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Closet Racist, Adoptive Mom, Annoying Narcissist ...


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The comments are just atrocious, and to say she is "heavily moderating" is an understatement. This one shows me that it is NOT about her feeling that Sarah is being treated condescendingly, but that Laurel feels her bio kids are left-out.

"We adopted 3 African children that matched up age-wise with our 3 youngest bio. kids. The first 6+ months they were home, they were treated like ROYALTY at our church, while our bio. kids were COMPLETELY ignored. (This was HARD for our 6, 8, and 11 year old bio. kids.) Even church staff who had never spoken to our bio. kids (in the 7 years we'd been at the church), suddenly became like best friends with our adopted kids . . . loudly welcoming them by name every.single.week. (and never even asking the names of our bio. kids). Other people at church who we had never met, brought extravagant gifts for our adopted children, and invited them to come over and ride their horses (without inviting the same-age bio. kids). It was just HARD . . .and AWKWARD . . .and Just.Plain.Strange.

The attention to them being "cute" . . . and people wanting to touch their hair . . . was fine when they were LITTLE, but it is just NOT OKAY for a 14 year old girl.

Nice that your close family and friends treat all the kids the same. Sadly, that has not always been the case for us.

Thanks for commenting."

She makes me sick.

ETA: "(This was HARD for our 6, 8, and 11 year old bio. kids.)" -- I bet it was awfully hard for your adopted daughter to be sent away to reform school, but I don't see you crying huge tears about it, Laurel.

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First of all, I am very, very, very clumsy. Because I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and clumsiness is a symptom of EDS. (It's an issue with proprioception.) I wasn't diagnosed until 27, so everyone assumed it was "normal" clumsiness. You know what my mom did? Figured out and taught me ways to control my clumsiness. I don't drink out of cups without lids, for example. That way, when I knock the cup over, nothing/very little comes out.

That's called parenting, bitch.

Secondly, I cannot with people abandoning adopted children. I had a dog for 12 years who had issues. I didn't go on vacation for 12 years because his issues made kenneling him, or having a dogsitter, impossible. I had to walk him late at night/early in the morning, muzzled. Having people over involved a lot of monitoring him. I never even considered getting rid of him. I adopted him, I agreed to care for him, so I did. And I consider myself lucky, I got a soulmate out of the deal.

This bitch can't muster a similar level of devotion to a human child?! I cannot. I just can't.

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The more I am reading on these "failed" fundy adoptions, the more I want to know why these people are not held legally accountable for turning these children out of their homes or abandoning them or returning them like spoiled produce? There should be both a legal and moral accountability and they need to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for their actions toward these children.

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The ones who dumped my son thus far have had NO accountability. They did go around telling people that they were paying us to take him....blatant LIE but makes them look better if they paid for his care after dumping him. Nope, they were such wonderful parents that they showed up with only three days left in his meds that cost us $200 to refill as soon as she skipped back out. That's not counting the need for basic things like a new mattress and bed for him, the complete lack of clothing and basic possessions he had nor the shocking levels of food he consumes because they starved him for four years smack-dab as he entered puberty!

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I've been following a blog called onethankfulmom.com. I thought Laurel's adventures sounded awfully familiar, and just realized that her blog is listed by Lisa, blog owner at One Thankful Mom, as one of her favorite blogs. Yes, Laurel has commented on Lisa's blog, telling an abbreviated version of her story. Lisa has a total of eleven children (counting the one she gave up for adoption after a teenage pregnancy) and four are adopted from Africa. One of her adopted daughters is now in a residential treatment facility. I was on the fence about Lisa. She seems like a person who is trying hard to love all her children, and has gone to several courses and such trying to get help.

At the same time, I feel there is something off about her. Like many fundies, she seems obsessed with order and control. She's always tired, and she worships a suffering Jesus who seems to bestow suffering on his favorites so they can learn a good lesson--not the best way to think about problems encountered in family relationships, imho, since it turns your kids' developmental needs into crap from Jesus that is really all about YOU. Recently, she has had a recurrence of the same clotting disorder that put Jen Fulwiler the Catholic blogger in the hospital. Apparently that's why Lisa had to stop giving birth. So, she has what she knows is a life-threatening illness, yet she still adopted four more children after giving birth to seven.

One thing that bothers me about Lisa as well as many of these other fundie adoption bloggers is that they have little concern for the practical needs of their children. They don't seem to realize that children who have been traumatized need a peaceful environment where their needs are met as easily as possible. They need a sense of personal space and privacy, not to be dumped in a cramped space with multiple siblings who don't even speak their language. They don't need expectations that they will immediately fall into step with rigid scheduling and highly controlled behavior. They need to be able to scream and cry sometimes without being made to feel like the Bad One who is upsetting eleventy other people all crammed into the same room. WHY is this so hard to understand?

There was no adoption in my family, but even so, my sisters and I often felt absolutely desperate for our own space. We lived in a small house with one bathroom, all three of us shared a small bedroom with only one tiny closet, and our father didn't believe in privacy for anyone but himself. It made us nuts. I would think that children thrown into a totally strange culture would feel even more strongly the need for peace and time. Now that Lisa's daughter has been sent to an RTC, Lisa has realized that she'll need her own room when she gets home--so they're renovating their garage. On the one hand, I give her credit for being willing to change. But jeez, this wasn't rocket science. Why not make the changes BEFORE you adopt? Also, sending the "damaged" adoptive kid to live in the garage doesn't send the best message.

(edited to break link)

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That Pound Pup site was chillingly instructive. Take the case of Emily and Eric Svenningsen, who were "disrupted" out of their widowed mother's house because she "couldn't handle" taking care of them along with her five bio kids. She made Emily sleep in a tent with no bug screen as a punishment for she couldn't even remember what, wouldn't let her eat with the others, etc. Overwhelmed fundie mom with limited resources, right?

Except that her ex-mother also tried to cut her ex-daughter out of a share of the late husband's estate, which was worth $250 million. She was so stinking rich that she could have gotten one nanny per child, and she still played out this sad scenario.

Pound pups indeed.

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I did a cursory look at Lisa's blog. I see a mother aimed for absolute failure from the get-go who is committed to her children and continues to learn as she goes. She's had her children in therapy for years, which is pretty rare to see in these families. They are in far more than attachment therapy, including trying EMDR which *is* the best known therapy for trauma issues.

She was a conservative Christian mother with not enough space, NO experience and a huge house full of children (by contrast though I have a large family I only had three when I did my first adoption and even then it sometimes felt overwhelming trying to balance those needs). She adopted a large group of at least a few non-biologically related children in ONE swoop, which ethical agencies WILL NOT ALLOW. They don't typically allow it for precisely the reason this family demonstrates, it's rarely successful. She has had to put one in RTC but the RTC does sound healthy and apropriate. There are children (bio and adopted) who did require out of home care sometimes short term and sometimes long-term. She continues to spend time one on one with her hurting children, fully participates in the care her child is getting in RTC and has plans for this child to come home. Giving up, giving away her children doesn't appear to enter her radar.

Maybe there's something I'm missing but she appears to be doing the best she can with the situatio she finds herself in. She appears to be the anti-thesis of Laura, from what I can see.

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Do any of you read the Mouro family's blog?

themourofamily.blogspot.com

She's another really annoying, over-the-top dripping with righteousness, quiver full-er. They adopted 2 kids from Liberia a few years ago and ended up disrupting both adoptions... if you just want to read about those kids, look under Abbie (poor little girl that they even renamed like a year or so AFTER she moved to the US hoping it would give her more of a 'fresh start') and Jerome (who was only home with them for less than a year). She's had a couple more bio kids since adopting/disrupting, and they also had a huge scare a year ago when their toddler son nearly drowned in a bucket of water. He made a full recovery which is wonderful but there's a whole lot of annoying religiosity around her posts about that incident.

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I did a cursory look at Lisa's blog. I see a mother aimed for absolute failure from the get-go who is committed to her children and continues to learn as she goes. She's had her children in therapy for years, which is pretty rare to see in these families. They are in far more than attachment therapy, including trying EMDR which *is* the best known therapy for trauma issues.

She was a conservative Christian mother with not enough space, NO experience and a huge house full of children (by contrast though I have a large family I only had three when I did my first adoption and even then it sometimes felt overwhelming trying to balance those needs). She adopted a large group of at least a few non-biologically related children in ONE swoop, which ethical agencies WILL NOT ALLOW. They don't typically allow it for precisely the reason this family demonstrates, it's rarely successful. She has had to put one in RTC but the RTC does sound healthy and apropriate. There are children (bio and adopted) who did require out of home care sometimes short term and sometimes long-term. She continues to spend time one on one with her hurting children, fully participates in the care her child is getting in RTC and has plans for this child to come home. Giving up, giving away her children doesn't appear to enter her radar.

Maybe there's something I'm missing but she appears to be doing the best she can with the situatio she finds herself in. She appears to be the anti-thesis of Laura, from what I can see.

I agree - I am always nervous to read Lisa's next post (just because it seems things are so incredibly precarious), but I do think that she is committed to her children, and that is at least more than I can say about Laurel. I am always shocked that Lisa considers Laurel a "friend," given how different their approaches are, though.

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There is a hesitation amongst adoptive parents to judge another parent's struggle and journey. I've been there. We tried REALLY hard to not judge nor condemn our son's first adoptive family at first. We reminded ourselves that Micah was insane to parent and we always had the risk he would require an out of home placement to keep everyone safe, but we were 1000% committed that he would ALWAYS be ours and we would ALWAYS be his. We told ourselves that while we could NEVER make the choice to throw away a child, we were stronger, more resourceful, more educated, and more experienced than most. We could not stand in another's shoes and condemn a hard choice.

All that changed in two weeks of holding the child who was thrown away and hearing his pain.

I truly believe that Lisa stands where I did a year ago, in the knowledge that it's WRONG, so very WRONG.....but you cannot judge because you cannot stand in that family's shoes. It was when I DID stand in their shoes that I lost all sympathy and compassion for them and realized that the only one who neeed compassion and sympathy is the child who gets thrown away.

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First of all, I am very, very, very clumsy. Because I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and clumsiness is a symptom of EDS. (It's an issue with proprioception.) I wasn't diagnosed until 27, so everyone assumed it was "normal" clumsiness. You know what my mom did? Figured out and taught me ways to control my clumsiness. I don't drink out of cups without lids, for example. That way, when I knock the cup over, nothing/very little comes out.

That's called parenting, bitch.

She had one post about how clumsy her adopted kids were and how they had a hard time thinking ahead of time about consequences of actions (like if I throw this ball at the window, the window might break) and I left a comment saying my ADHD kid was very similar and maybe it wasn't RAD or anything to do with being adopted, just that some kids are like that. She didn't like my comment... basically said none of her many many bio kids were like this so therefore it must be due to adoption issues. (or.. maybe? ... your genetically-related kids are all more coordinated than average??)

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I did find my adopted kiddos less coordinated at first. I also found them to be less able to do logical thinking a lot of times. I NEVER assumed it was because of RAD. I assumed it was because their brains were on hyperdrive from all of the changes in their lives. Geesh, when you have to press the lever on the fridge a million times because you are convinced that it's a trick and fresh, safe drinking water will NOT come out this time, coordination is HARDLY your biggest concern!

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Lisa, chaotic life. That was my feeling about her, too, but I don't have the knowledge you do. I think she's doing the best she can, under the circumstances. What disturbed me a lot about reading her blog was seeing how MANY people in the comments had adopted from overseas--often from Africa--and were now having disturbed or disrupted relationships with their adopted children. Before that, I thought the people we talk about on FJ were exceptions. I didn't know it was that common.

I don't understand why it is possible to adopt without being educated about the challenges you may face, and getting a good knowledge of how to meet your children's future needs. It doesn't seem fair to anyone--especially the children. (I don't think people should give birth to biological kids without understanding how to meet their needs, either! But that seems to be a hopeless cause.)

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Well wow, she sure got the last word in! Zing, Laurel. You've really proven that you DO love your daughter. :angry-screaming:

ourjourneyoffaith.net/2013/04/some-days.html

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Bizarre and still so totally racist and none of those women GET IT. WHY did they adopt minorities if they cannot grasp their own racist undertones? Furthermore, what the HECK is wrong with their bio kids? All of my bios at times have been given random gifts JUST LIKE their siblings. I choose to believe that when my children reach out and touch someone's life that occassionally that person responds in random acts of kindness back to my children. I focus on teaching them to give and touch lives for the sake of giving and touching and never for the random potential gifts but I also am not so arrogant, racist and stupid as to try to assign some racial connotation to those gifts.

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Right, when she said "it's just as well she didn't stop herself with her hands" I assumed the following sentence would have been because she could have hurt herself or something, not that she would have made more holes in the wall.

Unlike the "china rolls" blogger or the one desparate to stretch her daughters' hair, this one doesn't even seem to make a pretence of how much she loves and terasures her adopted children. People like these shouldn't be able to adopt, you should adopt because you want a child, not to supposedly save their soul and otherwise treat them as a burden.

wait, who is this?

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This woman can just jump up her own ass and suffocate on her own shit fumes, instead of spewing her shit on the interwebz.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It just gets worse. And worse. And worse.

ourjourneyoffaith.net/2013/04/when-lollipops-holding-hands-prejudice.html

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It just gets worse. And worse. And worse.

ourjourneyoffaith.net/2013/04/when-lollipops-holding-hands-prejudice.html

I. cant. Read. her. Blog. Meaningfully?

because of the Way. She. Punctuates.

And Abuses Capital. Letters.

And Color.

She. Also. misuses. White. Space.

Never mind the font sizes. And Types.

That Are All Over. The Place?

The. Fact. That. She. Homeschools. Frightens. Me.

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It just gets worse. And worse. And worse.

ourjourneyoffaith.net/2013/04/when-lollipops-holding-hands-prejudice.html

Actually, I see her point here (which does not excuse the rest of her racist BS). It is a condescending, infantilizing way to treat a 14 year old. As the "whitest" looking member of my extended family, I have been in situations where the authority figure would only speak to me, and would ignore or condescend to other, older relatives. This strikes me as an example of the nurse other ing Sara in an inappropriate way.

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I. cant. Read. her. Blog. Meaningfully?

because of the Way. She. Punctuates.

And Abuses Capital. Letters.

And Color.

She. Also. misuses. White. Space.

Never mind the font sizes. And Types.

That Are All Over. The Place?

The. Fact. That. She. Homeschools. Frightens. Me.

It helps if you read it in James T. Kirk's voice. It's the only way I can get through it.

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This Woman.

Seems to take OFFENSE

AT EVERYTHING.

Who the fuck

makes such a big deal

out of strangers being NICE

to Their kids?

TAKE THE LOLLIPOP

in the Dr.'s office

OR DON'T.

Nobody CARES.

And it is NOT

an International Incident.

STFU AND DEAL!!!!!!11!!

:penguin-no:

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I wouldnt say it was racist, not everything is to do with race. It appears that the nurse thought she was younger because she is short for her age, and would have still done that if Sarah was white.

It is the kind of thing that would be embarassing for a 14 year old (I am short as well, and when I was 14 people used to think I was about 12, and often arent sure that I am an adult now) and is very condecending to talk to a teenager like that, but its not racist.

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Sometimes people

do NICE things ...

and it's not because they're RACIST;

it's because they're trying to be

NICE.

In fact, thinking that the child's race

is the only reason someone would be friendly

is actually the most Racist PART of your whole post.

).

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I wouldnt say it was racist, not everything is to do with race. It appears that the nurse thought she was younger because she is short for her age, and would have still done that if Sarah was white.

It is the kind of thing that would be embarassing for a 14 year old (I am short as well, and when I was 14 people used to think I was about 12, and often arent sure that I am an adult now) and is very condecending to talk to a teenager like that, but its not racist.

I agree. It's condescending but probably not because of her race. I was/am the same. I also often got the feeling that the nurses at my doctors' office were afraid patients would have an extreme reaction to seeing a needle (like fainting) and that would contribute to them going over the top like that.

ETA: I don't think it was out of the ordinary for the nurse to ask if she wanted to hold her mom's hand. Lots of adults are scared of needles too and I think it's a reasonable assumption that if you bring someone back with you to get a shot you might want to be comforted by them. That part might be embarrassing for a teenager but I don't think it was as condescending as the lollipop. ETA2: Though I have to add that might become condescending if the nurse was using a baby voice.

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