The Marriage Amendment

I live in one of the four states that will have the marriage amendment on the ballot.  For me this has caused a time of reflection.  I just wanted to share with you my thoughts.  As a note I am not going to discuss my feelings about homosexuality, because I feel that they are not relevant. 

I know why most Christians are voting for the marriage amendment.  I understand this viewpoint, after all I was an uber-conservative pastor for many years.  This world view thinks the act of homosexuality is a sin.  Nothing will change that viewpoint, sex outside of marriage and especially sex with someone of the same sex is wrong.  For this group of people the impassioned pleas, the beautiful videos of two people in love, the heart-wrenching tales of loss will not move them to think that homosexuality is anything but a sin.  I've seen shame tactics from anti-amendment groups and this will only cause stronger resolution in their unwavering hearts.  In the end I know that they think that not having the legal benefits of marriage is a consequence for choosing a life of sin.

I get not wanting to endorse something that they feel is a sin.  BUT here is what is frustrating me about all of it: This amendment is not about endorsing homosexuality.  If this amendment passes homosexual marriage will still be illegal in my state.  So, to me, this amendment feels more like going overboard to try to stop something that is already illegal.  In the end I feel it is persecution of another people group.  Christians claim to know about persecution, a limiting to feel free to practice their faith, so they should understand even so slightly the feeling of persecution.

Let me explain further:  This amendment is trying to limit others belief systems.  Yes, I did say belief system.  In America we have worked hard to embrace freedom of religion and freedom of achieving your personal dream as long as it does not harm others.  This country is a haven for all to practice any kind of belief system.  It seems to me that Christians tolerate Buddhists, Hindus, Satanists, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses etc., if nothing else hoping that one day they will turn to Jesus.  We live in a country where people are free to practice hate like the KKK and Westboro Church.  These detestable people follow their convictions and practice their belief systems under the guise of freedom with all that entails.  We are also free to spend our whole lives serving the poor loving other and following examples like Mother Theresa.  So not only are we free to practice our religion we are free to practice our belief system and personal set of morals and follow these convictions out in our actions.  So for example we are free to abuse alcohol or free to be dry depending on what we believe about alcohol.  I'm guessing you can see where this line of logic is heading. 

I think that the culture of homosexuality has become it's own people group.  There are many variables within that group, but in the end it has become a culture because of the stigma that has been attached to it.  This group of people has become a community, embracing one another, supporting one another, and caring for one another when often they are abandoned by their families, friends, and churches.  They are often more of a community than most churches I know.  Here is a group of people that are trying to live out their own belief system and in it find a way of life within that set of beliefs.  Marriage has become part of this culture, part of what is important, a way of life.

So to me this amendment feels like it is trying to attack another groups belief system and that is persecution.  It seems to me that that is not what we should strive for.  It seems to me that attacking a persons way of life in the name is Jesus is wrong.

In the end I don't care if homosexuality is a sin or not.  I just don't want to hurt others in the name of Jesus and that is why I am voting no.  

Looking Back

You never know how bad it really was until you look back and see what you just went through.   I didn’t know how sick I was, I really had no idea.  The only one who possibly had any clue was my husband.  He watched my quick decent into sickness, but I don’t think even he could really tell how sick I was.  It took me a while to realize that this wasn’t a passing thing. 

It took me even longer to realize how not normal I had become.  Normal people don’t pass out every day.  Normal people don’t get so tired after going to church that it takes two whole days to recover.  Normal is not being so weak that it was difficult to lift a laundry basket or getting winded by going up and down the stairs.  It was a slow realization two years ago that I was truly ill.  It has even been scary, there have been ER visits, many times of passing out, a few times of passing out and then being unresponsive, but mostly it has been extreme exhaustion.

This illness started to affect my thought processes.  My thoughts were foggy and I lost words in the middle of sentences.  I would go to do something and then forget about it for days.  I missed two very important conferences for my son.  Even reading became a chore because I couldn’t keep my train of thought for long enough to finish more than a few pages. 

My husband and I started referring to the “Old Heather.”  The one that seemed more vibrant, that got out and did things, that wrote, that had ideas, and so much more.  The worse it got the more I feared that something was desperately wrong, but the less able I was to make concrete decisions to help myself.

Then one day in November of 2010 I got a break through.  I got on an elliptical machine with a heart monitor.  I watched my heart rate soar into the 200’s almost immediately.  I suddenly became lightheaded and wanted to pass out.  I did it again another day with the same effect.  Finally I was able to go to the doctor with two concrete symptoms; passing out and a high heart rate.  Finally a doctor took me seriously.

It took almost a year but I was able to finally see the specialist I needed.  I finally got an answer; Dysautonomia.  It’s a big word that means your autonomic system is out of whack.  Your autonomic system controls all of the unconscious functions of the body, including the cardiovascular system, gastrointestinal system, metabolic system, and endocrine system.  All of mine are severely messed up.  It’s not fun.  It’s also rare and so it is not something most people or even medical professionals even know about. 

Bad day

I got to go on a steroid for a while, but that caused major side effects that made everything worse.  Honestly the worst side effect was that I was bleeding constantly.  One of my biggest struggles is that I don’t have enough blood.  Thus I have low blood pressure.  Not the good kind of low blood pressure, really low blood pressure.  It’s the kind that makes me exhausted all the time, I don’t get enough blood to my brain and that makes it hard for me to think, I pass out because my body is trying to get blood to my brain and it makes me fall down for gravity to accomplish that. 

So all the traditional therapies didn’t work for me because my blood loss was too great every month.  The older I got the heaver my period got and thus the more blood I lost and couldn’t reproduce it fast enough.

This was compounded by my miscarriage in 2010.  I almost died when I lost Elya because I almost hemorrhaged to death.  We didn’t know about my blood issues at the time or I think different steps would have been taken.  After the miscarriage I was severely anemic.  For six months I struggled to get that under control.  My doctor thinks I never recovered from the miscarriage and that is why between that and the monthly bleeding I was getting worse with every month. 

If I wanted to get better I had to stop my monthly cycle.  In my case the only way to do that was to have a uterine ablation or a hysterectomy.  Either one meant the lost of my ability to have any more babies.  It was devastating for me.  In March of this year I had a uterine ablation.  It was an awful experience and I ended up in the emergency room later that day because of complications. 

Even with all the complications a couple weeks later I started to notice a difference.  I had energy.  My mental confusion started to lessen.  I looked around the house and was horrified about how messy it had become.  How did I not notice this before?  I looked at the relationship between my husband and I and saw how much it had suffered, and the same for my children, my friends and my family.  I had been afraid to drive because I passed out once while I was diving.  I realized how much time I had spent at home. 

Everyone around me had suffered because of me and I still feel a tremendous amount of guilt about that.  If you are reading this and you are one of the people I have let down in the last four years, I am sorry.  Terribly horribly sorry.   

So now here we are five months after my surgery.  I’m not all better, not by a long shot.  I’m still learning to manage my chronic illness, but I can manage it now with traditional therapy.  Learning to take care of myself is difficult, it doesn’t come naturally, but I’m trying one day at a time.  There are days I forget what is required of me, or days I’m lazy and just don’t want to.  But I know now how sick I was and I don’t want to be there again.  It’s a learning process and I still haven’t figured it all out yet. 

It sounds corny by I feel like I’m starting a new part of my life.  I want “Old Heather” to be the sick Heather.  I want my identity to become something that is different than what I have experienced the past four years. 

Thus I want to chronicle my victories.  A victory is anything that I do that is creative again, or organizing a closet out of chaos, or turning my chaos into cleanliness, or just writing again.  It is being with my family in a real way, or having fun with friends.  A victory is anything that I haven’t been able to do these last few years. 

I can’t wait to start this new part of my life.

"October Baby" Gets it Wrong

October Baby is the latest feel good film from the Christian film industry.  I loathe the premise behind this movie.  Lets break it down shall we?  A note: there are plenty of spoilers in this review.

If you want the quick version of my criticism it is this: This film is full of adoption cliches that are largely believed by society, mainly Christian society.  It once again proves that the telling of a story to propagate a pro-life agenda is more important to filmmakers than finding out the intricacies of adoption and portraying them in a realistic light. 

The protagonist of “October Baby” is named Hannah.  She is an aspiring actress that finds out though a series of events that she is adopted.  Let me repeat this: a full grown woman does not know she is adopted.  This rarely happens today.  This is an idea that takes adoption back fifty years when it was shameful to adopt, and therefore must be kept a secret.  It propagates the blank slate theory that says that adoptive parents can mold a child to their family just like the child was biologically theirs, so it is not necessary to tell the child they are adopted.  This has been proven not to be the case, we now know that biology forms a great deal of who a child is as well as nurture.  It is not just appearance that gets passed down from mother to child.  And yet the film makers make their first move in propagating old adoption myths and stereotypes thus setting the tone for dated ideas about adoption, adoptees, birth mothers, and even adoptive parents.  


Hannah finds out that she was adopted because she collapses following a play and the ensuing medical tests that are the result.  When Hannah confronts her adoptive parents they admit that she was born early and she was adopted.  It frustrates me here to no end that the adoptive parents hid medical information from their own daughter.  Even as an adult, they kept important medical information from an adoptee thus treating her as perpetual child.  This is something that adoptees know all to well, being treated as children.  Adoptees are denied their original birth certificate and therefore have no access to their medical history.  Once again other people have decided for the adoptee what is important for them, something that those of us that are not adopted will never have to struggle with.  Yet the film doesn’t seem to be about the anger that Hannah has at her adoptive parents for lying to her and keeping secrets from her, it’s about forgiving her birthmother.

“October Baby” shows adoptive parents as insecure people that need to hide secrets instead of the post-modern adoptive parent that often realize how important identity is in a child.  Most modern adoptive parents know that even though biology might be threatening to them, the emotional well-being of their adopted child is more important than any insecurity they have.  Sure eighteen years ago in 1994, when Hannah was supposedly born, open adoption was new and semi-open adoption was being touted as the perfect solution because open adoption seemed scary to many.  Regardless of that fact, in 1994, there were hundreds of books out about raising an adopted child, and none of those advocated lying to your adopted child and telling them they were yours biologically.  There were even a few book that talked about fully open adoption, agencies touted semi-open as healthy alternative.  Instead of doing research about adoptive options and attitudes in 1994, the filmmakers took adoption and adoptive parent’s attitudes back to the 1960‘s to suit their pro-life agenda.

When the adoptive parents reveal to Hannah that she is adopted they also reveal that she is the result of a botched abortion.  Here is where I personally take the biggest issue with this movie.  Yes, this is a possible story.  Yes, there are women that have abortions that do not work and the result is the mother giving up their child for adoption.  But this story line?  It makes me angry.  The vast majority of birth mothers love their children.  The vast majority of birth mothers did not consider abortion for their child.  In 1994 the preponderance of women giving up their children for adoption where white, middle class, christian, nineteen year old college freshman, that were told by the church that adoption was the right thing to do.  These women were sent to maternity homes, they were kept in their parents houses away from prying eyes, they were told to be quiet and that they needed to pay penance for their sin of fornication by giving up their child for adoption.  The majority of these girls in 1994 were strong pro-life Christian women who only considered abortion if their mothers took them to an abortion clinic to keep the shame away from them. 

I get angry when the church and pro-lifers say that adoption is the alternative to abortion.  It is not.  Life is the alternative to abortion.  Adoption is the alternative to parenting.  These are two separate decisions that should not be made at the same time.  Every woman that has ever been in a crisis pregnancy knows that first you decide if you want to have and abortion or not, then you decide what you are going to do with the baby once you decide to let the baby live.  Once again, adoption is not the alternative to abortion. 

Hannah goes on road trip to find her birth mother.  Once she finds her, she is rejected by her.  I admit, not an uncommon story.  It is however not always true.  Reunion is often longed for by birth mothers, sought after, hoped for, dreamed about, and generally wanted.  Of course that would complicate the movie too much, it is much easier to fall back on the “birth mother moves on with her life and forgets about the child” way of thinking.  From experience I can tell you that that is almost never true.  It is now known that giving up your child for adoption produces trauma in most women.  Birth mothers often have PTSD, need therapy, or have lifelong issues because of relinquishment.  Often rejection during reunion is because a birth mother’s coping mechanisms became overwhelmed during post placement and she needed to shut down and shut out all memories to emotionally survive.  Birth mothers do not forget, we do not simply move on.  Healing is a process that really is never fully complete, pain, loss, and grief for most of us are part of our daily lives.  It becomes bricks that we carry around with us and we learn to carry them, thus becoming stronger people, but yet so bogged down by the weight of it all.  

There is a scene in this movie were Hannah’s birth mother is carrying a little girl.  It is estimated that 40% of birth mothers go on to have secondary infertility and are never able to have children, some just choose not to, the trauma being too much for them.  It false the idea that birth mothers can "just have another baby."

In conclusion, “October Baby” proves that it is pro-life propaganda instead of a honest portrayal of adoption.  It makes me sad that adoptees are going to go to this movie and once again hear the myths and stereotypes that they are all too familiar with.  It makes me sad that people will see this movie and think they know about adoption instead of an accurate portrayal of what adoption really is.  It is upsetting that once again birth mothers will be vilified and yet at the same time portrayed as heroes for giving their child life.  It angers me that this will be a catalyst for someone to adopt, not knowing the realities of adoption. 

October Baby is just another film that gets adoption wrong.