So I don’t usually do this
I don’t usually apologize for commenters because they’re not my comments so I don’t feel particularly responsible for them but I have to apologize for wkh’s comments to the post below because I think they’re very hurtful and I know that quite a few of my readers found them offensive. (Several people wrote off-blog as well.)
Thing is, I’ve virtually know wkh for a decade now (we were pregnant with our sons at the same time and were on a list for women with duedates in February) and I have always known her as a smart, feminist, thoughtful woman and so I was particularly shocked by what she had to say. And I don’t feel like I can just leave them there without a response. At the same time, what she said is so ludicrous to me that I’m not even sure how to respond.
Without copying and pasting the whole thing here I will say this:
1. To basically say that women who choose to place their children for adoption have chosen their own pain and ought to have just chosen parenting is dismissive and insulting. Because I’ve known wkh for a long time, I have to believe that she did not mean to be dismissive and insulting but it sure sounded that way.
2. My god, women who regret having children are not jerks (unless they’re visiting that regret on their kids). I know that this regret is usually more complex than, “I wish you were never born” and is more “I wish I had had more control over my reproductive life.” A woman can wish her life had been different and still be a good mother. (Remember when Ann Landers asked her audience how many of them would have children if they had it to do over? 7 out of 10 said they would have chosen not to have children. It’s just one of those things that people can’t talk about.)
3. wkh wrote (about her plans to one day adopt from China), “I can worry how much she misses her birth mom, but she’s never going to see her again. I can worry about culture issues, but at the end of the day all I can do is be respectful and try the best I can.” Frankly, transracial adoption requires even more mindf*ckery (and worry) of adoptive parents. But don’t believe me, listen to transracially adopted adult adoptees like Twice the Rice, or Harlow’s Monkey, or Transracial Abductees, or A Birth Project. In other words, if you’re not prepared to spend just a wee bit of time obsessing about adoption issues, please do not adopt. And certainly don’t even think of adopting transracially. I’m not making these issues up to make my blog just that much more fun for my readers; I’m talking about them because my blog is the respository for my adoption thoughts as I tunnel through these things.
The woman who marched out of the adoption training where Lisa V and her daughter were speaking? Appalling. Appalling. [T]here was one couple who got up and walked out. The woman yelling “I’m so tired of hearing about birth parents, we will be the parents!â€Â
That behavior is selfish, it is insulting, and it is ignorant. You want to think this way at the start of your adoption journey? Ok, I get that. Most of us have been fed soft-serve Lifetime movies and “heart-warming” memoirs and it takes time to dig through the pablum and get to what’s real but we are morally obligated to dig deeper before we sign up with an agency. There’s been a lot of talk about adoption-guilt around the blogosphere this past week and I’m not saying let guilt rule you but humility, consideration, respect and a humble acceptance that we are adopters because we have unearned privilege is vital.
Ok, I have to turn off the computer for awhile — I’m all discombobulated.
To basically say that women who choose to place their children for adoption have chosen their own pain and ought to have just chosen parenting is dismissive and insulting.
For ANYONE to say this (wkh or other) is just plain ignorant.
Thats like saying infertile women dont deserve to be parents, arent qualified, becuase if they were, they would be able to get pregnant, right? God did not want them to be mothers, right?
Wrong.
But equally offensive and ignorant as what wkh said in that comment.
Perhaps wkh and those that think that way should read Fesslers book (or any of the many other books that talk to how children are taken from women by their parents, religion, society, governments, etc.).
I feel sorry for the child who gets adopted by a any amother who believes that.
I’m not saying it was “right” to walk out of that room (the potential mother who said she was tired of hearing about birth parents). Her outburst was obnoxious and yes she should have sat and listened.
I’m saying at some point it wears one out and it’s time to get on with parenting.
I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a woman who actually *had a choice* complain about choosing to parent. Being forced through lack of reproductive health care into parenting a gaggle of children one is not equipped for is entirely different than having the option to say “should I parent, relingquish, or abort?” choosing parenting, and then regretting.
People should think *long and hard* before committing to any choice. Adopting, relinquishing, giving up treatments for infertility (I don’t know a thing about that, I resonated with the people who found their minds worn out from thinking about Adoption Issues and just wanted a break for a while) is something requiring intense insight. To me, if I still have to go over and over and over about it, it’s not time to committ to any choice. That’s how *I* am. That’s not how many people are.
I know for me if I am holding my daughter (or son, sons are adopted out for the sin of cleft palates and other relavtively benign medical issues) from China in my arms and contemplating *still* about the moral and ethical issues and my place within it surrounding the social construct of how these children came to be in my arms, I wasn’t ready to adopt. I said *me*. Because that’s how *I* work. So I can relate to the “I am tired of hearing…” concept because, by that point, I would have already eaten the issue in my head for years and gone over it backwards and sideways and taken the time to find other birth parents and get to know their side and stories and issues and adoptees etc and by then I’d be burnt out and “okay just let me be mommy now please.”
I did the same thing with deciding whether to send my kids to school or do it at home, whether to hospital birth or homebirth, or breastfeed or bottle feed, or french school or english school or a myriad of decisions. I let it eat my head inside out and I won’t committ until I am SURE and once I am SURE there is little to nothing one can do to change my mind about it.
I suppose it was shortsighted of me to not consider *not everyone is like that*. But I felt for the weariness of “I am tired of mind bending this decision” because I know I will be when I get to that stage.
Point number 2. That’s my mother. She was convinced that having us meant she couldn’t become Doris Day. Seriously.
I was told often and clearly that I was a mistake, she tried to miscarriage me by playing tennis vigorously. She was FURIOUS when she found out she was pregnant with me.
She used to say how amazing it was that since I wasn’t meant to be here and wasn’t meant to be born, it was amazing that I was such a lively person, so full of joy. Yes, for someone who should have been dead???
You can call her a jerk, ha ha I do.
Not going to comment on WKH, I am thinking she is one of those people you need to get to know properly right?
wkh–Thank you for understanding that not everyone can make a decision and never look back, never second guess yourself, never find yourself “contemplating *still* about the moral and ethical issues.” There are many people who are able to make a decision, stick to it come hell or high water, and never revisit that decision. I have no earthly idea how to be this type of person. Perhaps law school beat any last traces of black and white thinking out of me, but all I see is shades of gray. I can think I have it all figured out, that I know that *this* or *that* is absolutely how we will do something, and then a new issue arises–I read a new TRA blog, DH mentions a preference in conversation, I hear of a family who started out homeschooling but switched, vice versa. I tend to live my life in non-linear fashion–there are just too many variables. I can’t say that I will do something come hell or high water or that I will never ever regret a decision because that simply isn’t the kind of person I am. I don’t think this means that I am not “ready” to make a decision as you assert–we simply have really different parenting and indeed life styles. I’m the type of person who is going to continually evolve what I do, who is going to change things, who is going to revisit things as I gain new information. I will *always* contemplate the moral and ethical issues because there will always be new things for me to think about.
What really troubles me though, is not our differences in decision making styles, but what seems (and please correct me if I am wrong) to be your assumption that b/c this is your decision making style it is okay to reach point where you no longer deal with the moral and ethical issues surrounding adoption. It seems like you are saying that you won’t think about these things once you are holding your child–and I’m sure you won’t for the first few, precious hours. But at some point, the moral and ethical issues will rear their ugly little heads. Your child will ask a question. You will get a cruel comment. You will read a TRA story. New research will come out. Your personal decision making style means that you will never second guess yourself and that is great–but the larger issue here is that underlying issues never go away. You don’t really have a choice in that. You will have to deal with them over and over again because your child has to deal with it. You do your child a great disservice if you want to do all your thinking and wrestling before they come. This isn’t puppy training–one size does not fit all, and you need to be open to expanding your personal comfort zone and decision making styles to allow for a certain amount of flexibility.
I was going to say what wavybrains said. I gave very careful consideration about everything I could possibly think of before I adopted. I read blogs, I read books, I read websites, I took classes. I mentally prepared myself, I made my decision. I was 100% confident in that decision.
But within a week of adopting my child, I was back to contemplating the moral and ethical ideas of adoption. Each child is different, each situation is different. My child has asked me things that I have never read about or been prepared for. I’ve been exposed to new ideas that I wasn’t exposed to before.
I admire your desire to be 100% certain about something before you do it. I tend to equate adoption to forming a family through marriage. I can be 100% sure that I want to get married, but there are most likely going to be things that I need to revisit throughout our marriage. New relationship books I need to read. New problems that arise. Same with adoption. Adoption is a one time event, but raising an adopted child is a lifetime of parenting, and parenting that *IS* different in many ways than parenting a biological child.
I think it is a huge mistake to assume that a child adopted from China will never see her birthmother again, unless she and the adoptive parents have proof that the birthparents have died.
I know that Korea never thought that we adult adoptees would grow up, return to China and actively search for our birthparents. But it has happened, and I would say that I know just as many adoptees who have been reunited with one or more of their birth parents as those who haven’t.
And it is also mistaken to assume that the birth parent(s) will never try and successfully “track” down their child, adopted to the U.S. and other countries.
I also know several Korean adoptees who were “found” by their birth families, and they had no intention of searching themselves.
My point is that we are early in the game for the results of Chinese adoption. I know that many adoptive parents are more comfortable adopting from certain countries because there is “less chance” of the birthmother “coming back for the child.” If there is anything to learn from the Korean adoption program, it is that Korea also thought that way. Time has proven otherwise.
Also, it is a privilege for an adoptive parent to forget about the circumstances and needs of an intercountry, transracial adoptee and focus on just “the parenting” - but that child does not have the same “privilege” of forgetting.
Most of us do grow up being successfully “assimilated” into our adoptive families. I say that with much sadness. Because I believe that assimilation is a bad thing. Instead, I believe acculturalization - keeping some of what you came from, yet blending with the “new” home, is better.
And I hate to think that the burden of casting off the inconveniences of being part of a transracial adoptive family is easier on the parents than on the child - and the assumption is, that if the family is able to cast off those inconveniences, it comes at the cost of the child’s having to give up his/her history - not the adoptive parents.
I was just thinking that perhaps WKH and my mother could enjoy a game of tennis…..
LOL Kim you crack me up.
Jai Ran, thank you for that. You made more sense than anyone I have read on this topic yet!
And Dawn, I think this was another of the best of what anyone has said: “humility, consideration, respect and a humble acceptance that we are adopters because we have unearned privilege is vital.” Keep saying that. It’s what we need to hear more.
“Also, it is a privilege for an adoptive parent to forget about the circumstances and needs of an intercountry, transracial adoptee and focus on just “the parenting†- but that child does not have the same “privilege†of forgetting. ”
This is so unbelievably true - yet so many a-parents, certainly many that I’ve met, simply don’t buy it. I’ve seen a tendency for a-parents to listen to adoptees tell their experiences and express exactly what Jae-Ran says here, and then walk away saying “But it’ll be different for me, my family is different.”
Being an adoptive parent is a privilege for sure, and it comes with enormous responsibilities that are downplayed at the front end of the process. It requires a lot of humility, too.
Re: the ann landers poll. If you changed the question to, “would you have had kids with a different father,” the ratio would have been different.
Also re: the Ann Landers poll–that’s taught in schools as a classic example of faulty polling, as it was a self-selecting audience: people were more likely to respond if they did regret having children. Although of course some people do, it’s not 70%.