Me, sensitive?

A couple of weeks ago, I modeled how to get writing ideas from the newspaper to my sophomores (who don't know newspapers at all). Since I often try but have trouble getting them interested in the real news, we started in the Life section with Dear Abby and moved on to the comics. So last week, when the kids had the papers again, one of them said, Miss, you've got to see this cartoon. It was your cartoon where the girl says to the boy something like, Don't you want to find out about your birthparents? Turns out this is an ongoing story in the comic strip.

















In the month since Charlie's birthday, this subject keeps coming up everywhere I turn: this story was on NPR last week, in a Woman's Day I read while I waited for my car to be inspected. And this Hallmark mailer came to haunt me, too:



And then, another medium, another adoption message. Three weeks after Charlie's birthday, we find out on Grey's Anatomy that Izzy is a birthmother; we find this out as she finds out her daughter, now 11, needs a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, I was only able to see bits and pieces of the show because the recording is very pixelated.

is April adoption awareness month or something??? No, it isn't. I looked. That's in November.

But thanks to Google, I did find this:
"The new wave in adoption is the so-called Open Adoption, where the mother “picks” the adoptive family, there is an agreement to exchange pictures, updates and etc. The Industry professionals do not inform the Natural Mothers that it is legally unenforceable and that fully 80% of open adoptions close within a year of the final papers being signed."

It is not comforting to know that my experience is so common.

And finally, the thing that threw me over the edge happened on Friday. At school, we send out invitations for parents to write their senior sons & daughters a letter to be read at the last TEAMS meeting of the year. I have 3 seniors, and after school on Friday I received the second letter. I opened it just to see what it was (I requested it and it was addressed to my care) and a word or two caught my eye:



So I lost it. But, thankfully, I was in my classroom alone. It's good I didn't have to read that for the first time in front of a room full of teenagers. I still don't know how I'll get through it this Friday.