I’ve just never gotten that impression from her posts: I’ve always seen a mom struggling with two different kids and trying to treat them as individuals. When they were very young, she had a much easier time with him–I do remember that.
You may be in the minority. It seems that all we ever hear about her daughter is how brilliant she is, how she’s so beautiful and smart and popular and how she’s always fighting injustice and going against the grain. But when she mentions her son, it’s how he screwed up, or he’s in trouble, or he’s having so many problems.
It may indeed be that her son is a troubled child. That’s sad. But what’s sadder is the constant bragging about her daughter is such a contrast to all the problems she’s having with her son. We only ever hear the good about her daughter, and we only ever hear the bad about her son.
And so what if she has more in common with her daughter? Music and sports vs. books and intellectual films? Please. My mother and my sister are like that – they’re into the same TV shows and movies, and I get really bored hearing them talk about it. But my mother never says, “well, my OTHER daughter, she doesn’t watch those shows, she watches X, and that just doesn’t interest me at all.”
She may not be aware she’s doing it, but a lot of people are noticing it, and how do you think her son would feel if he read some of things she’s posted.
What stands out to me is not just that her son is a big fat disappointment. It’s that she can readily portray him as such because he’s adopted and thus, not a real reflection on her. Her daughter, on the other hand…
I wouldn’t be saying this if his adopted status wasn’t constantly brought up in her posts. You have to wonder if there isnt a day that goes by when he isnt reminded of it, and shit, who wouldnt want a drink or two to numb that feeling?
I may sound critical, but the thing is, I can’t say I wouldn’t be any different than Dangerosa, if I were in her position. It’s why I don’t think adoption would be for me. If the kid turned out to be troubled, would I be inclined to assign that to factors outside of me? Would I be inclined to see my bio kid’s failings more sympathetically, because I’m biased towards anything that has come out of my body? I just don’t know. It’s a situation that I wouldn’t want to be in, though, and for that, Dangerosa has my sympathies if this is a struggle she has acknowledged and is trying to work through.
I have too. I am loathe to judge parents because I know I don’t know nothing. But sometimes Dangerosa’s posts make me think she’s parodying herself. I think it was after reading the millionth “wonderful daughter vs. disappointing son” comparison that I started to realize that she has a major blindspot.
It is no doubt a tough spot to be in. Given how different even biological siblings can be, I don’t even know if it is reasonable to expect that parents will love all their children equally. But I don’t think parents should be obvious with their favoritism. It’s one thing to suspect that a parent favors one kid over another based on an inartfully worded comment or two. It’s quite another to have this suspicion triggered every time the conversation goes to a certain topic. It is jarring for me.
I assume that Dangerosa does a good job of showing her son that she loves and cares about him, because the alternative would be awful and I don’t think she’s an awful person. I just wish she could portray her son with a tiny bit more compassion in her stories. Even thuggish-ruggish rebels have a soft underbelly.
youwiththeface, you kind of (for me anyway) touched on the very thing that’s been bothering me so much. When she talks about her son, she usually makes it very clear that he’s adopted - her tone about him paints him as “less than” than her superior, natural daughter, and basically not an equal family member due to his differences. That’s an awful burden on a child - as someone who was adopted I know firsthand.
Now maybe (hopefully) she doesn’t feel that way at all. But it IS how it comes across to a LOT of us.
I imagine that part of the issue here is that Dangerosa was at the end of the adoption process when she found out that she was unexpectedly pregnant. So hopes for a child were fulfilled and she maybe wishes she had backed out of the adoption and didn’t? That is my read of her posts and it makes me sad for her son.
Not familiar with adoption process is there a point when you can’t back out?
I THINK - I gave a child up for adoption when I was young - it didn’t become effective until 6 months later. We had the option of backing out. But that’s on a state by state basis.
People in this thread have suggested that her son’s drug problem is a direct result of her own failure to supervise him.
People in this thread have suggested that she doesn’t really love her son because he is adopted.
None of that is done with “empathy and kindness”, none of that is “honest concern”.
We used a sperm donor to conceive my son. I talk about it openly, because I feel like hiding something looks like I think it’s shameful. I know for a fact that some of my family disagree, that they think I shouldn’t mention it, that bringing it up looks like I am going out of my way to point out that he isn’t “really” my husband’s son. I think they are showing that they DO think it’s something shameful, even if they don’t realize they do. They are the ones that doubt my husband can really bond with a kid that isn’t “his” in that one narrow definition, so they fear that rocking the boat will somehow make it worse.
To me, it’s patently obvious that Dangerosa loves the hell out of both her kids, and the various facts about their lives are exactly that–facts, not value judgments. Y’all are the ones that are projecting shame and disappointment onto her observations. When they (when all of us . . . . ) were younger, she talked a lot about how she struggled to bond with her daughter, whose birth was traumatic and followed by bad PPD, but that she bonded much more quickly with her son.
I’m going to bow out of this thread now because I don’t want to feed the fire and sustain a pile-on, but I think this was a really mean-spirited thread. The moderator suggesting a Pit Thread did not mean that one had to be started–it could have been dropped or taken to PM.
I didn’t say either of those things, and neither did IvoryTower. I thought her word were very sympathetic.
I am a parent and I am an adopted child. These issues are personal to me, and it upsets me to see the way Dangerosa talks about her son. I know she loves him, I’ve “known” her on this message board since her kids were practically babies. But I don’t think she knows how she’s coming across over the last few years. It concerns me. I’m sorry you find me mean-spirited but I gave my reasons earlier for why I posted this here, and I stand by them. I hope she sees is so she can see that this is something that concerns more than just one person on this board.
Maybe the son started doing drugs at 10 because it was so obvious to him how favored the daughter was and how his adopted parents held him in disdain.
I know you said you are bowing out, but just in case-
I am not speaking for anyone else but myself. I am not accusing her of causing her son’s drug problems. I am not accusing her of loving her son any less than her daughter.
What I am saying is that her words come across as almost exclusively supportive of her daughter (even when she gets in trouble) and almost exclusively critical of her son (even when he has successes). Her daughter pings all her maternal pride, but because she does not value her son’s activities, it is hard for her to celebrate them.
This is personal to me. I had a son who in high school went to a very dark place and I to learn to love what was important to him. He found personal pride in being successful in certain types of group online video games. I found them to be ridiculous and wanted him to do more “worthwhile” activities. But at that time his self-esteem was so low, that my being proud of him for these games was incredibly important to him. I learned to cheer as hard for his top ranking on a video game as I did for my daughter’s poetry awards.
He’s graduating college this year and doing great- and part of his healing was when I became able to value what he valued, while at the same time helping him fix the negative behaviors he was engaged in.
I don’t think this is a fair characterization. People have suggested that the kid is troubled BECAUSE it is rather obvious she speaks about her daughter in more loving terms than she does her son, and it doesn’t seem like a big leap to suspect this could be damaging his self-esteem, assuming her language here is in any way similar to how she speaks in real life. People have suggested that she doesn’t love her son AS MUCH as her daughter BECAUSE she frequently mentions that 1) he’s adopted and 2) he’s different from everyone else in the family AND she rarely if ever has anything good to say about him BUT she never has a bad word about the daughter. It’s not one piece of evidence that has some of us feeling uncomfortable.
Even if the flak she’s catching was just about her mentioning that he’s adopted, this is still a reasonable criticism. It’s not weird to mention a child’s non-biological status when the kid is a baby or a toddler or if the conversation is about adoption. But her son is a teenager and she has had him for almost his whole life. At a certain point, using the “adopted” adjective becomes jarring. And no, I’m not saying she uses it every time she talks about her son. But she uses it enough for it to be jarring for multiple observers–folks who come from different perspectives and don’t have an axe to grind against Dangerosa as a poster.
We’re not projecting shame and disappointment; we’re interpreting those things just as you’ve interpreted the things you have.
If it was just one or two posters expressing these ideas, I could see a case made for unfair bias. Same thing if these posters were known to be wackadoodle types. But you have several sane, reasonable posters all seeing the same pattern. Isn’t this worth paying attention to even if just a little bit?
I have no doubt that Dangerosa loves both of her kids. But love is not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about obvious discrepancies in the respect given to her son compared to her daughter, particularly when she discuss them on this message board. She’s shared enough about how she relates to them and their personalities to paint a revealing picture, and we’re essentially telling her what that picture screams to us. If we’re completely off the mark, she is free to ignore us.
The themes that jump out in a someone’s posting history can provide insights into their personal struggles. I don’t think Dangerosa is aware of her own themes, because if she were aware she wouldn’t have said she doesn’t talk much about her son. She most certainly does talk about him; so much so I could probably point him out in a lineup and I haven’t even see his pic before. If anything comes out of this thread, Dangerosa will have realize there might be a disconnect between her perception of reality and the perceptions of others.
I used to frequent parenting threads on the Dope. Dangerosa is one of the reasons I don’t anymore. There’s nothing like getting shouted down by a person with clear and significant mental issues to put a sour taste in your mouth.
This is great, and shows how being a good parent can turn someone into a more open-minded person. Right now I have a strong bias against gamers. But I already suspect that bias is going to change if I see video games bringing a lot of joy to my daughter.
Go the GirrafeBoards. On the issue of her son many have spoken about her favouritism there in the “snipe behind Doper’s backs” threads they have there.
Do a search on your own name there Dopers, its illuminating. :eek:
Learn to spell Giraffe first, though!
Learn to read and write in a script which is not Latin based and we have a deal.