Peter's Cross Station

Help a Student of Transracial Adoption

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

Why Adopt?

Over at Dawn's, a conversation about adoption is going on largely between first mothers and adoptive mothers, but also some adoptees, infertile-but-not-adopting women, and others.  And it is fabulous as conversations over there can be.  You probably already know all about it.  I was only just made aware because I have been shamefully blog-absent of late.

Anyway, I wanted to address some of the issues coming up over there on this blog, because I have a lot to say and because I feel a bit outside the mold of many adoption assumptions that fly around (reasonably, since the assumptions are based on majority experience) there.  Better to give my thoughts their own space and not muddy things over there too much.

What a lot of the talk seems to be boiling down to is, "who in her right mind would adopt, if she knows how messy and unethical so much adoption is?"  And there are subtle but real accusations flying about entitlement in adoptive mothers (yes, mothers and not fathers) who come to adoption via infertility, and how that entitlement perhaps blurs morality when adoption decisions are being made.

I find it interesting because A) I'm not infertile and B) although sometimes queers who parent or want to parent are accused of having an entitled (more often, the term "selfish" gets used) attitude, I didn't come to parenting out of an innate drive or burning desire, but more of a second thought after lots of pieces of my life fell into place in ways that would make parenting possible and perhaps desirable.

So I find it difficult to enter that fray of "infertile women are so sad that they can't have babies that they become viciously capable of stealing the babies of others."  Maybe.  I have heard women talk like that.  You may remember that commenter on Strollerderby who said as much in so many words, last month.  But I don't identify with that feeling and I don't feel defensive about adopting because "baby at all costs" was never part of my psyche.

I did learn a lot (though not nearly as much as I know now) about ethical problems in adoption before I adopted, but seeing as that burning desire was not blinding me, I don't have that excuse to have continued with our adoption.

So why did I, upon learning that adoption is fraught with ethical paradoxes, go ahead and do it anyway?

Partly, the answer is that I did it in a way I thought was as ethical as possible, and I've talked about that a good bit on this blog, though not for a while.  Let me know if you want to hear more about it.  Right now I want to focus on the other part.

Life is full of ethical paradoxes.

I can't think of any part of my life that is not an ethical paradox--my legal marriage (okay, only in two states, plus a half-dozen foreign countries, but still) in spite of my belief that legal marriage is immoral; my choice to live in more housing than I really need when others die of exposure in a sub-zero winter; likewise my overuse of hot, potable running water in my half-hour showers every morning; my choice to shop at Whole Paycheck even though they don't have a unionized workforce and fly in my organic grapes from thousands of miles; almost every parenting decision I make is full of shades of gray.  That includes the decision to become a parent and the decision to adopt.  Had I decided to give birth, that would have had its own set of paradoxical ethical challenges, as it would have required medical intervention and donor (or purchased, depending on my decisions) gametes.

The fact is, we can't keep our hands clean in this life.  As far as I'm concerned anything short of "sell everything you have and give the money to the poor and come follow me" is a compromise.  And I can hardly judge anyone else's tough decisions, given my own set of complexities.

Sometimes I hear from readers here and I get the impression they think my adoptions (or the agency we used) are perfect examples of perfect ethics.  They are not.  They are tangled and messy.  You will not find a perfect agency or a perfect adoption, you will only be able to do the best you can to find an agency that's doing the best it can in an imperfect world full of truly screwed-up priorities and injustice.

I decided a long time ago that I needed to stop trying to keep my hands clean.  Not because I wanted to give up on the ideal, but because it is impossible to keep your hands clean, and trying for that is a waste of energy.  Do the best you can, then forgive yourself the rest and get to work making the world a better place.  Instead of trying to keep my hands clean, I decided I would instead try to inhabit a space of resistance.  As long as one is engaged in resisting, one is at least tossing something on the side of balance with all that mess that we humans live with.

We all have things we personally feel we couldn't live with.  Then we have things we are willing to struggle through.  Then there are the things that come up without warning or time to think and we do the best we can.  I made my adoption decisions--in cooperation with Cole--based on the information I had, and the things I decided I could and couldn't live with.  I could live with open adoption.  I couldn't live with figuring out how to do the right thing by a child from another country and culture who had no notion--and probably never would--of who her first family was.  This is not because domestic adoption is better than adoption from China.  It's because given the ethical mess that both of them are, I felt I could live with and deal with one better than the other.  Thank god there are parents who feel differently about that, because that's what the kids they adopt need.

Here's a story.  Once our homestudy agency offered to show our profile to an expectant mom who was white, carrying the child of a Black, secret boyfriend.  She had two (white) children already, but didn't want to raise the biracial one.  Because of race.  She wanted the baby to go away and be kept a secret from her friends and family.  We said no thanks, don't show her our profile.  We didn't feel up to dealing with the kind of specific pain that child would be facing.  We didn't want that overt racism in our family (birth family=our family), even if we weren't in touch.  And we wanted to be in touch.

Did that baby go on to be adopted?  Yep.  Under those circumstances.  Will someone have to deal with that child's pain?  Yep.  Our hands are not clean just because we're not doing that particular job.  But we didn't want that particular job.  We have our hands full with our own adoption complications (and yes, they are legion).

Anyway, I've said before that not adopting does not keep anyone clean from the unethical aspects of adoption.  In fact, the aspects of our adoptions that are the most ethically problematic are very large societal issues of racism, poverty and lack of healthcare access.  We are no more culpable for those than anyone else in our socio-economic position, whether they adopted or not.  Our children would not be living happily ever after with their loving mothers if we had not adopted them.  In fact, not many of the children our agency places would be "saved" from adoption if the prospective parent supply dried up.  I do think that might be true of the kinds of adoptions done by other agencies.  I think far fewer healthy, white babies would be available for adoption, were there not a long line of monied prospective parents out there.

But now I'm getting off the topic I intended to stay on, so I will go to bed.

Bottom line:  you can't stay clean in this life.  But sometimes you can thoughtfully choose your messes.

Thinking about School--Sort of!

One of the main reasons we want to home school is that we figure we'll never find a school with a curriculum we like, with any decent number of children of color, for tuition we can afford.

Except we just did.

We found a Montessori school near us that actually has a serious commitment to diversity and it's working.  There are at least 2 or 3 African American kids per 15-20 kid class, and lots more non-Black kids of color, too.

The curriculum is classic Montessori, which I mostly like.  I like the multi-age classrooms (each "level" incorporates 3 years), the individualized "work plans" for each student, the complete absence of grading (quarterly anecdotal reports) and the physical classroom space.  What sometimes squicks me a little about Montessori is the emphasis on orderliness and the idea that there is One Right Way to do everything.  But this particular school (we went for a private tour) seems to have a flexible enough attitude not to be too awful about that.  I do like the emphasis on respecting the materials and each other and tidying up after yourself.

I wish Montessori didn't insist on calling everything the children do "work."  I realize this was Maria Montessori's way to emphasize the importance of children's play, I just wish we could respect play, as play and not call it work.  But that's kind of a semantic issue and I can get over it.

I am also not ready for Nat to be in a full-time school and don't think I will be for a long time.  This program is three hours/five days.  We might very well skip Fridays on a regular basis, if she goes, since Friday is usually "yea! Cole-mom is home, let's hang out with the family all together" day and Nat did so terribly when asked to just spend 45 minutes tap-dancing on Fridays last Fall.

If she goes, it will be in the Fall when she's four and a half.  I am telling myself it's okay, because I am getting roughly this many hours of baby sitting, now, so it will still give me plenty of time to do all the same home school things I do now (or plan to do this spring, after not being able to keep on top much last fall during all our moving and settling).

Nat would get two full years of part-time before she went into the 6-9 year-olds class for an 8am-3pm day.  I don't know how I feel about 8am-3pm days for a 6-year old.  Maybe we can keep taking Fridays off or something, if we decide to do this school at that point.  And Nat's birthday is in February, so she'll be fully six and a half then.

But this brings me to money.  We can afford the half-days, as the money for that is slightly less than I'm paying for baby sitting now.  The trouble is, we'd still need some baby sitting, because of Selina.  But not as much.  And the nice thing is I can spend the time when Nat is in school (and Selina isn't with a sitter) hanging out with Selina so she can get her own good strong home education going between now and 4 if we do this same thing with her.

I'm also reminding myself that we can not go to the 6-9 year old class if we don't want to or it doesn't seem like the best decision (or we can't afford the full-time tuition, the very same year Selina would be starting to do the 3-6 year old half days).  I had been pleased to learn that school is not compulsory for kids until 7 years old in Illinois, and was thinking seven would be the first time I'd even consider school, but probably wait until nine.  We could, theoretically, bring her home again for the 6-9 years and send her to the third level ("upper elementary" they call it) at nine and a half.

On the other hand, the Montessori place is small, with a 1:10 teacher:student ratio and it follows a lot of the same philosophy that attracts me to home schooling.  Its weaknesses are music and physical education, but we'd have time (in the half-day years, anyway) to keep Suzuki and church choir and capoeira in our plans.  I don't want us to be rushed and stressed and over-scheduled when Nat is only six, because she's in school full-time and trying to cram in "extracurricular" things.  The school does keep to a half-hour homework limit after the kids hit the 9-12 year old class, so that bit seems reasonable.

We will apply for the fall and see what we see.  I do think Nat will really enjoy it.  It's totally up her alley.  She will thrive with the freedom to explore the room and choose what she wants to do, and she will enjoy playing with the same other kids--at a range of ages--every day.  I think she'll handle that "One Right Way" to do everything without getting a perfectionist or compulsive hang up, like some kids definitely do.  I just hope she doesn't get bored with the One Way, or if she starts inventing her own ways, they let her.  Because that's how she is.  When she finishes out the learning curve for something, she complicates it.  Most commonly, she complicates it by turning it on the adult who's trying to "teach her" and tries to teach the adult.  "What sound does B make?" she'll ask "b-b-b" I'll say "Good, Mama Shannon, I'm so proud of you!" she'll praise.

Can't you just see her doing that with the counting beads to her Montessori teacher?

It will be an adventure, I guess. 

More ICWA and Adoption Ethics

A comment from over there:

"...as a woman who is waiting to adopt and has been trying to build a family for over 5 years, I ask you this:  If one of your children was placed into your arms and said to be yours and then 30 days later someone came back and said, "wait never mind, this isn't "quite" legal." Would you have just handed them back and said, "We're so sorry, we didn't know we were involved with an adoption that was violating this law."??????

I wouldn't.  I wouldn't care if it was legal, I would want to be with that child that I love."

I answered her heck yeah.  What do ya'll say?

My colleague and I are planning a follow-up installment on this topic over the weekend.  Hope ya'll will check in, as you are more adoption-literate than the general public...

Long Time no Write

Sorry to be so quiet over here!

News Round Up:

- We close on the new place, Friday and the movers come as soon as we get the key. Everybody is very excited. I told Nat she'd get her own (well, shared with Selina) bathroom in our new house and she said, "with soap?!" I told her, sure, she could have soap in her bathroom. Since then she's been telling people that in her new house, she will have soap. make of that what you will.

- A visit from my BFF and her nursing toddler made a HUGE impression on Nat. Now she carries her little stuffed dog around under her shirt, telling anyone who'll listen that she's feeding the dog milk from her body, which comes out of her nipples.

- Many human reproduction conversations before and following the nursing mom visit. We've been fleshing out a few more details of Nat's (and Selina's) birth and adoption stories. I picked up a copy of It's Not the Stork and brought it home for her. She read the cover thusly:

Nat: It's not the st--st--what's that?
Shannon: "stork" it's this white bird (pointing to picture on the cover)
Nat: Stork. A book about girls, boys, babies, b--b--babies?
Shannon: "bodies" see the o and the d? "bodies."
Nat: bodies. families, and friends

The thing is, I don't really ask Nat to read much, so I don't quite keep up with exactly what she can read and so every time she reads something like that, I get all shocked and impressed. Mostly, she'd still prefer to be read to, to recite a book from memory (a big favorite she knows perfectly by heart is The Gruffalo) or to pretend to read, by telling a story while turning pages. So I let her do whatever she wants in the reading department, seeing as I'd estimate that she is reading roughly at a mid-year kindergarten level at age 3.5 with no particular "pushing."

As for the contents of the book, so far the thing that interests her most is the picture of a little girl pulling another little girl's hair. She's very concerned about the whole scenario. Why did she pull her hair? Why did she say "yeow!?" Why did she say sorry? No doubt this is right out of a growing big sister psyche.

- Selina is blossoming intellectually herself. She is just as interested in letters as Nat was at her age. Nat reads books to Selina now and then and that makes more of an impression than anything else ever could. Selina is still Nat's biggest fan.

Selin'a hair is now officially as long as Nat's. Her curls are looser and softer. In four poofs it's comically adorable. Not sure what we'll end up doing with it in the long-run. I think I'm just going to have to comb it every day when she's older. Right now she HATES a comb touching her head under any and all circumstances. She tosses her head violently side-to-side, Snoopy-dance-style and screams at the top of her lungs if she just sees the comb in my hand. I have found that four braids will last about three days without looking horrible, so I've mostly been doing that to minimize hair styling time.

- Speaking of hair, here's a short answer to recent requests for tips on styling toddler/preschooler hair:

With Nat, she has become more and more willing to sit and let me work on her hair as she has gotten older. When she was Selina's age, I used to do her hair on the run, following her around as she tried to run away from me. I often made parts while walking and bending over her little head. They weren't perfect, but they were adequate. These days (since she was about 2 and a half) I plop her in her high chair (buckled in!) let her choose a video and sometimes a snack and get to work. She is usually reasonably cooperative for about 45 minutes. It usually takes about one hour to an hour and a half to get finished. When she causes me too much trouble--complaining, jerking er head around or whatever--I turn off the video, leave her view and ask her to let me know when she's ready to finish. When she's ready, I turn the video back on and get back to work.

This gets the job done and Nat's hair styles tend to last between 7-12 days, so we don't have to revisit it daily.

When we finish hair, I make a big, gushing deal out of how gorgeous it is and we visit the mirror together to admire it. Nat likes to put butterfly clips and things in her hair, and that helps encourage and bribe her during the process, but she also pulls the butterflies out and fiddles with them until they break, so I actually don't let her put them in very often.

When Nat was little, many Black mothers, grandmothers, aunties and baby sitters told me to do her hair while she was asleep. If you want to, go for it! I didn't want to waste precious nap time doing hair! But considering how much more violently Selina objects to hair care, I suppose there are kids out there whose hair just wouldn't get done any other way. And it does have to get done. That's non-negotiable. That's another aspect of teaching my kids to put up with it--the idea that it just has to be done, like we have to put on our seat belts in the car.

- Why I like white male baby sitters:

I like white male baby sitters, because there are no white males in our immediate family (though we've got uncles and grandfathers and all that) and I love that what my girls are learning about the species is that it is a species of caregiving, nurturing, child-centered kindness. That's not really the dominant idea of what white men are. But it's what I want my girls-and the women they grow into--to expect from the white men they meet in life. I want them to be shocked and horrified when they encounter anything less and to hold those people accountable to humane expectations.

- How Strollerderby is going:

It's going pretty well. Its nice to have this job, because it's an all new type of writing for me to learn and an all new audience (well, a mixed audience, some new, some I'm used to) to learn to write to. It's a good exercise in maintaining my own voice in different kinds of contexts. Here's what I think might interest my readers here the most lately:

The Trouble with Safe Haven Laws: Some Thoughts for National Adoption Month

As always, see my bio page for my most recent writing.

Quickly: Race and Prop 8 etc.

Folks want to know what I think about the big media blame-game suggesting that Black and Latino voters are responsible for the anti-gay initiatives passing (esp. prop 8) on Tuesday. I am still too sick to write anything hugely coherent, but here's a list of points to keep in mind:

1. Race-baiting was a huge weapon in this campaign from the primaries to the general election. The media loves it and is looking to divide us into neat segments: the Blacks versus the Gays.
Resist this.

2. Anti-gay legislation passed by much wider margins in much higher numbers in the Bush elections. No record minority voter turn-out then, but no one said "it's the white people! they're all homophobic!"

3. Guess what? There are Black and Latino queers.

4. Gay rights are not the same thing as anti-racism. The movements have different contexts and different histories. White queers have not done their homework on the struggle for racial justice. They simply haven't and it has always turned my stomach when some ignorant middle-class white queer who knows nothing about the meaning of race in America compares marriage equality with the struggle for racial justice. There is loads of racism in the mainstream queer community and its flagship organizations. After years of shunting queers of color to the back of the bus, white queers should not expect to be understood and supported by minority voters. If we want minorities to take up our struggle, we sure as heck ought to have taken up theirs a long time ago. It ain't too late. Do some reading and educate yourselves and don't say one more time that not being allowed to marry is just like Jim Crow.

I am not saying that one group or the other is more oppressed. I'm saying the history of anti-racist struggle in this country deserves the respect of specificity. Co-opting its imagery is cheap and disrespectful. Not being allowed to marry is precisely that: not being allowed to marry. And that is stupid and sucks on its own without lazy knee-jerk comparisons. But I have to say that there are also worse injustices a person could suffer. And queers have and do suffer much worse. Usually though, these are not the middle and upper -class, privileged white queers who think that civil marriage is the key to liberation. And the people who've suffered the most as queers have been left in the cold by the mainstream movement too.

Saint Francis prayed "not to be understood but to understand" and that's what we white middle-class queers need to work on if we would ask other minority groups to support our concerns.

5. If you are a church-goer, pick up a Bible and read it. Learn as much as you can about it, so that you can educate fellow Christians about what it does and doesn't say. I have a few reading suggestions here. The best actual Bible to read is the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version. Costs a pretty penny, but chock-full of scholarly notes. See also, this post from about this time last year.

Sorry not to be more eloquent ya'll. I have a nasty flu and a raging fever and must get back to bed.

Meanwhile, give some love to my latest (and pretty old yet, since I've been so ill) post at Strollerderby on marriage equality and children.

Palin Calls Her Kids "Eskimos"

See the discussion here.

Stuff You Might Like

Still haven't had time to sort out a sidebar with feed from my Strollerderby gig. Meanwhile, here are some recent posts that I thought readers here might find especially interesting if you haven't been keeping up with me over there:

Video from a Sarah Palin Rally in Ohio

Five Ways to Treat a Child's Cold without Medication

In Which I Find Myself in Rare Agreement with Sarah Palin (Sort Of)

Interesting Conversation

Over at Strollerderby, my late-night post about Little Black Sambo has generated quite the discussion in comments.

I have to admit to you, my blood runs cold at the idea that white parents are reading this book to their white children and think it's an okay way to represent Black children. I would guess those are the same white children who have little to no contact with real-life children of color, too.

This is the kind of thing that makes me roll my eyes when people say "only old people are racist and they will all die off and then everything will be fine!" as someone did, last week.

Yeah right. In my dreams.

Focus Group

So, let's say there was a website where we might all do some reading, thinking, questioning and discussing together on topics specifically of African American history/culture/literature, geared toward the better raising of Black children by white people, but welcoming anyone interested in the topic for whatever reason.

You know, sort of a la this post.

Would you be in?