Peter's Cross Station

We Did!

I know it's Father's Day today and many of you are celebrating that.  We have many wonderful fathers (and faery godfathers!) in our lives and we wish them all the best.  But for our two-mom family, today is special for another reason:

Six Years Ago Today

This Just In!

Once Chastity, now Chaz Bono is transitioning to male.  Congrats Chaz and thanks for being such a brave leader of LGBT issues.

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!"

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.

People Are So Weird

Need to vent a little here in personal space.  So I wrote this thing (you might have seen it) at Strollerderby about questioning the appropriateness of pirates as a theme of children's play.  Mainly, it was supposed to be kind of funny, like "huh, yeah, never thought about it, but how DO you explain a plank to a 3-year old?"  (I told my kids their Little People Pirate Ship plank was a diving board.)

Anyhow, now a few commenters are convinced my children are micro-managed and having their creativity and learning opportunities cramped debilitatingly.

It really never ceases to amaze me how much assumption people can load onto the smallest pieces of information.  In another recent post, a woman said she was terribly worried about the children of anyone claiming to love their spouse more than said children and accused such people of having a sick "codependent" relationship.  You know, just in general.  Without knowing anything more than a silly comment on a blog about "love" which can interpreted in about a thousand different ways by a thousand different people.

For the record, my kids own about 300 books, buckets of blocks, a basket full of dress-up clothes (some girlie, some decidedly NOT girlie), baskets of dolls and stuffed animals, tea sets and play food, cars, trucks (and yes, even a pirate ship), a dollhouse and tons of furniture and dollhouse people, a miniature piano that has two and a half octaves of real keys, several drums and bells and other rhythm instruments, a real ukulele, blankets they use to build forts, a closet full of art supplies, more balls than I can count, scooters, tricycles, and yes, even videos (gasp!).  Plus more free-play time than any kids their age I know.

I hardly think I'm cramping their style by thinking twice about certain toys or books or videos. I mean, ALL parents choose what they let their kids play with to at least some extent, right?  (If they don't what's up with that?) My kids are still too little for peer influences, so I'm not exactly fighting them over their true passions.  They don't even know pirates exist (in spite of the Little People).  They don't miss them any more than they miss Hannah Montana, whom I sincerely hope they never discover (yeah, yeah, wishful thinking, I know).

Sheesh.

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?

Shannon On Suleman: Round Two

Again, at Strollerderby.

Fundraiser Update

I'll be sending a check for $250 to the new quint mom in Maryland today.

Those of you who ordered jewelry should see it by the end of this week or early next--I accidentally failed to post a "SOLD" sign and double-sold a couple of things, so I'll be making duplicates for those and it may take a me a few days to get that done.

Thanks everyone!

I Should Be Working

But my brain is too tired to write anything that has to make sense.  I have this long list of things to blog about but I can't handle that either, right now, so here's some entirely random, stream-of-consciousness from me.  Move over, Jack Kerouac.

Church this morning--it was our fourth week at the new church.  When we appeared the first week everyone was all welcoming and asking how we found the place.  The truth is, I knew more about it than half the welcomers, because I did hard-core Internet research to find the perfect church in Chicago long before we even moved.  We just didn't get it together enough to get there on a Sunday until this month.  A bit of a New Year's thing to get up and go.

Even Cole loves the place, which is remarkable, seeing as church has never meant much of anything to her before and God means even less.  But as far as family activities go, she is all for it.  As for uber-churchy me, I can say (and did, after only two weeks' attendance) that it's the best church I've ever been to, hands down.  And I have loved other places in the past, and been very involved in lots of other places.

Here's why I love it:

It has a serious number of members who are not white.  I don't mean, "oh look, how nice, a Negro!" I mean, it's a truly racially mixed church.  Roughly, I'd guess it's about 40% Black, 40% white and 20% other--lots of Latina/o, some South Asian, lots of mixed-race people, etc.  Nat has plenty of places to look for grown-up Black role models and young Black peers, adopted, transracially adopted, born into their families, with two same-sex parents, with single parents, etc. etc. etc. (Selina too, of course, but she's too little to notice yet.)

That brings me to the fact that maybe 20% of the membership is queer.  The rector is a gay, long-partnered white man who spent many years in D.C. so he and I reminisce.  There's never a drop-the-bomb moment of worrying that the person I'm talking to will suddenly feel weird to find out I'm a lesbian as there often is pretty much everywhere else in life.  I mean, any given person may not realize that I'm a lesbian, but they take it for granted that plenty of people in the pews around them will be.  No biggie.

It answers to my idea of the perfectly Episcopal church.  That is, it's full of lovely liturgical tradition, but not stuffy in the least.  Lots of processing and bell-ringing and music and candles and kids and adults in various states of vestiture and yet the altar is a round table in the middle of the sanctuary/nave with pews coming off of it like wheel spokes.  It just shouts "the table of God's people!" through design.  It's theatre-in-the-round, which has always been a favorite of mine, but I've never seen it in a church.

For Epiphany, about two dozen golden stars and a mess of golden streamers are hanging from the vaulted ceiling to just above the altar.  Nat found this immediately captivating.  So did I.  Tasteful, but contemporary and celebratory.  I can't wait to see what they hang there throughout the rest of the year.

If you think I am dwelling an awful lot on the material aspects of the place, that's because I find my own spirituality and connection to the divine to be most aided by these kinds of sensory touchpoints.  It's why I like the Episcopal Church in the first place.  I consider it excellent theatre.  I think church can be largely a matter of taste and this is mine.  Finding a herd of people who share it and also find their connection to the divine through it makes for instant bonding and a basis for intimacy.  So I trust we can grow to love the people there, too.

Which also reminds me that the music program is excellent.  There's a new music director and he has wide-ranging eclectic taste and talents, so there's a great variety of music styles every Sunday.  On MLK Sunday, though, we had a jazz trio do everything, including a special Duke Ellington piece.  There are choirs for kids starting at Nat's age, so she can start learning to sing next Fall.

So far everyone has been super.  People bent over backwards to welcome us and the kids and get us involved right away.  It's got a warm glow to it.  They serve an entire real meal after the service too, not just coffee and donuts.  Today it was mini-veggie quiches and little make-it-yourself ham sandwiches on rolls.  Sharing a real meal, not just stand-up food makes for a cozy environment in which to get to know people, I think.  Plus, I'm usually so low on blood sugar by the end of the service it's all I can do not to faint on the way downstairs to the food.

Last week, as luck would have it, was the annual meeting to which I brought a big casserole of beans and rice for the potluck (Episcopalians who do potluck--the perfect blend of my Baptist childhood and my Episcopal present!).  Thus I got to find out what the heck the church is up to as far as the neighborhood and the city and the world.  The church is around the corner from the Obamas' old house and the prayers on the Sunday before the inauguration, named "our neighbor, Barack Obama" for a blessing.  The church is quite entrenched in the neighborhood and does quite a bit of work to preserve its mixed-race, mixed-class character.  it opens the doors to parents who need a place for kids to run around in the winter; many members are involved in a local project to protect the lower-income neighbors from displacement due to gentrification (and the possible upcoming Olympics, should Chicago get them); many members walk to church from homes nearby.  (We drive 40 minutes all the way across town.)

Get this.  They do Montessori Sunday School for the kids.  Who's ever even heard of such a thing?  They call it "Godly Play" and it's totally awesome.  Nat picked up the rug and the routine immediately.  She likes the sand box with little Bible characters (to make scenes in the desert!) the best.  You can also get a baby doll in a Christening gown, pour water into a little bowl and baptize her.  It slays me.  Who thought this up?  I am so impressed.

That's everything I can think of for now.  Sunday is everyone's favorite day now.  Nat had a tantrum and didn't want to leave this morning.  That's how awesome fun it is.

Yeah.  Just like Jack Kerouac.