The Catch-22 of Blog Writing
It has been three years since Amanda Eshelman gave up her daughter in a semi-open adoption and two months since Amanda began penning a blog about the pain and complexities involved.
Armed with a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, Amanda, 25, uses her writing skills as a way to both share and process her experience, to help get it out of her system. She said she “hasn’t wanted to write about anything else since it happened” and despite her second-guessing herself with each new entry, Amanda continues to post because “not only do I want to do this, I need to do this.”
Amanda, of Northampton, uses her blog as an “emotional security place,” but also hopes to reach out to others through her posts. She hopes others connect with her or are moved to offer comments on their own experiences and opinions. She wants to share a plethora of perspectives and points of view. Amanda wants to “discourage some fears and irrational thought behaviors” as well as allow more understanding amongst the parties involved, including child and adult perspectives.
Amanda admits that being open is difficult because of how public the blogging world is. Fears of judgement follow each new post, but on the other hand, Amanda says she wants to open up and let people know what she and others have gone through.
Amanda has written close to a dozen posts since she began, publishing a new one every Sunday. With her entries, she tells the story about giving up her daughter, whom she calls Lila to protect the child’s identity, and the painful aftermath that ensued when the adoption transitioned without warning from semi-open to closed.
Now the only contact that Amanda has with her 3-year-old daughter is through a spurt of random and infrequent emails containing pictures. Other than a three-minute Skype conversation, Amanda has had little actual contact with her daughter.
Amanda is a former Beetle Press intern who continues to offer research and writing services on occasion. We support her work as a blogger because we know it will help her to be successful in raising awareness.
Amanda feels that often people know only one side of an adoption story; with her blog, she hopes to show all sides and provide a safe space for birth mothers to connect.
Typically, Amanda chooses to focus on a certain thought or feeling she has been experiencing. She tries her best to describe it, to write about what she is going through, and then allows it to go through an editing stage before publication. She works hard to ensure the posts aren’t cluttered and heavy.
She hopes that as the blog develops and grows a wider readership, it will evolve into something more professional, and less journal-entry-like. She also hopes that one day, the focus will shift from her story to the stories of other birth mothers.
