Peter's Cross Station

Two Over Two

Selina's second birthday has come and gone (Saturday) and was, I have to say, a huge success.  She was aware this year, that she was the birthday girl (she remembered Nat's birthday from February and knew what it meant) and enjoyed--really for the first time in her life--a real place at center stage.  Nat was a gracious supporting cast member and terrific big sister, helping (no, really just helping) Selina open her gifts and appreciate her cake.  Well, Selina didn't really appreciate her cake at all.  I had hoped she would recognize Sandra Boynton's hippopotamus, but for one reason and another, she didn't seem to.

  Nat did, though, so that was nice.  Actually, it was pretty amusing.  For the party I had veggie crudite and dip, plus some whole apples and pears.  Selina usually gets cut fruit, but Nat can eat a whole fruit.  So Nat had been munching away on an apple, but when she heard cake was imminent, she handed the apple to Selina, who was really excited about getting a big, whole apple, like sister usually gets.  So the cake sort of didn't register in the wake of her excitement about the apple.  She held it in her hand while I tried to get her to blow out the candles.  Cake was really underwhelming for her.

She did like eating the cake.  But I am not sure she liked it more than the apple.  (Nat did, though!)

Mama Fern was here (along with Grammy and Granddaddy, Babysitter J, friend Krystal and her guest, Justin and neighbors K and D) , which was nice, as she was unable to get together for Mothers' Day this year.  I have to let you know something, though.

I have decided not to blog much about our specific adoption experiences here anymore.  I will still be blogging about adoption in general and about our family on a surface level, but I have been unable to figure out where the line is for me in sharing too much of others' stories.  Since the kids are too little to help decide how they feel about sharing their own stories, and since neither of the first mothers in our family have computer access, I feel too much responsibility for the control of the story.  I am going to err on the side of telling too little, rather than telling too much.

I guess I've had this policy for a while, unofficially, but now I'm letting you know.

Meanwhile, I want to also let you know that if you ever want to email me and ask to hear more of our experience in order to help you sort out your own, please do feel free.  I don't have a problem discretely sharing with you as an individual.  I just think publishing on the WWW is a bit too much for me at this point.

Suffice it to say that we have what I think of as successful open adoptions in the sense that all parties are doing all they are able for the best interest of the children.  But that doesn't mean we have happy, rosy stories. "All we are able" is sometimes quite short of perfect and that is the case in our family.  But I also feel that "all we are able" is something the children will understand and appreciate as they grow up.

I will also say in vague terms that open adoption is HARD.  Sometimes I fear people will think it is easy for others and so when they don't find it easy themselves, they decide it must be wrong for them and they close the adoption.  I will say it again, I am finding open adoption to be a serious challenge.  A struggle.  Painful.  But all in that way where you know the pain is good for you and means you are growing.  I am especially convinced that it is good for my children, which is why I work so hard at it, however challenging I find it.

I think both kids--especially Nat--are beginning to really understand some things about their families in an age-appropriate, organic way that will prevent sudden surprises that might really hurt them and turn their realities upside down to learn later.  So again:  hard but good.  And again, feel free to write personally via email to share your story or hear more of ours if you feel it will help in any way.

And now we are off for family adventure day at the aquarium.  We hear the dolphins and whales are back from "vacation!"

In an Hour! (or whenever you want)

Join me on live web radio (via Babble).

You can listen in archived form too.

Help a Student of Transracial Adoption

Blogger and blog-reader, Kara, has asked me to pass onto you, a request for your experience with transracial adoption.  You can do that by checking out her webpage with the info, but here's a reprint of some of it:

I’m working on an interview project for a class entitled Intercultural Conflict Resolution. Our topic is intercultural conflict in transracial adoption. As I’m a Korean adoptee myself, this is a topic that’s very personal and sometimes painful to discuss, but some of my classmates do not come from the same places. For the record, my two groupmates are not adopted.

***

Part of the reason this project is important to me is that I object to the basic ethnographic premise of the project, which was to interview people to research a certain topic. While I, myself, am adopted, I make no claim to know the experience of other adoptees, whether Korean or otherwise, not to mention other people involved in adoption. I don’t feel qualified to define the questions of such a project; I don’t think that should be solely up to me or anyone else. This project is required, so its terms are not exactly negotiable, but I far prefer letters and storytelling to rigid questionnaires, as I believe those involved in any kind of research should have control and influence over what questions define such research, not to mention what content comes out of it.

***

This is an invitation to share those stories with us in the form of a letter.  These can be letters you have never written before, letters you have already sent, letters you wish you could send, letters you hope to send one day. If you are an adoptee, this could be a letter of advice to your younger self, or a letter to an adoptive parent, a birth parent, or another adoptee.  If you are a birth parent, you might write to your biological child, the person or people who adopt that child, etcetera. Any kind of letter is welcome, including ones addressed to us! All letters that we share will be anonymous, so don’t feel pressured to add any names, but please indicate how you identify and to whom your letter is addressed.

These letters may discuss issues of race, identity, and intercultural interaction, but please feel free to personalize them and reflect on your experiences however you wish. Thank you in advance for sharing your stories, experiences, and families of all kinds with us. We feel honored to be able to listen.

For details of what to write and where to send it, see Kara's site.

Behave!

I blogged about this at Strollerderby and I mentioned it on Facebook, but I have more to say about it.

These lesbians and lesbian exes and ex-lesbians and what-have-you are getting me down today.  The story is: Once upon a time two women fell in love and got together in Seattle.  There they settled down, feathered a nest and each gave birth to a baby, each of whom was adopted, in turn by the nonbiological second mom.  Happy-happy, joy-joy.

Then the family moved to Florida and all hell broke loose.  Moms split up, agreeing to coparent amicably, until Mom A falls in love with a fundamentalist Christian man, gets engaged, repudiates her lesbo history and refuses to let Mom B have any more visitation with Mom A's bio child.

Mom B sues for custody (of her nonbio, but fully legally adopted child) and the court overturns the adoption (made in another state, mind you) on the grounds that Florida doesn't grant adoption to gay people.  Mom B appeals and the appeals court rules in her favor, saying Florida, whether it grants gay adoptions or not, must recognize adoptions made in other states under the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Now, Mom A has appealed to the Florida Supreme Court (no word on whether they are taking the case yet).

Here are some points:

1.  If Florida upholds its right to willy-nilly reverse adoptions made in other states, um, whoa, Bessie!  What does that mean for any adoptive family, not just queer ones?  You may think that you are safe because Florida doesn't ban you from adopting at the moment, but this kind of precedent sure opens a can of worms to allow Florida to decide it doesn't like you either and will dissolve your relationship to your child while on vacation at Disney.  Florida, by all accounts is Crazy State.  You never know what it's going to do next.

2.  Mom A is a jerk, obviously.  But not just because she is keeping her bio kid from its (don't know the genders here) second mom.  She is, one must assume, also repudiating her own parenthood of Mom B's bio kid, in spite of having adopted the kid legally in Washington.  Now that's major jerkness, right there.

3.  We need federal laws governing this stuff, not state ones.  I know that's a long shot, but if states are going to go ignoring the full faith and credit clause, and if the U.S. Congress is going to support them in that with laws like the DOMA, which allows marriages to be dissolved when crossing state lines (also in glaring contradiction to full faith and credit, among other things), then states need to simmer down and let the feds take over family law in these broad areas of marriage and adoption.  You can't just dissolve legal familial bonds when a family arrives in your state.  That is dangerous on a zillion levels.  Certainly, most clearly in the case of a child whose parent can just renounce her responsibility to provide for and nurture that child as a parent who took on these responsibilities legally--and for life--in another state.

4.  I have been reading all this adoption stuff (new books from conference) about the various ways that a loss as devastating as an entire family will mess with the developmental tasks at every stage of a child's life.  Whether adopted at birth or after five years of foster care, kids still sustain a loss at the outset of adoption that adds challenges to growing up healthy, happy and whole.  It can be done of course, I'm not suggesting otherwise.  I'm simply saying that it adds challenges and makes life more difficult.  Why any parent in her right mind would create this situation for a child by taking that child from a (perfectly healthy, non-abusive) second parent is beyond me.  Why orchestrate a loss for your child when you could have prevented it?

I know, people are nutso when they break up.  Ex-gay fundie converts even more so, I am sure.  Much as I wish it were not true, lesbians are just normal human beings like everyone else and no better behaved in a breakup than straight, legally married people who might just as readily swipe the kids if it were so easily done, given no legal protection for the ex's relationship with them.

And because lesbians (and gay men and you know, everyone) are human, we need laws to protect our children when breakups happen.  I know some people pull off voluntary coparenting with integrity.  But some don't.  And some really, really don't.  So we need a blanket of second-parent adoption that covers all children and protects their connections to their parents.

In fact, I think de facto parents should have legal standing, whether adoptive or not.  They should have automatic rights to visitation unless a court decides it is not in the child's best interest.  Overall, I am tired of this stuff being put under the heading of "gay rights" because it is really about children's rights.  Kids don't get to choose who their parents are.  Like it or not, queers have been having children from time immemorial and will continue to do so.  Protect those kids not by prohibiting them from having legal ties to their parents, but by mandating their parents support them and give them access to all other parents, whether they are born again or not.

Really, what kid would Jesus abandon?

Same-sex marriage would help--if the moms had married in this particular case--by providing same-sex divorce and thus putting the visitation and custody stuff in the hands of a court.  But plenty of straight people don't bother/have their reasons not to marry the second parent of their child (biological and otherwise--look at Brangelina), so marriage really isn't the issue here.  The issue is kids' rights to their parents--as defined by the kids.  Children will develop connections to people whether the adults in their lives necessarily want them to or not.  Step-parents, boyfriends, grandmothers who babysit every day--kids will define their primary caregivers in ways we might not.  Those relationships deserve at least a glance by a court before being severed at the whim of one legal parent.

Meanwhile, this case is simple enough--the adoption was actually legal.  Mom A needs to present her bio kid for visitation with Mom B and cut a check for her share of Mom B's bio kid's support.  Case closed.

In the court of Shannon...

Thinking Out Loud

I feel so differently about adoption, biological reproduction--assisted or accidental or somewhere in between--and parenting in general than I did before we adopted.

We never had the "gotta hava babee!" fever, but we did just sort of think "baby? huh, sure that would be fun (for us)."  Now I find my skin crawling at anyone who thinks of baby procurement as being about the parents almost at all.  It just really bugs me when people want children because children will meet some need of theirs.  But where the heck is the line behind being overjoyed at the idea of a child in your life and wanting a child to meet some need of yours?  It's a fine, fine, fine line.  It's not like only grim, unemotional people should be parents.  Obviously not.

And it seems that babies always start by somebody just wanting one.  And I am pretty convinced that wanting a baby is always a selfish thing.  It's never about the baby.  Especially when the baby isn't born yet.  And that's obviously okay.  We don't look kindly on the "rescue" model of adoption either, do we?  Besides, that really turns out to be all about the parents too--how heroic and sacrificing they are, right?  (If you are wondering who "we" is, I guess it's self-defining.)

I mean, I definitely start feeling this way after getting into it with people about various ART things.  I am starting to really chaff at the notion that questioning the ethics of certain reproductive decisions, based on how a child born of those decisions--and the adult she will someday become--will experience them, is automatically judgmental of the person making the decisions and therefore, de facto bad.  (Sorry, long sentence.  I don't even know what I just said.  You're getting unadulterated stream-of-consciousness, here.)

But it's not just ART stuff.  It's more the attitude that ART accentuates that underlies so much reproduction, whether you conceived on the first try or you had medical interventions for 4 years and finally went to Khazakstan.  It's the attitude that babies--however you get them--are commodities to be "gotten" at all.

I'm also annoyed at the attitude of entitlement from straight people, that babies are somehow a natural right and if they don't come easily, equipped with the best parts of each partner, the would-be parents are being denied a part of themselves they ought to have been able to take for granted, like tehy take their very bodies for granted.  Why would anyone ever take the ability to make a baby for granted?  That is so far outside of my worldview I am breathless in the presence of that entitlement.  Yet I know it's really common.  It just is what people expect.

And this Madonna thing?  Talk about entitlement!  You know, if she wants that child so badly; if she really is bonded with her; feels like her mother, then why doesn't she set up house in Malawi for 18 months?  That's all they wanted from her when they denied the initial request.  Now the bio-dad is involved which complicates it, I know, but initially, it was 18 months of residence.  I mean, how many residences does Madonna have, anyway?  How much skin off her nose would it be to add a hut in Malawi?

But this stuff just has nothing to do with the people who are minors (or embryos, for that matter) when it all goes down.  It's all about the adults and what possession of these minors will mean for them.  And I'm just getting fed up with that.

I don't want to give embryos rights.  That's not my point.  My point is that we ought to be thinking of what these people will be facing when they aren't our little doll-babies anymore, but are live, grown, human beings who want to know who they got torn from in Khazakstan or Malawi or the south side of Chicago.  Or to meet their gestational surrogate.  Or dealing with "existential debt" as some donor-conceived adults are now calling the burden of having to be grateful for their very lives to a protocol they now want to challenge and change. (Found this term in "Voices of Donor Conception: Behind Closed Doors: Moving Beyond Secrecy and Shame" ed. Mikki Morrissette.)

I guess listening to a lot of adult adoptees at the conference last month got me headed down this path.  But it's also a parenting preoccupation of mine to worry about making sure I always think of my children as future adults with their own agency and their own questions and their own values, which will in all likelihood, overlap, but not completely match mine.  I want to be able to look those adults--equals--in the eye and know I did everything I could to make it as right as I could for who they would become, not just to please myself or gratify my craving for a baby.

Anyway, this probably makes very little sense, but I'll publish it and you let me know.

While We're At It

A gestational surrogate is just an incubator, right?  So say some folks here.

Connections

I am here.  It has been a fabulous time so far.  Dorothy Roberts was the keynote this morning, brilliant as ever.  And I've met some fabulous people, including a blog-reader who didn't realize she was until she went to the address I gave her and found it was just little ole here.

So howdy to Malinda!

I love it when that happens.

Looking for Interviews!

First, let me tell you that I'll leave the entries for the giveaways open until next Thursday.  That's a long time, but then I'll be back in town, post-conference (leaving tomorrow) and settled and ready to make a trip to the UPS store, okay?

Now for the big question and call for your help.

I want to write an article about becoming a new mother at or over the age of fifty.  By "new mother" I don't mean "first-time mother" though that's a possibility too.  But what I mean is entering a new mother-child relationship at or after 50.  For example:

-a biological mother via ART, whether IVF with donor gametes or through surrogacy

-an adoptive mother to a new child whether an infant or older

-a foster mother who has taken in new children (of any age) at or over 50

-a grandmother adopting/fostering her grandchildren

-a new stepmother, married to/moving in with a custodial parent

-anything else you know of that I haven't thought of

The mother relationship doesn't have to be legal, but should be daily or very nearly daily care of/responsibility for a child under 18.  In other words, standing "in loco parentis" or being a "de facto" parent counts too.

And I want to focus on mothers, because it is less examined in our culture than men becoming fathers after 50, but if you are or know a father in an interesting new parent situation at or after age 50, I'm okay with throwing one in there for extra insight.

I developed an interest in this topic when Selina arrived about two months before Cole's 50th birthday and looked around and saw little but condemnation for women becoming mothers over age 50.  If you are an "expert" in this area for whatever reason (you can define your credentials), I'd like to hear from you too.

I would love to get at least six strong interviews with women who fall into as wide a variety of situations possible.  I plan to do long-form open-ended questions, rather than trying to accumulate any "statistics."  I plan to pitch the story to a few major parenting magazines.  I pitched it to the AARP magazine in the fall and they gave me the silent treatment, but my interest in the topic remains, so I figured I'd get started on it and find a publisher as I go.

Thanks for your help!

Elsewhere

Because I subscribe to a zillion key-word alerts to help me dig up material for Strollerderby, I came across this blog post quite by random.  I know nothing about the blog or its authors, but I was intrigued by the post and the comment discussion following it.  It's a question, in the end, (for the most part) about whether adoptees have a right to know who their biological family is when that information is available (open records, right to search, right to contact etc.).  It has extended, in the comments (this might have been my fault, in fact) to include a right to know who your gamete donor was and whether anonymos donation should be allowed.  Anyway, I thought some of my readers here would find it interesting.

Here it is.

Standpoint

I'm going back to the whole PGD-for-hair-color thing.  Because lots of people raised some very good points and some very good questions and I want to keep talking about it.  If you're bored, feel free to move along (as if you didn't already feel perfectly free to do just that).

Jody pointed out that my position seems pretty freighted with my experience as someone on the margins of mainstream parenting for a number of reasons (like being a lesbian transracial adopter, for instance) and the frustration that brings in terms of people's expectations about what makes for a family and what makes for beauty etc.  Yes indeed.

Sara raised some scenarios of ethical conundrum in which aesthetics overlap with disease (sort of) or in which values conflict--like the value of being a different kind of person versus the value of being free of what mainstream society might consider a defect (Sara used little people versus typically statured people.  Me, I always think of deaf people when this kind of question is raised.)

Anyway, I got to thinking that I should share my personal stakes in this discussion.  So here are the ones that immediately come to mind:

1.  I'm a member of a group that could well be severely reduced in numbers were we to find a gene for it.  I know that you, gentle reader, would never select against a gay embryo, but that doesn't mean most people wouldn't.  Most people probably would, given the choice, right now, today.  (Mind you I'm not so sure I think there's a gay gene out there, but let's just say they were to find one.  God forbid they ever do, and this is why.)

2.  I am someone with very little personal feeling about being pregnant and passing my genes into the future.  I realize either or both of those things are very important to some people.  My interest in it doesn't go much further than idle curiosity.  I am awed by human reproduction, but I don't have a burning desire to participate in it directly.  Which is just to say I do know that the desire to be pregnant and/or pass on ones' (or one's partner's) genes is almost indescribably strong for some people, and I am sympathetic, but I am not empathetic in the sense that I just don't get how that feels.

3.  My two best friends are directly impacted by ART.  One went through IVF twice and she and I even had an egg donor talk once (didn't ever go through with it and she ended up with a surprise bio-baby in the happy end).  My other best friend and her female partner are starting down the path to donor sperm selection, beginning with a friend.  So it is not that I am untouched or unfamiliar with the details of various ART options, beyond just reading infertility blogs (which I've done a lot of too).

4.  My family is composed of entirely un-biologically-related members.  We don't look a thing alike either--no two of us.  And that is a deep, special blessing with gifts that I think most people never consider.  It is most often assumed to be a handicap.  And it is a social oddity, to be sure, but I am not one to assume social oddities are necessarily handicaps.

So that's where I'm coming from.  Now, Jody raised the problem of how you go about actually regulating these things.  I don't know, and that's not my area of expertise.  But here's what I think.  I think people like me and like Jody can certainly sit in meetings with people whose expertise is actual regulation--and actual enforcement of regulation--and air our concerns and help to hammer it all out.  Sara, on the other hand, seems worried in both her comments that the special needs of special cases and the special knowledge of the parents in question would somehow be overridden by regulations.  But "regulation" doesn't mean parents have no voice in decisions.  In fact, it can mean whatever we hammer out in a meeting with the regulation experts.  It doesn't have to be all one way or another.  And as for ethics boards consisting of all tall people (making decisions, in Sara's scenario for little people), why would that necessarily be the case?  Hospitals already have ethics boards for trouble-shooting things that come up (which they do on a regular basis).  I don't know how they get put together.  But I strongly believe that any board overseeing these kinds of decisions should have representation from someone with strong disability rights credentials.  Because the case of the little people forced to have tall children or a deaf parent forced to have a hearing child are good examples of how subjective these kinds of issues can be.

Calling for regulation or ethics boards or whatever is not saying "people should not be allowed to blah blah blah."  It's saying "this needs to be mulled over much more thoughtfully than just to say 'is there a market for it?'"  All the cautionary concerns raised by you all and others should be part of the mulling.  It's all valid fodder.  But I still maintain laissez-faire is not the way to go when it comes to medical ethics, especially medical ethics concerning entirely helpless, dependent beings, from embryos to babies.  And although PGD may be quite rare today, it may be considerably less rare a generation from now, (as is the case with all kinds of ART that was in the wee developmental stages a generation ago and is all but routine today).  That being the case, it is a good idea for us to establish--at the very least--a set of values upon which to base future uses of such technology.  And even if there's loads of gray area (and there is likely to always be), I think the values that technologies like PGD be used for 1) legitimate medical reasons only and 2) without violating the rights of the child in question is a great place to start.  After that, we can sit around tables and argue for and against various cases being legitimate/rights violations or not.  But I think those values would put hair and eye color selection quite obviously beyond the pale.  And I'm good with that.

You?