this woman’s work

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Jess asked: “Is Madison the only grandchild in J’s family?”

Yes, she is. I thought about this a lot because I know that in my own family, the impact of grandparenthood didn’t really click (couldn’t really click) until the grandparents got their hands on actual Noah. (He was also the first grandchild for three out of four of his grandparents. My dad started earlier.) I remember how my mother-in-law would talk about how familiar his little body was because he’s built just like Brett. Madison is built just like J was when she was a toddler. I wondered how much he was flashing back when he held her. I don’t know if our visit made things easier for him or made them harder.

Jody asked: “[B]ut where is Brett on some of these issues? Does he feel differently about the birth father than you do about J? How much of that is about fathering, and how much is about Madison’s particular birth father? What, if anything, has your experience with Madison’s birth families (especially given that you don’t have any contact with her birth father) taught you about how we in the USA think about mothers and fathers? Or is it unfair in the extreme to generalize in that way?”

Ok, Let me take these bit by bit. First off, neither of us get to think much about the birth dad because he is so adamantly not in our lives. He knows — vaguely — about the adoption but doesn’t care (Ohio law doesn’t require that he care). What little we know about him is that he’s not a really great guy so we haven’t pursued it. The way I figure it is that we’re lucky to have J in our lives and so we shouldn’t get greedy. But sometimes we all (Brett, J and me) feel angry that his life hasn’t changed at all since Madison’s arrival and that he hasn’t had to take any sort of responsibility. The other thing that makes me nuts about this is that we believe Madison may have some half-siblings out there. So the lack of birth dad talk on this blog is totally about the way things have played out in our own situation.

As to how Brett feels about it, the birth family issues are much harder for him than they are for me because he’s a very closed-in type of guy. Emotional confrontation (by which I mean confronting emotions and not emotionally confronting someone) is really hard for him. There were two reasons he didn’t come out with Madison and me. The first was that we knew that Noah shouldn’t come — we were too unsure how it would be and I was afraid that I would put too much pressure on him to “prove” our parenting abilities — so someone had to stay with him. And the second was that the thought of it made Brett’s knees start knocking together.

Brett and I have talked about how it would be if Madison’s birth dad did choose to be involved. We both feel committed to openness and Brett’s convictions on that issue are as strong as my own. However he feels that he’s gotten off pretty easy since he’s never had to deal with feeling competitive or threatened and also he laid claim to his daddy-role earlier than I was able to lay claim to my mommy-role. He has always been the only father Madison has had in her life. (In the hospital J didn’t let any non-medical men hold Madison until Brett had held her first. Stuff like that has made things easier for him.)

I’m not sure what I’ve learned about the cultural roles of motherhood and fatherhood by our adoption experience. I have very mixed feelings by the different ways the states handle birth father rights. On the one hand, as its the woman who carries the baby, I feel like most of the adoption decisions should be in her hands. And there are so many birth fathers who can and do walk away from their responsibilities so when states force potential birth moms to jump through birth father hoops in order to make an adoption plan, this pisses me off. Why make a difficult decision even harder? On the other hand, I’ve read enough grieving birth father experiences (mostly online) that I understand the need to formally give potential birth dads some power.

I don’t know. I feel really divided about it.

But there isn’t much about birth fathers out there. There’s not as much research and there aren’t as many narratives. Is this because birth dads care less? Are less aware when adoptions take place? Or is it because as a society we don’t give the same weight to their experiences? Probably all of that. Perhaps if we did give more weight, more men would take responsibility. I think it’s all very circular and complicated and I don’t think I have much intelligent to say on it since I’m still working it out.

If Brett had come out on this trip, he would have likely had to think on some of this because J’s dad is the closest we’re all going to get to a paternal birth family experience. And since J’s dad and Brett are only a couple years apart in age, it would likely be even more interesting.

Maybe Lisa (who has a good relationship with her daughter’s birth dad) or Laurel (whose husband is a caring, involved birth father) would have more to say about this. I would be interested to hear their thoughts.

And homeschooling (since you asked)! It’s going fine and yes we do feel some change in summer because some of Noah’s formal activities disappear and new ones crop up. We start seeing more of our schooled friends, too, which is great. Most recently my mom signed Noah up for a science club and Noah has announced that he no longer wants to do the activities with Brett; now he wants to do them alone but with one of us around. Specifically he said, “I want to do this at the kitchen table while you’re doing the dishes.” Between that and his sudden enormous, grown-up looking feet, I am feeling all nostalgic for small Noah.

Also career stuff (since you asked again)! I just got a nifty new assignment from a well-paying market that y’all may have actually heard of. I won’t give the name because I’m jinxy that way. It’s just a short filler (350 words) but that’s how you break into these things. And my little sister called yesterday (finally!) and will start Monday so if Madison allows (Meagan warned me to start her before Madison got all mama-clingy and I didn’t listen), I will have childcare soon. I think we’ll give the first week over to breaking in but then I have high hopes for a more productive work life!

Magicpointeshoe’s comment below (”Most of your adoption story has been about fitting J into your lives, and this was pretty much about you fitting into your adoptive mama role within the birthfamily.”) got me thinking. (She always gets me thinking! Darn her!)

One odd part about being there was that only one person (not a family member) who asked me anything about myself. No one asked me what I did for a living or anything about Noah or Brett — just this one person and her role in the family event was a sticky one — more sticky than mine for reasons I can’t get into here. I didn’t like her much but when she asked me questions about myself, I realized that she was the first person to do that. I very much felt that my only purpose there was as Madison’s escort but that was totally ok with me.

Since one of the things that Magicpointeshoe has helped me understand is that the experiences of adoptive moms and birth moms often mirror each other, this made me think about how in some adoptions, the birth mother is only seen as the woman who gave birth to the child the family now parents. I think there’s a parallel to how adoptive parents can be seen by birth families.

There was one member of J’s family who was (and is) against the adoption. This person very recently asked J if she could undo her decision and get Madison back; this is one of the people I met this past weekend. I knew this going into the visit and I figured that I didn’t need to let it impact my feelings about going out there. I was glad that my concerns about dealing with outright hostility were unfounded but on the other hand, my fantasies of an emotional turn-around didn’t play out either.

For this person — and for others, I guess — I am both Madison’s mother and not her mother. By which I mean, it may be that this person will always see me as … not an impostor but not entirely valid either.

J and I have gotten way past these limited roles in our personal relationship but in our respective extended families, there is still a struggle to understand how that works. And in my family, there is much less vulnerability because legally there is no question — Madison belongs to us. It’s easier for us to be generous and even so, it’s still a challenge as everyone — not just Brett and me — learns how to do an open adoption.

I can’t speak for anyone in either family (my own or J’s) so I’m just surmising and this is all from my own point of view.

There are a lot of careful social niceties that go with an open adoption but there is a lot of unsaid, roiling emotion, too. I am not privy to much of the roiling emotion on J’s side of the family nor should I be. The most I ask for myself (and am fortunate enough to receive) is respect and courtesy.

In some ways, it really doesn’t matter how I fit — or don’t fit — into Madison’s birth family. I strongly feel that my necessary role is to facilitate some kind of relationship until Madison is old enough to manage one — if she desires — for herself. In my mind, this means pictures and updates as long as they are open to them with visits as time/money/emotions allow. It also means understanding that because of the legal weight of my role, I am an all powerful gatekeeper and so it is easier for me to step back than to ask them to always step forward.

Like this pork chop deal. I was telling J on the flight back that had someone offered Noah a pork chop at that age, I would have flung my body across the plate to keep it from him. We were talking about this in the context of my past insanity as a mother and I meant to demonstrate that I’d loosened up this second time around. But what J said, shrewdly, was this, “Well, why didn’t you stop them then? Isn’t she every bit your child as much as Noah?”

And so I explained to her that in my mind, any harm that would come from eating a pork chop was nothing compared to the harm I would have done had I not let that bonding moment happen. (This was something I would not have understood with Noah — ask my mother-in-law.)

One of my worries before the visit was knowing that I’m a tad controlling when it comes to my kids — media, food, etc. — and wondering how I would balance this with my conviction that Madison needs and deserves a relationship with her extended birth family. God, who has a sense of humor, heard me worrying up in my head specifically about pork. Seriously. “What if they offer her some bacon?” I fretted. “What will I do?” And then they went and served pork chops. But what happened is that I saw Madison in the arms of someone who was loving her and wanting to reach out to her. Then I understood that even a pork chop can be an act of spiritual communion.

Had it been, say, a family tradition that babies ride on the hood of cars or play with loaded guns, that would have been an easy no but pork chops? Hey, what’s a pork chop in the grand scheme of things? Even talking about this much makes it a bigger deal than it was. Understand that I mean that pork chop to be symbolic — I’m trying to talk about how my role is to facilitate and to balance our everyday parenting values with our broader values about love and compassion.

I guess as I’m wandering around this entry thinking out loud that I’m realizing how accepting I am of my careful, outsider role in this. I feel a lot of the compassion for the family members who are grieving; I am very grateful for their welcome. They don’t have to like me or even care about me. I hope they do but it’s not necessary. We barely know each other now and it’s a little early to say whether or not it would be possible to have a relationship that moves beyond our shared commitment to Madison’s well-being anyway so I haven’t really worried about it.

We’ve made it past this first hurdle and no matter what happens in the future (since things will surely change as their family continues to expand and more grandchildren come into the world), we had this visit. And we have the pictures to prove it.

Go give ‘em some love!!!

While we were waiting for a flight, J and I were surveying the other travelers. There was a huge group of fresh-faced young men in suits and ties — black suits for the most part. We were trying to figure out what this large contingent of males in their late teens/early twenties could be and then I decided they were missionaries. I decided, in fact, that they were Mormon missionaries and we started to paint this whole story about them and how they were probably nervous. We made up personalities for some of them and tried to figure out what they were listening to on their iPods. It was fun.

Then as we were pushing the stroller down to the airplane, the whole tipped over and the carseat, our bags, everything went sprawling. We both started laughing (punchy) and one of the Nice Young Men helped us clean it all up.

“See?” I said, nudging her. “Missionaries tend to be gentlemanly.”

Our helper was wearing an Ohio State tie but I said that could be explained away pretty easily. I mean, if you’re heading to Columbus, Ohio to save the world, wearing an Ohio State tie might get you into a few houses where you might otherwise be unwelcome. (This is a very large football town.)

Only it turns out I was wrong and we weren’t the only ones wondering about sharing our plane with a lot of young men dressed for church. The flight attendant asked them what they were doing and it turns out that we were actually heading home accompanied by the entire Ohio State baseball team.

All was not lost, however (although J and I were bummed that our stories would remain fiction) because I had picked up a DK baseball book for Noah’s “I missed you” present. Madison was flirting outrageously with one of the young men behind us and he was so charmed that I went ahead and asked him if he could get the team to sign the book. The flight attendant helped out by taking it around to every player (they were scattered throughout the plane).

Brett is hoping one of the boys makes it big so that the book will be a collectable. Noah thinks it already is a collectable. In any case, it saved our plane story so J and I were happy about that.

Tiny Coconut asked: I want to phrase this delicately, because I don’t want you to see it as coming off as critical of you, or J, or Madison…It’s just that I’m interested in why you think Madison still won’t go to J, especially since, as you point out above, she’s hardly a stranger. Do you think Madison “remembers” her in some way and doesn’t know how to deal with the emotions that memory brings up? Is it something much more basic like a personality conflict? Or am I just reading way, way, way too much into this?

I used to think that Madison remembered her and I do think it’s possible that on a spiritual plane she does but in this grounded everyday world I think that it’s got more to do with how J approaches Madison.

I think that Madison senses how tense J gets around her. J didn’t grow up around babies, never babysat small children or planned to have kids. She isn’t that comfortable around any babies or toddlers. Then because J loves Madison so much, her stagefright is that much worse. When Madison was smaller, J worried about holding her wrong or hurting her even when we told her it was ok. And you know how babies can sense when the person holding them feels awkward.

I think their relationship will become easier as Madison gets older. I’ve seen J with her little sister (who is just a bit younger than Noah) and with her best friend’s nieces and nephews and she’s ok with preschoolers on up so I anticipate that things will get easier for her. Also Madison will know that J is her special person in a way that she can’t really understand right now.