Wet Feet: I used to hate you

How do you follow a post like that?? I couldn't talk about Christams shopping (I haven't started. If you must know.) I couldn't take the incongruity.

While being a bad mom on a cell phone while Naomi ran amok in Old Navy, I begged Jo to post her adoption-related something that she'd been working on. "I need something to write about!"

So Jo posted this.

Of course, we'd talked about all this before, how she eventually came around. In between talking about baby poop and the clearance section of H&M, we squeeze this these amazing, illuminating, weird discussions that can blow us both to pieces. So of course we talked adoption.

She already told you about the first time we talked adoption (if you're into trainwrecks...I'm not the OP, by the way. I was never that crazy). It did not go well. Back when I posted the entry about her, I read infertility blogs partly as an outlet for anger. It was easier getting all worked up about strangers than admitting that my feelings toward J and C were anything but neutral or positive.

In an odd coincidence the agency Jo had been in love with was the agency I placed through. I had also been in love with the agency. We might have sat in the same conference room, at the same table, next to the same bookshelf with Children of Open Adoption lined up in a pink row, paper strewn before us and trying to make life altering decisions with only a hazy idea of what the future could be. Adoption has tough questions on all sides of the table.

With her abundant references to the Talking Heads and her clearheaded way of facing her problems (as well as the shaved head picture she linked to in the very next post), she edged under my defenses. Within a few posts of the initial brouhaha, I saw that if we weren't sitting at opposite ends of that long conference table, we would be friends. If she had called me something idiotic, like a stooopid ho-bag, it would be different. But how could I resist the woman who called me a malcontent jerkwad?

When Jo found herself pregnant, I was thrilled for her, but the tiniest bit dissapointed that I wouldn't get to watch her adopt. By then I was a full on Leery Polyp fan, and suffering a bit of an as-yet-unrequited girl-crush.

Unwittingly, Jo played a major role in my own healing. I was a jugdmental twit in those days. I could not see adoptive parents as human, as people. I could only see them as figureheads of power, in need of a good spanking.

So, thanks, Jo. And sorry about the spanking.