Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Story of Joseph - A Preface

I've been working on Joseph's adoption story for a while now but I kept running into a couple of roadblocks.

First, it was getting so long. I just kept thinking of more and more details that I wanted to add and it was kind of getting out of control. I decided to remedy that by breaking the story up into chapters. I hope that doesn't seem really obnoxious and self-important. It just seemed like the best way to get it all out there without having a one blog post that took 4 hours to read.

Second, I was starting to worry about some of the stuff I wrote about. I wondered if I was crossing some lines when it came to respecting other people's privacy. I wondered if I wrote about the difficulty Joseph's birth mother went through that I might be saying more than I should. I finally decided to just write what feels right to me and to write it from my own perspective. I'm not trying to tell any one's innermost secrets here. I'm just writing about the events from my own personal point of view. Other people's version of events may differ from mine but in the end this is my story, the story of how I became Joseph's mother and I feel like the events leading up to it are mine to share or not share as I see fit.

That brings me to the last issue. I'm going to try to keep in mind how Joseph might feel if he were some someday stumble across this account. I don't want anything I write to be hurtful to him. Therefor everything I write here will be stuff that Joseph already knows or will know someday (when he's the right age). I've been very honest with him about how he became our son and I don't think there's anything in this story that would too surprising to him. I just hope I'm able to do justice to the crazy series of events that went into making my son, my son.

Thanks for sticking with me. Very soon I'll be getting to the good stuff. And the bad and the ugly and the crazy and the wonderful.

5 comments:

PunditMom said...

I am struggling with this, as well. While I have done a lifebook for PunditGirl, I haven't written down much about the story about how we cam to be her parents and always wonder how much she will be glad to have and how much she would just as soon not know.

Sarah said...

It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into what to write and how to write it, and I can't wait to read your story!

Jen said...

punditmom - Finding the right balance is tough. I think Joseph needs to know his history but I have to find a way to explain it in a way that won't hurt him.

caustic - I'm loving typing it up. It makes me glad all over again for how things turned out.

Sarah said...

Writing about your past is like flipping through the old photo album of your mind. You can see how nervous or terrified you were then, and think things over again from the perspective of someone who knows how it all turned out.

Anonymous said...

I'm coming to this kind of late but some dear friends in the east side of my state liberated a young boy from the foster care system, with great difficulty vis a vis the court system. His mom was lost to crack, and the last time he'd been with her she nearly killed him.

the judge that finalized their adoption told him they'd be lucky if they didn't have to find residential care for him eventually 'because obviously he's gonna be retarded."

Their son, now 13, gets As without help, is a motivated student and brilliant artist. We lurves him to death (he doesn't have any grandmas because his parents are older, so he adopted my partner as his 'granma' and when he's on this side of the state he's glued to her side, his parents are chopped liver.

Keep up the good work!