this woman’s work

I am liking this photo blog software

Jan 21, 2006 Adoption

Brett is just thrilled to have the pictures behind bars but I like being able to organize them so easily. Now I need to find some missing pictures, like Madison’s first Raggedy pics (we take pics of the kids with the raggedy ann & andy for birthdays and in the first year, we take them every three months) and I would like to scan Noah’s sometime.

Ok, now I want to talk about the entry I wanted to write way back before the photo snafu (by the way, the photo that started this is in favorites in the album — it’s the one with the party hats) and I’ll start now but maybe finish later depending on Madison.

Shannon said earlier in my comments that she doesn’t understand adoptive moms who are threatened by their children’s first mothers and I wanted to talk about how I do understand because I was threatened by J. I think Shannon has a unique perspective because her children would automatically have two mothers so motherhood was something she thought about differently and then also I think it’s very different not to come to adoption through infertility.

As a person meanders her way through infertility, she gets kind of hung up on biology. If we didn’t want biological children in the first place we would have gone to adoption right away but we did and so we went however far (maybe just charting, maybe IVF) and then we started looking around. Maybe we dipped our toes in by thinking about donor egg or sperm. Maybe we got our feet wet by thinking about gestational surrogacy. Those treatments challenge our ideas about what it means to be The Mother but still, there’s a tie there. We will be the ones to give birth or we will be the ones to pass on our genetic material to the baby. Even in surrogacy with donor egg there is a measure of control that’s missing in adoption.

We were middling — we came to adoption after an IUI but still we came to adoption with a thought in the back of our minds that said, “Biology is important.” Plus all through Noah’s growing up I’ve been a fan of attachment-style parenting so basically I was already hardwired to have a strong belief in prenatal bonding.

I wanted all that. That’s why I wanted to get pregnant. I wanted to adopt later, after I got to do the whole pregnancy thing again.

I realize as I work through all of these freewrites that being witness in the hospital to what J went through is etched deeply in my heart and soul and it has had huge ramifications for our adoption journey. It changed me profoundly. It changed how I feel about adoption. I can see how another parent might feel undone by it and not want to let that person back in.

I was talking to a friend who adopted and whose child came to them through intermediary foster parents (it’s an open adoption but due to circumstances with the birth family, this is how it happened) and starting out that way, it’s different. By the time she met her child’s birth family it had all been done; the baby was hers.

In the face of it all — my belief in prenatal bonding, being witness to the undeniable tie between J and Madison — it would have been easy to say, “That’s it. I’m running away. No more. She’s mine and that’s all there is to it.” Then, too, there were people who said we should do that. J leaned on us a lot in the first year — well, me, specifically not Brett. We talked a lot about her grief, about what she wanted/needed to do next. She would call just to talk about life and end the call crying. People would say, “You’re preventing her from moving on.” People told me I needed to step up and just be Madison’s mother. Thing is, they didn’t tell me how to do this when she already had a mother.

Remember, too, that I had Noah first. My experience as his biological mother also colored this because I understood that J’s adoption plan wasn’t about Madison and then she met Madison and it all changed. I also understood that Madison didn’t know me as her mother — women are not interchangeable — and that she was going to have to learn me. That was hard and then Madison was a difficult baby. She cried a lot. People would say (yes, they would say this), “It’s a good thing J placed her because there’s nothing more stressful than a crying baby and you have a support system.” But I always wondered if she would be crying so much if she had stayed with J. (On our trip together this was one of the hardest things for me to talk about — how much Madison cried. She knew Madison was fussy — she visited enough to see how fussy she was — but we talked details on that trip.)

I’m saying basically that I was a quivering mass of insecurity during those first few months (the first year really) and it would have been far easier to close the adoption. Really. And I would have found a lot of support from the rest of the world if I chose to do that. Keeping it open when it was obviously so hard didn’t make sense to a lot of people in my support system. I would finally feel like I was getting my sea legs with Madison and then J would come over and I would need to confront all of this again. I felt like I was failing Madison in many ways because I couldn’t move on myself. So people said to close it. They said limit the phone calls. Limit the visits. But we didn’t (obviously).

We didn’t close it for a number of reasons:
1. I believed wholeheartedly that contact with J is Madison’s birth right and that she would be better served by having J in her life. This was first and foremost why we stuck with it. A close second was that we simply could not have done that to J.
2. Lisa V who promised me that not only would it get better but that it would get easier.
3. Magicpointeshoe and Katie (no blog, alas) who gave me their perspectives as mothers who placed babies for adoption and who challenged me to stretch my thinking.
4. Talking to an adoptive mother who was parenting in a closed adoption and realizing that denial was not the easier way out; it’s just a different kind of hard.

I first read the antiadoption sites while we were waiting to adopt but I decided to write that article about a year ago, just before Madison’s first birthday. I wanted to do this because I needed to confront it. I needed to make sense of all aspects of the adoption stories. I needed to find a way to fit this in to my parenting paradigm.

In any case, I understand being threatened. I understand wanting to run from the hardest parts of this. I just wish that adoptive parents who are feeling threatened would avail themselves of the research, talk to parents in open adoptions (both sides), talk to parents in closed adoptions (both sides) so they could appreciate that it’s worth getting through those challenges. The part I don’t understand is the crass dishonesty of some adoptive parents. Either you have an open adoption or you don’t — this opening and closing and messing with people is abhorrent. The bait and switch tactics, the rigid control of contact — so not good. Yes, it can feel painful to confront that we don’t get to be the be all end all in our kids’ lives, that they come to us with history that has nothing to do with us but that pain is our problem, not our children’s.

I get the feelings. I get the impulse. I get the fears and concerns. I just don’t get the actions. We can’t let our worst hang-ups dictate the course of our children’s lives.

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