A Salon troll on the couch

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:15:00 +0000

On Monday, Huffington Post Parents ran a post by novelist Jennifer Coburn responding to critics of her earlier Salon piece in which she described her intense reaction to the text breakup her 14-year-old daughter received from her first boyfriend.

HuffPo Parents editor Lisa Belkin had written an essay shortly after the Salon piece ran, in which she questioned the ethics of bloggers who expose their kids’ private lives for big blog traffic and book deals, citing Coburn and fat-shaming mom Dara Lynn-Weiss as prime examples of blurry-boundaried mommy bloggers.

I may lose custody of my son: How did I get here?

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:01:00 +0000

I was adopted when I was 6 days old. It was an old-school, politically incorrect, pre-Brangelina-era adoption in which the records were closed. My original birth certificate was sealed, and with it my original identity. I knew nothing about my birth mother or why she relinquished me. Some adoptees grow up feeling firmly planted in their adoptive family and in the world. I was not one of them. Not a day went by that I didn't wonder about the woman who gave me up: what she looked like, how old she was, what she did with her life now that I wasn't in it.

The blueprint of my adoption has shaped my life. When my best kindergarten friend and I were put in two different first-grade classrooms, and she went on to make other friends, I was bereft. I felt left behind. No other little girl could take her place. The prospect of making new friends, and losing them, was overwhelming. Reading books, drawing pictures and daydreaming were much safer.

My adoptive parents and sister (their biological child) loved me, and I loved them, but I always felt apart: It was the three of them ... and then me. As I pitched forward into the throes of adolescence, and everything my parents did was heinous and pissed me off, I retreated into a parallel universe, where I imagined what life might be like if I lived with my birth mother. Was she a countess? A movie star? Surely we would look exactly alike and understand each other completely.

Salon.com > Pauline Gaines

A Salon troll on the couch

I may lose custody of my son: How did I get here?