As an author, aspiring to be successful, one of the things I’ve been told I should probably do is to build a network on at least one social media platform. After giving it some thought, I decided to concentrate on Threads. It’s simple, has a strong indie author community, and the people (mostly) seem quite nice. I still haven’t figured out the algorithm. Most of my posts just echo into the void. But I’m building followers–as of this writing, I’m just seven short of 500. It’s been a bit of slog, but I’m learning, and once in a while, I swing and actually connect. A post gets seen and people respond. 

That happened on Saturday. In a shockingly big way. Big for me, at least. It was nothing resembling viral, which I learned has an actual technical definition, but it was seen in a little over 24 hours by almost 48,000 people, and just over 4100 liked it. Several commented, and a few reposted. That last thing is really what this blog entry is about. But I’ll come back to that. 

What was the post about, you ask? About my daughter and the emotions attached to seeing her birth certificate for the first time. In case you don’t already know this, my wife and I got married in 2018, at which time I became the stepdad to an amazing young woman named Lauren. We had our usual stepdad/stepdaughter moments, in which she tested me to see if I was really here to stay, but over the years, we’ve learned to love each other deeply, and I’m proud to call her my daughter. So, when she turned 18, I adopted her and she chose to take my last name. Why we waited until she was 18 is a private story I won’t share, but people who’ve been in this situation can likely guess. At any rate, I had never seen her new birth certificate until Sarah asked me to scan it and send a PDF to Lauren. I did not expect it to be so impactful to me seeing her with my last name and me listed as her father.

It apparently struck a chord somehow. Thousands of people saw it in just a few hours, with the likes growing faster and faster as the day progressed. Several folks who have adopted someone or whose spouse adopted their children or who were adopted themselves had sweet things to say. But, as warm and fuzzy as the post was from my angle, some folks just can’t stand to see someone feeling good. One person started a bit of a kerfuffle, in which I didn’t participate, about whether new birth certificates would be seen as legitimate for voting purposes, specifically because this person claimed their trans child was turned away until they produced their original birth certificate. Happily, this person was inundated with people telling them to leave the politics out of what is clearly a sweet post about a man loving his adopted daughter. 

But then I made the mistake of looking at the reposts. I was just curious about the comments that may have been attached to them. Turns out they were a little twisted. There were more of the folks saying stuff like the parent of the trans child, but the ones that made me saddest were the ones that made it sound like I was oppressing Lauren by forcing her to take my last name. They didn’t bother to check to find out that the adoption was something we all agreed on. I would never have gone through with it if it wasn’t something Lauren wanted. I wouldn’t love her less for not being her father instead of her stepfather. And I’m not sure how many people know this, but people can choose whatever last name they want. Lauren actually considered her mom’s maiden name and another family name before deciding she wanted to honor me by choosing mine. It was all her choice. But these folks didn’t know this. Because they didn’t bother to seek out the truth. They had an agenda they could forward by reposting my words and saying something that just wasn’t true but sounded like it made sense in a vacuum. 

I’m not offended for myself. The people who reposted this are no one to me other than screen names, and the people reading it don’t know me at all. I’m just sad for the loss of kindness in the world as well as the loss of personal accountability demonstrated by these folks who saw something nice and used it to further their cynical view of the world, the facts be damned. 

I guess what I’m saying is two things. One, be nice. Celebrate with people rather than tearing them down for being happier than you are. Second, learn the whole truth before you speak. And if you can’t learn the whole truth, seriously consider keeping your mouth shut. 

Hope that didn’t come across too harshly. I just think being a force for both truth and grace is so important and it makes me sad when people do their best to be forces for neither.