hard enough trying to keep them together, but she can do something for her baby.  She can give this baby the only gift she can, placing him or her with a family who wants a baby and is willing and able to provide for one.

The ladies are horrified. Of course she’s being rash.  She can’t give the baby up! How dreadful!  But why?  I want to know.  Why is it so dreadful?  Why shouldn’t she try to achieve better for the baby.  She can barely keep body and soul together and help her children and herself grieve for her husband.  Does she need a newborn?

But the instant you see the baby, Florida tell her, you’ll want it and want to keep it.  ‘I know,” the mom-to-be says sadly, “that’s why I’ve got it all worked out with the hospital so I won’t ever have to see the baby.”

The ladies leave after that and Florida and Wilona go off to get for dinner since they invited Lorraine (Mom-to-be) to stay.  Of course she goes into labor while they’re out.  JJ can’t get a taxi to come.  Michael goes to bring Florida and Wilona back.  Comedy gold ensues resulting in a healthy baby.  Thelma is taking care of the baby and snookers Lorraine into seeing the baby, falling instantly in love and keeping the baby, thus proving that family values are alive and well, because apparently adoption is evil.

And at the end of the show, stunned and dismayed, I thought of the poor parents who were waiting for that baby to be part of their family and how devastated they must be.  Imagine getting that call, expecting to hear that your baby is waiting for you only to be told that no, you don’t get your baby.  The mother has changed her mind.

A week or so ago, I watched a Memphis Beat episode (yes, I’m behind), “Flesh and Blood,” that shows we haven’t really come much farther in our stigmatization of adoption.  In that show, (wicked spoilers, btw) investigating a dead lawyer and a baby left in the police car, lead the police to an ex-con who did work for the lawyer.  “We’re infertile,” the ex-con explains, ” but because of my record, we can’t be approved for adoption.  [the lawyer] was helping us with our dream” (or something like that.)  They clearly didn’t murder the lawyer; he was acting for them, so they vanish into the night, never to be seen again.  The lawyer, it turns out, was murdered by the baby’s grandfather, the jackass who was trying to sell the baby and keep the money from the sale.  Which worked fine until the baby’s mother, a high-school junior and her equally juvenile boyfriend decide that they’re going to keep the baby. And again, my first reaction is for the poor want-to-be parents who can’t even buy a break.  Oh, I know, I’m supposed to think, “boo.  Ex-con shouldn’t have a kid.  He doesn’t deserve it.  He was going to BUY it.  BAD. BAD.” But I don’t.  And what about his wife?  What does she deserve?  The ex-con had paid to debt to society.  Isn’t he entitled to be able to start over?  To build a new life with his family?

Obviously the Memphis Beat adoption is a bit more controversial, but the Good Times adoption is very straight-foward.  What makes it so evil that a struggling mother can’t make an excruciating decision like that and have the support of the people around her?  She’s trying to do what’s best for the child, after long and careful consideration, and these horrible people attempt to talk her out of it and eventually seduce her into doing what they want.  It doesn’t matter that Thelma says she’ll provide free babysitting whenever Lorraine asks.  Thelma has to be in school and take care of her own life, (BTW: AFAIK, Lorraine is never mentioned again on the show, so much for Thelma and the Evans family helping out.) how much time does she really have to help out?  I get that they mean well, I really do, but how can anyone make that decision for her?  What gives these sweet, well-meaning people the right to harass this poor woman who is already under such strain?  Most importantly, what is wrong with adoption?  What makes it so terrible to give a baby to someone who desperately wants a family?

Before I started this blog, but when I started my quest for fertility, there was a period of time after the initial tests had been run, but nothing was happening when I titled my blog, “If I’m not broken, how do you fix me?”

Every test we had run suggested that there was nothing wrong with either of us.  There was no barrier to conception.  It just wasn’t happening.  Everything was good quality and in sufficient quantity.  But no magic.

After we started treatments and got pregnant, the miscarriages were unexplained too.  (This is actually pretty common.  Most miscarriages are unexplained. Often because its too early to see what might have caused it, but often because no one in the medical profession takes miscarriage seriously until your third miscarriage in a row. Then they start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you.)

When something like that happens, it does feel like a judgment.  (I read this article yesterday which glancing mentions the stigma of predestined failure)  Most people buy into the idea that, in the main, children are awarded by G-d on the basis of the worthiness of the parents.  (other than the teen slut.  She is being punished for her behavior.) If you were *meant* to have children, you would.  So simple, right? And yet, so wrong and damaging. But even the infertiles cling to that idea, because if we did something wrong, if we deserved it, if we could pinpoint what made us infertile (whether physical or divine) we could apply some corrective action to the situation.

But how do you fix something that isn’t broken?  How do you get the strength to keep trying the same things over and over hoping for a different result?

Last week on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, we lost a patriarch.  I’m failing to come up with a description.  The grandfather of my longest time friend.  The father of my mother’s best friend. One of my grandparents’ dearest friends.  All of those things are true and yet incomplete.

Until Wednesday, not a second of my life had been lived without him.  He has been a fixture, like the earth beneath my feet or the stars overhead.  The memories of him jumble in my head, too many to isolate, they tumble together and blend into the tapestry of my life.

And Janet will never know him. He has two great-grandchildren who are under a year old, and they will never know him.  And I was thinking about that, thinking about MeeMaw and worrying, because compared to MeeMaw, Sol was a bit of a spring chicken. I started to feel that familiar anger against infertility that stealer of time; and then I realized that the other two great-grandchild, Janet’s contemporaries; those mothers weren’t dealing with infertility.  This wasn’t an isolated infertile problem; losing beloved family is a problem for everyone.

And then my mind went even further.  They may not remember Sol, but Sol will remember them.  Whatever else happens forward of this, we have no control over, but every day they had with their great-grandfather is a day with him.  Every moment Janet spends with a MeeMaw is her moment with MeeMaw whether she remembers or not.  And those moments are precious.

It means as much to MeeMaw, as I’m sure it did to Sol, that he got to meet the kids and love them for all the time he had with them.  They won’t have the memories their cousins will have of their great-grandparents, but during their time together, however brief, however fleeting, they had each other.  And I can think of that time together as a blessing, without anger, which is for me another type of blessing altogether. A year ago, I would have felt only anger and deprivation.  A cry for all the time we missed, not a love for all the time we had.

And we will tell our children the stories of our grandparents and hope that through that, their memories will be a candle to light up their nights and a reminder that we are unbroken line connecting the past to the present and building the future. These are our families, our past and our future.  They only wait for us to claim them.