from the story of a prospective adoptive dad to a tween:
"About half way through lunch, he pulled his caseworker aside and told her he wanted me to adopt him. He came back to sit with me, told me he wanted me to adopt him and asked me if he could start calling me Dad."
All together now: "aaaaaawwwwww!!!!!"
One year ago today, Selina was being grudgingly extracted from the womb six weeks (and one day) early on an emergency basis after her mother almost died of full-blown eclampsia. She would go on to spend a week in the NICU and her mother would spend three weeks in the hospital.
We didn't know she existed yet. In fact, it was probably around a year ago today that I emailed our adoption agency and asked them to take us off the list, as we had decided to be an only-child family after all.
It might seem not to reflect well on our agency that less than a week after receiving that email, they called us about a baby. But in fact, when it comes to who belongs in our family, it seems our agency knows us better than we know ourselves. I had spent that week packing up Nat's newborn clothes and gear and planning to give it away, crying through the whole process, because really, I wanted another baby.
So when the social worker called, I asked "did you get our email?"
"Oh yes," she answered. Then, without pausing to breathe, went on with "there's a baby I want to tell you about."
Then she told me about Selina and her mother and added that she thought most people on the waiting list would not be willing to take Selina due to preemie health considerations. I don't know if they actually asked anyone before calling us, but I told the social worker that I wanted her, and that as soon as I could reach Cole, to see if she wanted her too, I'd call back.
An excruciating hour later, Cole arrived home from work to me at the top of the stairs announcing, "theresababygirlwhoneedsafamilyandIwantherokay!?"
"Okay!" said Cole as if she too, had not decided a week earlier to pursue no more children for our family.
I called the social worker back and she arranged for me to talk to Fern in the hospital later that evening to make sure Fern agreed with the agency's judgement about us. (Fern had already signed a waiver giving the agency discretion to choose a family, but our agency tries to respect the mothers' judgement in those cases anyway.) Fern and I had a good talk and the rest is history.
Happy birthday, Selina! This wasn't an easy day for you or Mama Fern, and it hasn't always been an easy year for any of us, but none of us can imagine our family without you!
*It's Leap Year!
Are you looking for a way to clean up some of the dirty money the IRS just sent you? I've got a $420 proposition for you.*
The adoption agency that placed our daughters with us has been doing wonderful work since 1992, helping children who would otherwise end up in the fostering system get into permanent, loving homes from birth.
And for the past three years, they've been matching HIV+ children from many parts of the world with adoptive families. HIV+ children are almost never born in the United States anymore, because prophylactic medication during pregnancy prevents almost 100% of maternal-fetal transmission. But in many places in the world, these drugs are not available or affordable. Instead, babies are born positive, their parents die of AIDS and they are left with very little medical care, hopefully in the loving care of relatives, but when that's not possible, in an orphanage.
If they are lucky.
Many orphanages in countries with large HIV infection rates are so overwhelmed that they actually have to turn children away.
That's right. Orphaned, HIV+ children turned away from even orphanage care.
My adoption agency has worked hard to match some of these children with adoptive families, and they've done quite a bit of that, all things considered (you can imagine the hurdles to finding adoptive families for kids like these), but the fact is, many of these children will simply never be adopted.
Our agency has decided to broaden its efforts to include supporting orphanage care--in particular access to quality medical services--for those children who will simply never be placed with permanent families.
I've mentioned here before that Cole and I often think about and sometimes talk about the "what if" of adopting an HIV+ toddler through one of our agency's programs.
But neither of us can quite shake just how many kids are going to be left behind, no matter what happens. And the fact is that a dollar** can go much further in a place like Haiti, than it can in the U.S. For a fraction of what it would cost to raise a child in the United States, many children can be raised in their home countries (and perhaps have access to surviving relatives, their native language, culture, religion and other benefits).
Our agency is looking for sponsors willing to commit to giving $35 a month to fully support one child in an orphanage in Haiti. These children are HIV+, some are available for adoption and hopefully will find families, but many will not. Either way, the orphanage needs help so as not to have to turn children away, and to give high quality care to the children living there.
If you think you could manage $35 a month, please leave a comment below or email me, and I will send you the flyer and sponsorship form you need to get started.
I will personally vouch for the ethics of this agency. There is nothing in any of their hearts but the sheer desire to give love and health to children most in need, with the utmost respect for those children's families and cultures of origin.
While Cole and I continue to mull over the adoption question, we're going to do this. Please, please join us!
*This opportunity is not restricted to U.S. citizens, so feel free to jump on this bandwagon if you live elsewhere, too!
**Or a pound, or a euro (considerably further, in fact)!
P.S. They can also use in-kind donations and one-time gifts. Thanks!
The new report out on transracial adoption breaks little new ground as far as I'm concerned. Of course "love is not enough;" of course white people adopting outside their race need to learn a lot in order to do it well.
I realize the point of the report is to call the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 into question. That law supposedly made it illegal to even bring race up in foster and/or adoption proceedings from the homestudy to post-placement visits.
But I ask you, if you are in a transracially adoptive family, did this happen? Race was a constant factor in our pre and post-adoption discussions with social workers and agencies (and not just the agency through which we adopted that specializes in African American children). Every match or placement we were offered came with a racial description of the child or child-to-be and we were required to think about race in both the foster license training we did for our home study agency and the pre-adoption paperwork required by our placement agency (which required extra paperwork from prospective white parents).
Perhaps much of this race talk was illegal, but it happened nonetheless. So in spite of the anecdotes I've seen in various newspaper articles on the topic, I don't think foster children who've been turned away at the door by white foster parents who weren't told in advance that the children were Black are all that common.
Still, I'd be fine with a change to the law that removed the supposed gag on adoption and foster professionals to discuss race and/or banned them from requiring training for cross-race placements.
I am also not opposed to stepping up "recruitment" efforts for Black families to foster and adopt, but guess what? Black families already foster and adopt in far, far higher numbers than white families (and I don't mean white families with transracial placements, I mean all fostering and adoption by white families). Randall Kennedy quotes a mid-nineties statistic that in Cook County, IL (where my children were born), 88% of the children in foster care were Black while only about 33% of the county's residents were Black.* In other words, the Black communities in places like Cook County are already strapped in caring for these children. The problem is not, as Elizabeth Bartholet claims: that Black people are just too poor to adopt Black children.
Something else is going on.
But even though I'm incredibly ambivalent about the origins of the 1994 law, I don't think a return to strict race-matching would be wise. It didn't work well when it was in place, and as of this moment, too many kids need families to limit their options that way. I am not sure how things would be for the babies my agency places if strict race-matching were required by law. I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of the babies the agency places would wind up in foster care.
Which brings me to the question we ought to be asking. What are all these Black children doing available for adoption and/or in need of foster care in the first place?
Arguments for and against transracial adoption are just a waste of time and energy, spent on the wrong end of the problem. Sure, white people can be good parents to Black children. Well of course they can. Some could probably use quite a bit of training first and for those that don't need it, it won't kill them to jump through the hoops anyway (and they may need it more than they think). But where we ought to be focusing our research and energy for change is in the area of family preservation.
I haven't seen a single article about this report that bothers to quote Dorothy Roberts, whose work in this area in unrivaled. Roberts' books, Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare, addresses the systemic ways that racism reigns in decisions about who is a fit or unfit parent and where the children of the poor belong. Roberts finds evidence that Black children end up in foster care far more often than white children in the exact same circumstances and that frequently "neglect" is really about poverty. This lines up perfectly with Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform Act. Remember when Newt suggested the children of women on welfare be removed and placed in orphanages? Instead, there was a push to remove them to middle-class white families, and the MEPA was passed as part of "welfare reform." But those white families didn't step up in significant numbers to take in those Black children anyway. Instead a few healthy newborns came into a few families (like ours).
No, throngs of white people have not swarmed the city halls demanding to adopt Black children from foster care.** Very few have done so (as Dorothy Roberts details). And plenty of white prospective adopters still check every box but "Black" on the forms their agencies give them, asking what kind of baby they'd be willing to adopt. There are still babies (I know a few, but will respect their families' privacy) who were left unadopted for months, even as healthy newborns, while those throngs of prospective adopters wait an extra year or two for their white (or anything-but-Black) babies.
So the competency of white people to raise Black children is a small issue, involving small numbers of families. (The competency of white people adopting "anything but" babies is probably a far bigger problem, since they seem to think that those "other" races are No Big Deal.) It's a small enough problem to be addressed successfully with increased training and support.
There are many issues that arise from being of identifiable African heritage in our society, and as many of those as possible should be taught. But perhaps the most important thing white prospective adopters should learn, is that they will need to be open to continuing to learn. Most race matters in this country are not easy to teach in a short class. When it comes to subtler issues (foodways, manners, sexuality, style, the meaning of education and money, the real influence of history on daily life for Black Americans, etc.) the kind of racial reductionism taught in one of the trainings we took is silly at best and underwrites white supremacy at worst, by propagating the idea that Black people are A) a different species from other races and B) all the same.
So any increased education should be of high quality, should be ongoing and should address more than the surface issues (we do not need more of the dumb stuff Cole and I had to do. It hurt more than it helped). In fact, Dorothy Roberts should be required reading for every white adoptive (or would-be) adoptive parent of a Black child in the United States. Ironically, one of the most important things white parents of Black children need to understand is the racism that put their children in their arms. To parent a Black child, you must look that racism square in the face, see that you have profited incalculably from it and swear to fight it with all your strength for the rest of your life; to do everything in your power to create a world in which a child such as yours would never again need to end up in arms such as yours.
And on a personal note...
This report comes at an interesting time for our family, given Roberts' location in Chicago and given the presence of two agencies there specializing in adoptions that usually end up being transracial.
A few of you have known for a while that the LilySea Clan has been planning a Summer '08 move. What most of you few probably don't know is that the place we are moving to is not the place we thought we were moving to from last fall through, oh, about a month ago. We are still moving, though. We are moving to Chicago.
For various reasons the Plan A move started to look like the wrong move at this time, and Chicago started to look like the right one. And so we are keeping our current jobs and shifting the household to the city, from whence Cole will do a bit of overnight commuting as necessary for work.
We have been looking at ways to get the family to an urban center for some time. This has always been our intention partly because we think it will make being an interracial family easier and partly because we love cities and partly because we want to home school and there are so many great opportunities in cities for various home school projects and adventures.
Chicago is the right city for us right now, because it is easier to reach by our out-town family members and cheaper to live in that the Plan A city and because our daughters' mothers and their families live there, so it will make open adoption easier too.
And hey, did you know that along with Houston and L.A., Chicago is one of the top three most gay-parent-populous cities in the country?*** Me neither, but cool!
So for the next several weeks we will be doing a good deal of driving back and forth and condo-hunting (it's a great condo-buyers' market in Chicago these days) and eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, moving the crew cityward.
All you readers in the area, drop me an email. Let's talk play dates!
*Interracial Intimacies, Pantheon 2003, p. 403.
** You know who (among transracial adopters) is doing this? In my anecdotal experience, gay white men (especially, but not exclusively, single ones). It is one of the very few routes to parenthood they have. Of the gay dads I know (white and Black, but most are white), all are adoptive parents and about half are foster-adoptive parents to older children. In one case, a couple said they would take a two-child sibling group with an age range of 2 to 6. They ended up taking (and are now the adoptive dads to) a three-child sibling group with an age range (at placement) of 2 to 12.
*** According to page five of this report.
The NYT today has this story about China "clarifying" the one-child policy post earthquake:
But a local Chinese faculty member of the U. here was saying (last week on the radio) that many families would have lost an only child after their own childbearing years were past, and that's what originally got me thinking about domestic adoption increasing.
Indeed, the article goes on to say:
"Many Chinese have shown interest in adopting earthquake orphans, and Monday's announcement says there are no limits on the number of earthquake orphans a family can adopt. The adoptions, or even a future birth to a family that adopts an orphan, will not face the limitations of the one-child policy."
Additionally, Chinese children not previously registered can now be registered (if their registered sibling was killed) as the child of their parents.
I really, really hope that this shifts the whole one-child policy forever such that not only will parents be able to keep their babies in the first place, but the children living unofficially in secret foster/adoptive homes or even their biological family homes will have citizenship status. It is my understanding that those children (living without official status) are the biggest problem with the one-child policy.
"Use humor" is one of the suggestions you hear a lot when you're an adoptive family being advised in dealing with the nosy public. Christine had a good story about the use of humor recently. Most people have stopped asking impertinent questions in front of Nat, now that she's more obviously cognizant of adult conversation, but there's always that one, isn't there?
So this morning, a visitor at our church came up to me after the service and asked "how old is she?"
"Oh," answered I, in my usual response to that common question, "she is every bit of three" and rolled my eyes as if to imply "any misbehavior you may have witnessed from her this morning is completely age appropriate and is by no means a negative outcome of my parenting!"
"Ah" the woman responded, "but how long has she been here?"
Here? I wondered, where exactly is "here?" I assumed she just meant, how old was she at placement (a common, and harmless enough question).
"Since she was three days old," I told her.
"Ah," she said again, chucking Nat convivially on the shoulder, "so she's all American by now!"
"Um, well, she was born in Chicago," I explained.
"Ohhh! So she isn't imported?" the woman exclaimed as if it were the most shocking news she'd ever heard.
I looked down at Nat, who, by now, was watching us curiously.
"Nope," I said with false cheer, "they have plenty of babies right here in Illinois, at bargain, basement prices! Don't they, Nat?"
Nat, right on Drama Queen cue, declared "Yep!" and flashed the woman an impish grin, took my hand and marched off with me to coffee hour.*
And I suppose that's my answer to the recent discussion over at Anti-Racist Parent.
* Where, I might add, Nat had a ball playing with her "imported" pal, Helena (from China).
I have been mulling something over and am wondering what those who know more about China can tell me about this. Do you think that the loss of only children in the earthquake will build pressure to increase domestic adoption of abandoned children? "Increase" as in, push the government to make domestic adoption easier for Chinese parents, etc.? The story of the breast-feeding super mom has really struck me as an inverse to the stories we are all told about the lack of value abandoned babies have domestically in China. I know there's a big difference between a child orphaned by an earthquake and a child "orphaned" through the pressures that lead to abandonment (or "leaving-to-be-found," as the case may often be), but do you who know more about the nuances of China adoption/orphan issues think the earthquake will shift the cultural position of those children in the orphanages?
Please point me to anyone blogging about this. Thanks!
ETA Thanks to Margie for this link.
To the person who searched "Can the parents make a teenager give her baby up for adoption?" the answer is NO. NO they can't. Not legally. You are your baby's ONLY mother and legal guardian unless a court finds it otherwise and it is your decision what to do.
Please also see this post.
Some of you probably heard all about Teleflora's "non-mom" contest category that included adoptive moms. (They got floods of complaints. Read the small print at the top of the page and you'll see their hasty apology.)
Calling adoptive moms non-moms is offensive, sure, but unfortunately, common enough. Most of us have been asked if we have/couldn't have/want to have "children of our own." It's pretty much about like that.
Whatever.
Ultimately, who cares if others don't think I'm a "real" mom? I know I am, my kids know I am and when it boils down to it, I have my children. Whatever anyone says, I get to be the one they go crazy for greeting when I've been out. I get to be the one to cuddle them on the couch in front of the t.v. all day when they're feverish (Nat, today). I get to teach them to read and write and eat a meal with good manners. I get to watch them grow and change and I get to guide them to adulthood. It doesn't really make any difference to me whether some ignorant person insists this isn't "real." I get to have my kids.
Who are the real "non moms" according to pretty much everyone on the planet? First moms, of course. They didn't even get a Teleflora contest category. Why is no one up in arms about that? Because folks actually believe it. They believe first mothers don't count, shouldn't count, should closet themselves and stay invisible. Some adoptive parents like to imagine first mothers as angels in the hospital bed, laying there, passing the baby off to their superior care. (I had a venty chat with a first-mom friend today so this image is fresh in my mind.) But that's where they want them to stay. First moms aren't supposed to go on and have actual lives and continue to be mothers after the soft-focus photo op.
Maybe it's because I'm queer and I'm used to people thinking my family relationships aren't real. But so far into this adoptive parenting gig, I am far, far less concerned about being dissed by the public than I am about first moms being dissed. Those are my babies' mothers, folks! Their flesh and blood.
Teleflora "fixed" their adoptive mom slight and posted the apology. (Frankly, adoptive moms should just be mixed into all the other categories if you ask me.) They also sneakily (no apology) changed the description of their adoptive mom candidate from, "mother to one daughter of her own and six other children who began life at Meth babies."
It's all P.C. now. But the first moms are still invisible.
I'm not the biggest fan of holidays invented to sell stuff. We wouldn't really recognize mother's day around here if it weren't for the fact that we had mothers galore--Cole, me, my mother and Fern--in the house on Sunday for Selina's big event. So we bowed to Ha11m@rk and passed out the gifts. To all the mothers here.
Not sure how the exact vote comes down, but #3 is a clear winner for first place.
I might have guessed. A flesh and blood friend of mine is always telling me to share a bit more about our adoption specifically because that's what people want/need to hear from me most (or almost most). True enough. But I waver on it. Sometimes, I think I won't write much at all about the details of our (especially the kids') personal experience with adoption, because it's really their business. I am both guessing their feelings (however closely) and writing it down when they can't do that for themselves (let alone choose to make it public), and that sometimes feels invasive of their privacy.
But I would like to try to record what I see and hear and how I feel about it in a limited way, trying to walk a line of maintaining their privacy while sharing my own experience. So I will try.
Ever since ever, I have told Nat that she grew in Mama Rose's body and that when she was born, Mama Rose found Cole-Mom and Mama Shannon and we went to get her and bring her home. She has three pictures of herself as a baby--one each of her being held by each of her mothers--hanging over her bed and always has (Selina has the same). I have always rehearsed the names of the people in the pictures and we "God bless" Mama Rose (and now Mama Fern) first thing in our nightly bedtime prayers. So Nat has always heard the name, seen the picture (plus others in her baby book) and heard that she grew in Rose's body.
In the past, Nat has rarely responded at all to the story of her origins. If anything, she'd brush it off and change the subject whenever I told it to her. But recently she's been more interested in it. I think this coincides with her growing understanding that babies must come from somewhere and all her books with egg-hatching scenes in which baby animals emerge in a dramatic moment of tiny cracks getting bigger and bursting.
A few weeks ago, we had the exciting opportunity to watch a friend's 4D ultrasound remotely over the Internet. Nat was wandering around the computer and we told her to look at the picture of the baby who was still growing in her mama's body. Cole said "like baby Nat grew in Mama Rose's body" and Nat said "and Mama Shannon's body!" No, we told her, she only grew in Mama Rose's body.
Nat kept pilfering a picture of the three moms and Baby Nat, taken when we met Rose when Nat was 5 days old. Somehow, this picture ended up on top of a pile of things in the office after we had to move stuff around in there. I kept "rescuing" the picture and putting it back until it occurred to me that I could always just print out another one if I needed to. I asked Nat if she wanted to put the picture in her room, where she could just look at it whenever she wanted and she said yes, grabbed it, marched into her room and pointed to the top of her glass-doored bookcase and announced "you can put it there and you can see it whenever you want!" (She meant "I" but her first and second person still gets confused sometimes.)
So I got a roll of tape and we taped it up inside the bookcase glass. Nat was very insistent on helping with this. For a few days after that, she'd talk a lot about the people in the picture and she tried to say she'd grown inside all three of our bodies at one point again. I corrected her again, of course.
But nowadays, she will just spontaneously announce from time-to-time, that baby Nat "grew in Rose's body!"
I am not sure why the picture of all of us together was so important to her, when she already had the three separate pictures hanging in her room. But it was. That's her favorite one and she wants to look at it and talk about it a lot, though she doesn't have too much to say, beyond restating the story we've told her. She hasn't asked any questions or anything.
But it's great timing for Rose to maybe get in touch (nothing yet--some of you asked). I think to meet Rose in person now, would really be helpful for Nat in putting it all together.
So, we will see.
I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:
1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)
2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around
3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption
4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days
5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)
6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next
7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)
8. Other (specify)
Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.
Air kisses!
What about you? When you pray for your family--first or adoptive--or yourself as an adoptee, what do you consider?
Thanks for your help!
I am trying to write some prayers for use in all kinds of adoption situations (Big Freelance Writing Job) and I would love to hear some feedback on what kinds of things you pray for your child(ren) placed in adoption, for your child(ren)'s adoptive parents and other family, for yourself, etc. I have a list, but it was brainstormed mostly by me and a couple of other adoptive parents. Anything you'd be willing to share would be very much appreciated. If you'd like to email me privately with responses, please, please do.
Thanks in advance!
Is this for real? Anybody know what the hey?
In a decision released Wednesday in a local adoption case, 9th District Court of Appeals Judge Donna J. Carr said it's troubling that minors are restricted from entering into other legal contracts, but not adoptions.
''We allow 16-year-olds, and those even younger, to independently decide to permanently terminate the relationship of parent and child without the advice of their own parent or perhaps the counsel of a guardian ad litem or attorney,'' she wrote in a three-page addendum to the court's decision.
This followed from the Stephanie Bennet case. Hopefully it will lead to heightened awareness of the problem of unethical adoption professionals coercing young mothers to give away their babies without any true, unbiased counsel.
The day we've been waiting for for three years has arrived! Mama Rose talked to our adoption agency director today and said she's ready to see all the letters and photos we've been sending since Nat came home with us. She said she thinks of Nat every day (I never doubted that) but wasn't ready yet for contact. Cross your fingers, Internets! We may get to see her sometime soon!
It's been a bit of an adoption carnival at Dawn's this week. One of the things Dawn herself mentioned that got my attention was that when someone wants to research adoption from the crisis pregnancy end of things, there is a dearth of unbiased information available. It's really true. It's been bugging me a lot lately that there is no adoption equivalent to the kind of counseling they offer at abortion clinics for women who are considering abortions. That is, there is no truly disinterested party whose job it exclusively is to talk a woman through her options, her feelings, her values and support her process and decision-making. Even when adoption agencies offer terrific counseling, it's still and adoption agency, bottom line. Adoption agencies keep their lights on at least partly by completing adoptions. Adoptive parents are paying most of those bills. (This is not true of women's health clinics that perform abortions. Abortions don't pay their bills.)
So I've decided that this year, on Nat's birthday, in honor of Mama Rose (Nat's first-, or birth-, or natural-, or biological- or just "mother"), I want to add my google power to the cause of offering any women out there who may be considering placing their babies in adoptive homes a different point of view.
I'm not unbiased. But my bias is somewhat unusual. I am an adoptive mother of two beautiful, fabulous, deeply loved children whose mothers placed them with my partner and me shortly after birth in the expectation of open adoptions. So far, we have held up our end (and then some) of the openness agreements we made with these women. I am not anti-adoption. I think adoption, though always laced with at least some loss and sorrow, can be a wonderful thing and I believe deeply in the idea of people making family without regard to blood ties.
That said, if either of my daughters found themselves in a crisis pregnancy they wanted to carry to term, I would move heaven and earth to make sure that the only adoption that happened would be a family adoption in which my partner and I adopted the baby and kept it within the care of the immediate family.
I feel this way for several reasons:
1) Every adoption professional I've ever met--many of them very good, ethical people--has been on "side" of prospective adoptive parents. Even folks who treat pregnant women well and help them in all kinds of great ways identify themselves with prospective adoptive parents. I am not suggesting this is universally true. But it is overwhelmingly true, given how many of these folks I've dealt with over the past four years in obtaining a foster license and adopting two children.
2) Most of the time, open adoption agreements are not legally binding. This means that an adoptive family can promise a pregnant woman anything, then once the adoption is final, they can disappear at will. Few pregnant women go into making an adoption plan fully informed of their rights and the true loss of those rights after the adoption is final. (Usually, once an adoption is final, the mother who gave birth to the baby has no rights at all.)
3) Relinquishing a child for adoption causes grief and suffering to the mother. This grief and suffering tends to be underplayed by most adoption professionals. Prospective adoptive parents are often told that birth mothers "forget" and/or "move on" and have better lives after the adoption. Worse, sometimes we're told that birth mothers are/were unworthy of their children and it doesn't matter how they feel. We are encouraged to believe that we are saving a baby from a terrible life by adopting her.
I would not want my daughters put into these kinds of situations or characterized in these ways.
Being single, young (a "teen mom") or poor are not good enough reasons alone to relinquish a baby to adoption. It is very important that anyone considering adoption for a baby she is carrying or parenting read about what others in her position have experienced and what they advise. Here are a few places to look for information outside the adoption industry:
Girl-Mom
Webring of Birthmother Blogs
Keep Your Baby
Concerned United Birthparents (CUB)
Here is a link to an organization for adult adoptees pressing for their rights to know where they came from:
Bastard Nation
You might also like to read The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler. It's about what it was like to relinquish a baby for adoption in the 50s and 60's.
Here's a video on YouTube of some birthmothers discussing their experiences.
If you are pregnant and considering adoption, please be sure to do a few things to protect yourself:
1) Make sure you have the full legal story about exactly what your rights are in the state in which you live. How soon are you allowed to sign a relinquishment of your baby? Do you have any right to change your mind once that relinquishment is signed? If you have made an agreement for an open adoption, is this agreement enforceable by law in your state? How will it be enforced if necessary? If you can possibly afford it, hire your own lawyer to represent you in the adoption process. An adoption attorney hired by an adoptive couple works for them and their interests, not you. BEING A MINOR DOES NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR BABY.
2) Find out what kinds of benefits you are eligible for as a mother of low income. You may be able to afford more than you realize.
3) Read about and talk to other mothers who have gone through what you are going through and listen to what adoptees say about their experience of being adopted.
4) Realize that no matter what you plan to do, as long as you are pregnant and before you sign a relinquishment your baby is your baby and you are a mother, with all the rights of a mother. You get to decide who can or can't be with you at your baby's birth. You get to put the name on your baby's birth certificate. You get to decide whether you will sign anything or not, no matter what you told anyone before the birth and no matter if someone has helped pay your expenses before or at the birth.
Adoption is sometimes necessary or the best possible option for a mother and her baby. Plenty of adoptees grow up happy and healthy and well adjusted. Plenty of birthmothers believe they did the right thing, even if it is painful. But this is NOT the only story and it is never simple for anyone. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
A Few PSes:
1. Please check the comments to this post below. Many readers have additional resources linked there.
2. For more on my own experience of and feelings about adoption, click "Adoption" under the categories list at right, or click here.
3. In retrospect, this post was also about my long-brewing annoyance at the movie Juno and how it seems to make adoption--from a birth mother's perspective--look hip, easy--almost fun--and erases much of adoption's complexity and pain. For my review of Juno, see this post.
Will post more of substance soon, but for now, thought you'd enjoy this piece on the movement to lift the ban on same-sex parent adoptions in Utah.
Cole saw something which claimed that Juno was a big anti-abortion ad. She disagreed and thought that rather than abortion, it was really all about adoption politics (reactionary ones). I read a review from an online friend on a message board claiming the same. And said "friend" knows women's reproductive politics and history like the back of her hand.
I could see their points. I'd argue that while Juno isn't necessarily directly anti-abortion propaganda, it certainly serves (purposefully or not) an anti-abortion agenda.
And yet, I have to agree with Cole that it is more overtly about adoption politics.
Let's think about what the creators of this fictive piece had to and didn't have to do to make narrative sense. Well, to tell a story about a teenager having a baby and placing it for adoption, they sort of had to address why she didn't get an abortion. Not addressing it would have definitely seemed anti-abortion--as if there were a working-middle-class white community in the Midwest in which the pregnant teenagers don't even vet the possibility of abortion. That would be fairly unrealistic. Nothing about the way Juno, as a character was set up would lead a viewer to assume abortion would be automatically off the table for her. So why doesn't she get one? Needs explanation.
Fingernails? A pretty anti-abortion argument, to be sure (in that sentimentality takes the place of a logical discussion of what is really philosophically meaningful or ethically important or medically, socially or psychologically healthy for Juno). But whatever. It gets the "why" out of the way.
The simplistic dismissal of the question of abortion versus carrying a pregnancy to term was indeed annoying. But of course, what really bugged me the most was the rhetoric around adoption.
A) The Penny Saver? Those prospective adoptive parent profiles are bad enough, if you ask me. "Dear Birthmother we are exactly like every other couple in this pile of profiles because we were told exactly what to write and how to write it in order to persuade you to give us your baby." Yuck. But the Penny Saver represented as the go-to place to find an adoptive family was pretty appalling.
B) Private adoption complete with attorney to represent the adoptive couple and a blind-sided dad to represent Juno? Juno gets no notice of her options or rights, so that, learning for the very first time about open adoption hastily dismisses it out of hand, all but begging for an "old school adoption" like in the "good old days when it was quick and dirty." Hey baby boomer birth moms! You remember those crazy good old days? I know you wish you could get those back again!
C) And it wasn't closed anyway, because she was hanging out at their house all the time.
D) Happy bike-riding, guitar-playing, love-song ending? It seems that in spite of what folks who've been there say, Juno happily returns to life before the baby. At least as far as we know.
Now I have heard it argued around the Internets, and I suppose I can grudgingly agree, that this was not necessarily an unrealistic portrayal of a teenaged birth mother in the midst of and soon after the pregnancy, birth and placement. She might well think that closed adoption is best (she might have even chosen this if she had given it further thought--some folks do and that's their right). She might well feel relieved to have it all over with and hey, maybe she didn't need an episiotemy and got right back up on that bike the week after the birth!
But what online friend and Cole and I all said was "I'd like to see the sequel of Juno in ten years."
And yet, as with the first movie, the second would be a fictional work of someone's imagination and just as subject to wish-fulfillment rather than realism in its storytelling tactics.
Now of course we ask "whose wish is being fulfilled?"
I thought the portrayal of the adoptive mother was both realistic and satisfying. As for the would-be father, I should have seen the foreshadowing like a ton of Hollywood bricks, but missed it because his attitude at the first meeting and in the nursery painting scene were so in sync with what I've read around the blogosphere about women's experiences of their husbands while waiting for adoption. I know not all men are so distant and disinterested, but enough are (and turn out to be enthusiastic dads in the end) that I just took Mark's attitude in stride and was actually surprised when he left Vanessa.
But back to Vanessa (whose wishes--and the wishes of those who might identify with her--are being fulfilled in this film). She is "born to be a mother." She's nervous about coming across as perfect, but in a charming way that is further set aside when we see her playing in the mall with the children of her friends and when she's on her knees, pretty much praying to Juno's uterus. Any danger that her "born to be a mother" status might be sullied by multiple claims to the motherhood of this baby are dismissed easily by Juno's disinterest, refusal to see him after birth and her benediction-like, voiced-over pronouncement that the baby was "really [Vanessa's] all along." ("Born in my heart" anybody?")
Isn't this the sort of thing many adoptive mothers want to hear? Want to believe about their children, about their children's first mothers?
And as charming as Juno, the character, was, and as artfully made as the movie was, and as hip as its soundtrack is (might even buy it), this movie might have quite easily served a more powerful, progressive agenda. In the beginning, I was rooting for Juno to have an abortion. (I wanted to save her the pain and trouble of the pregnancy and placement, even as I knew the premise of the film.) The more pregnant she got and the nicer her family was revealed to be, the more I started rooting for her to keep the baby (I was convinced it could have worked swimmingly, even as I knew the premise of the film), then, when she had the baby and Vanessa came in to pick him up, I rooted for Juno and Vanessa to have a mountaintop moment, a mutual change of heart and arrange for Juno to be the live-in childcare for Vanessa--a new single mom--and parent the baby as a mom-team.
Those were my wishes. As a result, I left the theatre bitterly disappointed and not feeling good at all in spite of the movie's obvious attempt to place itself firmly in the "feel-good" genre niche.
Though one might say the movie was not "unrealistic" (Juno's lack of legal or other representation, her isolation from others who share her experience, her detachment from grief after placement), neither did the film problematize any of this or suggest any alternate versions of the story.
In the end, the film heartily endorsed the agenda of a return to the bad-old "baby-scoop" days and thus yes, a return the days (if they are indeed over) of women's sexuality being shameful and not within women's own control. And thus yes, a return to the days (if they are indeed over) when abortion was not readily or safely available.
If you knew nothing about adoption going into the film, you'd learn that adoption is sweet and birth mothers have no issues. If you had fairly mainstream knowledge of adoption, you'd leave with nothing new. But if you know about adoption from any part of its the insides, you might well judge, like me, that it does a terrible disservice to the field.
P.S. I'll leave it to the Killer Ladybugs to discuss the "In China they load babies into tee-shirt guns and shoot them into crowds of waiting parents" comment, not to mention the racist Asian caricature Su Chin with her anti-abortion sign and bad English grammar.
P.P.S. For more about what Juno didn't tell you about adoption, see this post.
I hate to say I told you so, but sure enough, here come the pleas to "save orphans" from an "unhappy land."
Sure, bring 'em to this land. They'll be ever so happy.
These comments from Allie are a scathing rebuke to adoption in the U.S.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the difference between even Britain's social safety net (which is shrinking) and ours and how even in Britain, our children would likely be with their first mothers. When there are "very few babies available for adoption" in a country and that country also happens to give housing and a paycheck to single mothers until their kids are 16, it ought to be a heads up to a country with throngs of children in the foster system and enough "babies available for adoption" that we are exporting them to Europe.
Giving the children of the poor to the rich is no social safety net.
Sara also mentions a key problem with using a tax credit to publically support adoption. The people who need the most help with adoption costs aren't going to have enough tax liability to recoup the costs in a credit later. Besides, you still need the money up front, which can be difficult too. This is why tax breaks of all kinds are such a stupid way to help people besides the solid middle class. Politicians love the solid middle class though, so here we are.
A couple of weeks ago I said that if the world were the place I'd like it to be, I might not be a parent.
The thing is, I know my children needed Cole Mom and Mama Shannon under the circumstances of our current system. Thus I have no qualms about adopting them. We didn't contribute to a market in babies through our adoption because the babies we adopted aren't the kind that are "in demand." I don't feel at all defensive about how our family came to be.
And yet, I'd really see these circumstances changed, even at the cost of having never met my children. Why on earth do I feel that way? Ironically, because I love my children so much that I'd sacrifice being their Mama Shannon to change the world to treat women like the women they'll grow up to be with justice and compassion.
Of course, no one has arrived to offer me this choice, so it's a moot point. But I think it speaks to the conversion experience some adoptive parents have after they bring their children home. Once you are deeply in love with a child whose life has been negatively impacted by social circumstances out of the control not only of that child but of the child's blood kin, you are seething with righteous anger that the world would treat your child and her people so badly.
Anyway, that's how it has been for me and some other adoptive parents I know. We cared about these things before. In some ways, caring about them led us to the kind of adoption we chose. And yet, the personal, parental connection does trigger a mama bear response that is different from any political or moral commitment I've felt before about these issues.
What I don't understand--and I mean that sincerely, I just don't "get it"--is why so many adoptive parents (barring birth family abuse histories) don't seem to feel these things.
Coincidentally, Third Mom is on about this one too, this week.
Wendy asks me to comment about adoption costs.
People do ask this a lot so it seems worthy enough of comment. It seems like when I talk to people about adoption they fall into two categories: 1) people who assume it's free to adopt because adoption is such an altruistic, humanitarian act (ha) 2) people who assume it's really expensive to adopt because they heard about someone who had to mortgage their house to do it.
Before I go on about it, here's a handy link to sample adoption budgets at Adoptive Families Magazine, and here are the results of their 2005 survey of real adoption costs.
Basically, heck no, Wendy. Adoption doesn't have to cost $30K. To answer Wendy's questions about what we did, we used a non-profit agency that keeps their costs as close to the federal tax credit for adoption as possible. If you are able to use the agency's services for everything, you will probably break even post-tax-refund. We had to pay a little extra for our homestudy and for our lawyer and I don't mind telling you that for Nat's adoption we were out by maybe $3,000 post-tax-credit. For Selina's it will probably be less since we already had a home study (and the tax credit is going up a bit every year).
We got what those of us in the adoption club sometimes cynically call "bargain babies" because not only are our children not white, they are in fact, Black. Many agencies have one fee structure for white newborns, another (slightly lower) for non-Black children of any non-white or mixed races, and yet another (bargain basement!) for children who are African American or African American mixed with any other race(s). Often enough they have adoptive parent qualifications that slide downward with this fee schedule too--if you consider older, married a shorter time, or single to be "downward." In our case being queer added to the mix because our agency (which works exclusively with mothers of children who are Black or Black+ any-other-race-mixed) is one of the most open-to-queers agencies in the country. My People all over the USA and in Canada and Europe have adopted babies from our agency. So our bargain babies got bargain parents too (lower age limit 21, no upper age limit, no marital requirements, no family size restrictions, tight budgets welcome, queers accepted).
The $30K+ adoptions out there are either international with big travel requirements or domestic white newborns I'm going to bet you.
Sometimes they say that the brown and black babies are cheaper because they are subsidized by various hard-to-place kid programs. That's true of the agency that did our homestudy. You can adopt a child through them for free if you take one who is hard-to-place and that can mean Black, over the age of two or with various types of disabilities. The agency has a fund for this. But the agency is still non-profit.
It's also true and don't let anyone tell you otherwise--that for-profit adoption professionals like some lawyers and (most) adoption "facilitators" will basically price a baby at whatever they think some desperate hopeful parent will and can pay. (See my exchange with such sleaze at the bottom of this post.)
And now I will take this opportunity to declare my absolute opposition to all for-profit adoption work as well as "sliding scale" fees for children such as my own. If our agency can do adoptions for under the tax credit, so could an agency placing white babies. If another agency wants to charge more for some adoptions to subsidize some others, let them base this on prospective parents' income, not on race. This "we have to charge less for Black babies because Black parents can't afford to adopt" is a dumb and unneccesary way to deal with the issue. I'm fine with rich people subsidizing adoption for less rich people. There's no need to base it on race.
Just because I'm posting every day doesn't mean I'm going to have a snappy title every day. That's just too much to ask.
Beth asks about: "Any plans you have for Selina's baptism, or for marking her adoption liturgically. And what theological thoughts are bouncing around your head in relation to the above."
Today is the second anniversary of Nat's baptism (Church-calendar-wise) and a good day to talk about all things liturgical.
We are going to baptize Selina on Easter Sunday next year. We couldn't get it together before then. She'll be about the same age Nat was at her baptism and so can probably wear the beautiful gown my mother made for Nat.
My theological thoughts on marking adoption got some exercise last April when I worked on a subcommittee of the Episcopal standing committee on liturgy and music to develop a proposal for a supplement to the Book of Common Prayer for all aspects of adoption. I personally worked mostly on something called a "theological rationale" for the supplement itself. In other words, why does adoption need its own liturgical identity? Here is the concluding paragraph of the document I wrote then:
We believe that the special nature of adoption and its strong presence in scripture, theological traditions and human practice calls for special liturgical recognition by the Church. In the United States, adoption was once a practice most often veiled in secret, hidden as if something to be ashamed of. As adoption practice shifts and changes, as adoption becomes more acknowledged by the broader U.S. culture, the Church can take a leadership role in celebrating with those who rejoice, comforting those who mourn and calling for justice within the practice of adoption. The Church can offer a unique witness to the special place of adoption within human family forms. It can offer those whose own immediate families are not involved in adoption a role in supporting and sustaining families who are.
I think that adoption can often be oversimplified in a Christian context. Some of the most offensive things people say and do in adoption flow from supposed claims to Christianity. People claim to "rescue" "heathen" children and "christianize" them in adoption. People claim that God planned their adoptions, even putting babies "in the wrong mommy's tummy" (a story I heard related by a researcher at the adoption conference) for them to later go find and adopt, etc. But as one first mother put it at the conference, "that's a cruel and malicious god who 'willed' me to lose my baby." Too often, the Church forgets those who are silent parties to adoption, especially first parents when it thoughtlessly celebrates adoption as the way we become God's children.
And yet I also think that the message of the Gospel is that your neighbor is the last person you expect her to be, that family is made across the unlikeliest lines and that hope and healing spring from death and loss. I think the spirit of adoption is at the heart of the Gospel and the Gospel can be at the heart of adoption when those hurting and losing are not forgotten, but are enfolded into the family in whatever way is possible under the circumstances of the specific adoption. (Maybe this is an open adoption, maybe it is an adoption in which biological families unknown are remembered and honored in rituals or prayers.) I also think that the Church--mine especially--has a leadership role to take in calling for adoption reform, pushing for openness in adoption and forgiveness and healing for broken families.
As of right now, there is a little prayer to bless an adoption in the BCP and we did it right before Nat's baptism. We'll do it again at Selina's because if anything comes of my committee work it won't be for a while. If and when anything does come of it, though, we'll return to the church and do something more. I actually look forward to that possibility and to the fact that the girls will be older and maybe at least Nat will be old enough to understand and add her input to whatever we do. As long as I'm fantasizing, I'll add both Nat and Selina's mothers to the mix and hope that someday they will be able to go and have their familial relationships to us consecrated in a community of faith.
I'm going to say more, I think, about "hmmm..." below, but in the meantime, I was just emailing with a filmmaker I also met at that conference and thought I'd publicize both her completed film and her work in progress (to which you can contribute). It looks like a really great project, right up my ideological alley!
I have been reading a book by one of the folks I saw present at the adoption conference and I am loving it. It says all kinds of stuff I think. For those of you following along at home, it's Making Babies, Making Families by Mary Lyndon Shanley.
She is basically very pro-openness in adoption and very anti-anonymity in adoption and gamete "donation." She is also very anti-free-market policy in the exchange of human gametes (and surrogate gestation, too, I think).
One nice thing she does, rhetorically, is asks "what does policy/practice X tell us about what we think matters regarding families?" She also asks again and again whether children's or society's interests are served well by various policies/practices. And in her adoption section, she comes down very solidly in favor of putting most of the power about adoption placement decisions in the hands of mothers (by which I mean women who give birth to the children in question) rather than social workers, courts, professional organizations, etc. She would also give unmarried biological mothers more rights (though not 100%) than unmarried biological fathers in making adoption decisions and I think she's correct to do so.
I think that our personal, individual adoptions are ethical as far as that goes, but the longer and the more I think about these kinds of issues the less likely I think it is that I would be a parent if the world were the place I'd like it to be. Maybe. But quite possibly not. And certainly not to the children that are mine now.
And that's an interesting thing to ponder.
Well that was fun!
The adoption conference went really well this weekend. Not only did I get to meet Susan, Jenna and Dawn--all face-to-face for the first time--I got to see some of my favorite academic adoption writers, develop a new academic crush on another and meet my researcher friend, mentioned in the post below!
Our panel was very well received. It was like adoption summer camp except colder. We had a terrific mix of academic and non-academic, first and adoptive parents (one of the best mixes at the whole conference) on the panel and in the audience, which leant itself to fabulous discussion after the panelists read their work.
Now I've got two new articles brewing in my brain that need homes and time to get written. If only my desire for sitting and thinking and reading and writing wasn't in such (slightly losing) competition with my desire to hold my babies while they're young enough to let me! It looks like chiropractor's advice aside, the baby wrap is coming back out this week...
I have a friend who is working on a magazine feature article about adoption. She is particularly interested in the process by which adoptive parents decide what kind of adoption to pursue. If you'd like to read her interview questions with no pressure to continue to participate, please send me your name and email and I'll pass them on to her. All members of the "triad" are invited to respond!
But I have papers to grade and I am trying to churn out a paper for this conference. It will be my first academic-esque presentation in something like two years and my first quasi-professional adoption writing, so I am really bummed that I have to write it in a sleep-deprived stupor. I just hope it won't be complete drivel.
Allie comments:
"One of my concerns about seeking diversity is always that I don't want anyone to feel like I'm 'using' friendship or acquaintance with them as some sort of lesson for my kids. I know how that feels and I don't like it when it is done to me..."
And it's really high time I addressed that here, because some version or other of that concern pops up a lot when I start talking about this in various contexts.
I'm going to start with how I feel when I get the idea that I'm someone's token lesbian friend. For the most part, I don't really mind as long as I really am a friend and not a colorful entertainment or the repressed object of some closet case's desire. (That can happen a lot with lesbians who wear their outness on their sleeves. The not-so-out can become hangers-on. That's emotionally taxing and often truly problematic in many ways.)
But if I just "happen" to be someone's only lesbian friend, that's not a big problem for me, nor is it a problem when or if that person wants to "use" my family as a example to teach her children something (or enlighten herself, for that matter). I prefer honest questions to ignorant silence every time. And I'm all in favor of the children of straight people learning about lesbian families, and happy to be of service--again, as long as it is rooted in genuine friendship. (And you never know which kids are going to grow up to be queer. I feel an obligation to all children to show them that it's a perfectly fine thing to grow up to be.)
I mostly feel the same way about adoption and about race in our adoption, though I'm getting more cautious of how I talk around the kids themselves. I'm pretty happy to answer almost any question, honestly asked for the purposes of better understanding (and certainly for purposes of adoption research) when my kids aren't around. I think I have a pretty good radar for knowing when the questioners are just prurient curiosity seekers. For one thing, they tend to out themselves by starting to tell me some third-hand adoption horror story. Major red flag.
And I never want my children themselves to be "used" as diversity for other children. If we happen to be real friends, that's fine. But I would be livid if a school separated my child from the only other Black child in the grade so that each classroom could have a token Black kid, for example (a real-life scenario some friends went through).
On to how I feel about seeking out relationships with people of color so that my children will have peers and adults in their lives who look like them and can give them an "indigineous" sense (if you will) of what their own Blackness (or other minority identity, but I will use Blackness as shorthand here since it's our main concern) means to them and how they "live" it in their daily lives.
This is the thing I most often hear anxiety about from would-be transracially adoptive parents. Some version of "Won't I look like a phony, obviously only making overtures of friendship because I have a Black kid?" My answer to that is, "maybe." And also, "so what?"
This question is absolutely loaded with an anxiety born of resting on white privilege. And I will explain at length, because I have a feeling that to a person, the people expressing this concern very much mean well. But it's a privilege not having to move beyond your racial comfort zone if you don't want to; a privilege to appear to be "neutral" (that is, having no "vested interest" because white isn't a thing with interest attached) and therefor more trustworthy on issues of race; a privilege to call yourself "not racist" while not knowing a single non-white person with whom you might exchange more than surface pleasantries.
Here's an illustrative tale from real life:
On Nat's first Fourth of July, we were in Washington, D.C.. The best place to watch the fireworks in D.C. is from a hilltop parking lot of a church in Anacostia. (For those who don't know, Anacostia is a very nearly 100% African American, very poor quarter of D.C. When you hear about the D.C. murder rate, about 90% of those murders are in Anacostia. The rest of the city is mostly murder-free.) I knew about this parking lot because a (white) friend of mine--a retired Episcopal priest--used to serve a church in Anacostia. Also, Anacostia is where the Frederick Douglass House is, and that's also on a hill with a nice view and it's one of my favorite "tourist" sites in D.C.. (Never mind that most tour guides don't even mention it, because the neighborhood is not exactly Our Nation's Pride. In fact, Cole, seeing it for the first time called it "U.S. Apartheid.")
Anyway, up the hill we went to watch the fireworks. My retired priest friend, Cole, me and baby Nat all wrapped in her baby carrier, but with her little brown arms and legs dangling out. And I spent an inordinant amount of time worrying that everyone there (we were the only white people in a crowd of about 500) would think we were only there because of Nat, when in fact, by golly, I had gone there long before considering parenthood or adoption and I wanted "credit" for that!
In short, those little brown dangling appendages took away my White Liberal Prestige. Another white privilege lost. I got over it, of course.
When it comes to making overtures of friendship towards Black people that are at least partly "for" my children, well, we do a lot for our children that requires sacrifice or causes us discomfort. If I make someone mad or annoy someone or someone says something that hurts my feelings or wounds my pride, in the process of this reaching out, I can deal with that. I'm a big girl. Discomfort is part of parenthood in all kinds of ways.
But as it happens, no one has ever responded that way. Not a stranger on the street, not a friend, not a professional acquaintance. Whatever might be said behind our backs, our children are embraced with warmth and love and an insider "nod" by Black people 100% so far. And even if only for the children's sake, those adults treat us kindly too. I have no qualms about walking my white self with my Black children into an all-Black space and being read as the lady who is only here because of her kids (even if it isn't always true--sometimes it is!). If that's what it takes to do what I consider to be the perhaps number one most important thing I can do for my children, I'll do it.
I realize that there's a big difference between being white, raising Black kids and needing to cross these uncomfortable boundaries and being white with white kids trying to do the same. And I can't speak to that. But I do think that overall, if you truly care about this stuff and you truly want to make a real effort to give your children experiences that will allow them to grow up and build a more racially just world* you just have to suck it up and be willing to have a Black Person Be Mad At You. I know, that's a white liberal's biggest fear. But oh well.
And like I said, more often thatn not, your fears are probably unfounded.
Now do please continue to leave excellent comments or write your own posts because I am really enjoying the discussion.
* "Race" standing in here, for all kinds of justice, really.
A lot of gender thoughts have been popping up in my head lately and I thought I'd share where we are on the topic since I wrote this.
Recently, someone asked me if we selected girls in our adoptions. No. Our agency doesn't allow gender selection.
I read a poll in an adoption publication a few months ago that suggested most adoptive or prospective adoptive parents think they should be allowed to choose the gender of their adopted child. I don't know how scientific that poll was, but I was surprised. For the most part, I don't think adoptive parents should get to choose gender. Why should they? People can't choose when they get pregnant. (One responder to the poll said that because she couldn't get pregnant, picking her child's gender should be offered her as some kind of consolation. That's the kind of entitled narcissism that gives adoptive parents a bad name if you ask me.)
I can imagine discrete scenarios in which selecting gender would make sense. If current children in the family had certain kinds of abuse histories, one gender or the other might be the only healthy option. But for the average couple seeking their first (or second or third, for that matter) healthy newborn, I can't see any reason that they should go ordering up the gender of their choice. If adoption is about finding homes for babies (and children) who need them, gender shouldn't usually come into it.
All that said, we were mostly glad when Selina was a second child of the same gender as our first. (Cole was a little misty about giving up her dream of a boy, but I reminded her that one of our girls might yet grow up to be a boy, so all hope need not die!) In our case, a second child of roughly the same gender means indefinite years of room-sharing, clothes-sharing (hopefully) and thus a less strained budget. But we are also the legal guardians of two small boys, so it was not a make-or-break deal for us. We could end up parenting kids of all kinds before we're through.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking Selina is girlier than Nat. but actually, she's just quieter. So there's a little peek into my psyche. There is still really no telling what kind of girls our girls will be. The jury is out on Nat. At the moment, she's wearing a lot of tee-shirts and shorts and as recently as tonight was mistaken for a boy. I buy her shorts from the boys' section of the store, because no 2 year-old needs to be wearing Daisy Dukes and the boy shorts are about four inches longer. The tee shirts mostly having surfing themes, as they were bought in preparation for, or while on vacation in, Hawaii. And she has some distinctly girlie white shoes and some sneakers from the boys' department (I don't like bubble gum pink sneakers, okay? Sue me!) so often enough, she is entirely cross-dressed to play outside and run and climb and whatnot.
She has dresses too, but for summer playgroundwear, we have mostly stuck to shirts and shorts.
If I ask Nat what she wants to wear, she usually picks the last choice. So if I say "do you want a shirt and shorts or a pretty dress?" she'll say "pretty dress!" If I say "do you want to wear a pretty dress or your zebra shirt?" she's all over the zebra shirt.
She likes me to put lipstick on her when she catches me putting it on, and she likes to wear my shoes, my hats, and my lotion, but so did my ex's son when he was this age and spending lots of time with me. It feels entirely like "I want to be like Mama Shannon" as opposed to any real expression of her true soul.
I don't think she's really registered gender difference yet, in terms of categorizing Cole and me and she and Selina in one group and David and Rob and her granddaddies and uncles in another. She doesn't use pronouns very often and when she does, often as not, she uses the wrong gender for the person she's identifying. I suppose this is due to not hanging out in daycare or preschool. Nobody has told her she can't play with the trucks because she's a girl or that she needs to keep the boys out of the dollhouse.
So Nat's a mystery still, even at two-and-a-half.
You all knew I was born in Honolulu, right?
Until now, I hadn't been back to Hawaii since age two.
With my babies in tow, it felt a bit like stepping into one of my father's old home movies, in the role of my own mother. There's my toddler, chasing a Hawaiian local child through the park with her tongue hanging out to feel the breeze. There's my baby getting petted and fawned over by local mamas and grandmamas at every turn.
It was a great vacation, but it was also just really cool to stand on the ground of this place that has taken on mythic proportions in my psyche for the past 35 years.
Nat loved the ocean. Loved. She went running headlong into it at every opportunity. We stayed at Anini Beach on the North Shore of Kauai (if you know it). It's a long, long, long reef that makes for really shallow, calm water about a half mile out from the beach. Nat just assumed that the Pacific Ocean was one big wading pool Granddaddy conjured for her benefit. It kinda was.
We stuck Selina's toe in the water but she hated it. She is still a pre-bath-loving newborn and doesn't like getting naked or wet, so she mostly hung out in slings, wraps, bjorns and plain old arms the whole week. Fortunately, 5 adults besides myself were queuing to hold and feed her so I got a nice break from lifting and carrying, etc. (at least while in Hawaii, if not en route).
Cole and my brother and sister-in-law all took a surfing lesson while I sat on the beach with another class member's grandparents and cheered them on. They weren't terrible. Cole especially wasn't terrible given that she just hit that mysterious 0 birthday and has a half-paralyzed left knee from an old lacrosse injury (these aging butches and their sports injuries!). You better believe there will be a photo up here of Cole surfing as soon as I get the disk.
I also dragged Cole along to ride a horse. If you go to Kauai and are planning to ride a horse, go for the worst review in the ultimate guide. The people who wrote that guide don't know beans about horses and I could tell from the bad review that the Princeville Ranch was actually a great place as far as rent-a-horse outfits go and I was right. They did a fabulous job for that sort of thing (ie: letting anybody and everybody ride their horses regardless of experience level) and Cole loved it. I sold her on horse back riding enough that she wants to learn more.
My father dragged us all over the island to look at beautiful stuff and more beautiful stuff. It was chock-full of beautiful stuff, including a waterfall of family legend where my mother allegedly pulled the car over and washed herself off after I allegedly threw up on her. (I should add that Selina carried on the throwing-up-on-mothers-in-Hawaii family tradition commendably.)
We had a noon to 10 pm layover in Honolulu on our way home and we drove around a bit downtown to get a feel for the city, then hung out at Waikiki and watched surfers and chatted with locals. In the evening, we found a ramen place in a mall (even the malls are nice in Hawaii) and Nat had a grand time eating one of her very favorite foods ("noodles"). We liked Honolulu a lot, as we are sort of urban people but also like pretty nature. Honolulu has both things going on at once. Wow.
Now I'm reading Dismembering Lahui to get, as I told my father, the cynical stuff. Really, the real stuff about post-colonial Hawaiian history. Did you have any idea that in the last quater of the 19th century, the Native Hawaiian population declined by 92-95% depending on whose numbers you think are most accurate??? I didn't. Hello genocide.
But Hawaii has this really cool political/cultural feel to it, like the Native Hawaiians don't take increased luxury hotel development sitting down, like gay rights are a big no-brainer to them, like adoption is an obvious way to increase your family, like all the children belong to everyone. I loved the sense I got there.
Even the Hawaiian Airlines propoganda magazine featured a cover story about traditional Hawaiian kinship adoption (Hanai), which is informal, but strongly rooted in history and culture and is open by definition. There was even a woman in the article, who, having grown up with Hanai values, but without anyone in her circle to give her a baby, adopted an African American boy from Arkansas and now he's some kind of big deal on the Hawaiian traditional music scene. Apparently, in Hanai children are sort of redistributed. If you have lots of them and you know someone who wants one and doesn't have any, you give them a baby. Just like that. Your uber-fertile sister-in-law is no longer an annoyance at holiday dinners, but the birthmother of your baby. Also, hanai was used to maintain strong traditional culture by giving firstborn sons and daughters (one each) to the grandparents or another member of the grandparents' generation to be raised into late childhood/adolescence. Also, it was used to attach families to other families higher up on the social scale by placing children with nobles. But these children were to always be raised exactly the same as biological children in those families and there were heavy formal consequences for failing to do that.
Anyway, that's what the airline magazine said and it made me feel like I was on my way to the Land of Adoption or something. It is worth a look, but their online version isn't current, so the article isn't there yet. Maybe when a new hard issue comes out. I took a copy and am going to put it in Selina's book.
Speaking of babies, my BFF, Karen, of two failed IVF's and brief consideration of donor eggs (from moi) and a decision to adopt from China right before China became Hard To Adopt From, had her baby via scheduled c-section on Tuesday. His name is Carl and he was conceived the old-fashioned way through dumb luck. He's a beauty. My idea of what newborns look like is so skewed by my two low-birthweight preemies that he looks like a 6 weeker to me, but her was only 7 lbs 10 oz (which, I guess is average? a bit above average?). Anyhow, I am ecstatic for Karen, her husband Rob and their whole family.
And on that note, I'll leave you to catch up on blogs I've not been reading for the past two weeks (um, or maybe to grade my papers--maybe).
That would be a stream-of-conciousness post from me. I don't promise that I won't edit it, though.
Two kids means zero time of brain power for blogging, yet lots of thoughts throughout the day that just escape into the ether unappreciated because no one around is of age to discuss them with, or at least to respond intelligently.
Today, Nat was watching Sesame Street and Selina was having a mid-way bottle break (it takes her two or three rounds to finish off a bottle) and I had clean dishes to unload, so I plopped her on a Boppy my mom gave us that has the little toy bar thingys and went to unload the dishes. As expected, Selina liked that for about 45 seconds, after which, she started to cry. I heard Nat move in Selina's direction, so I sneaked a peak through the kitchen door to make sure she didn't smother baby sister, and what did I see? Nat sitting there on her knees, patting Selina gently on the tummy and saying "baby Seena, what wrong? What wrong? What wrong, baba Seena?" very sweetly.
Now that's just darned awesome.
I wasn't slinging Selina, because the chiropractor says I can't for an undetermined period of time. I can't lift Nat at all. And my back is still pretty much in constant pain except for the first hour after David puts this stuff on it called "Bio Freeze" (no link--google it--this is stream-of-consciousness). And now Cole has a cold and David has a cold and Nat's fever is gone, leaving her with a dry cough.
I am using her illness as an excuse to ban the sandbox. Her baby sitters--who do not have to give her baths--just love to let Nat play with other kids in the sandbox at the park. YUCK! And I know Nat. There's no doubt she has been putting random strange children's sandbox tous in her mouth. DOUBLE YUCK. Thence the 104 degree fever (that farenheit folks, just to reassure my European readers that she isn't boiling).
But you know, Nat is almost 2.5 and since her first birthday, she seems to get sick about every six months. This was her first recordable fever, but her thrid illness. If she gets sick every six months for the rest of her life, I figure she's ahead of the game.
Selina has yet to demonstrate her constitution, so we're keeping her out of reach of all contaminated people