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Sep 9, 2006 Adoption

WavyBrains asked,

I know you’ve talked a little about how you decided that TRA was okay for you, but did you specifically set out to do TRA with your agency or is that just how things worked out? Was there ever a point where you and your DH differed as to type of adoption, openness, type of child, etc. How did you resolve your adoption style differences?

We did set out to do transracial adoption with our agency and yes there were a few times when Brett and I differed on what we felt ready to do.

Way back when pre-kids, I planned to adopt from foster care one day. Why? I don’t know. I just planned on it in a hazy-future kind of way. Working at shelter made me more sure but I also knew I really wanted to have a baby myself. And I knew that our child protective system being what it is, chances of being placed with a kid whose ethnicity didn’t match my own was pretty good and so I just kinda had that in my mind that one day we’d do a transracial adoption. (Actually this began pre-Brett, too, so when I say “we” sometimes I mean “me.”)

(Then there is this weird moment that I wrote about here, when I had a flash that I was going to have an African American son. Do with that what you will because I am NOT going to adopt again.)

When we first looked at adoption Brett was only interested in international adoption because he was terrified by the Lifetime movies where distraught parents kidnap their children years after placing them for adoption. He didn’t want to have anything to do with a domestic adoption, period. I was just happy he was willing to consider adoption so I said, swell, whatever, just show me where to sign.

We sent away for a lot of brochures and I realized that I didn’t want to adopt a white baby. I know — totally racist of me. The reasons I didn’t want to adopt a white baby are these:

• I had concerns about the adoption programs where white babies were available;
• I had concerns about the health of the white babies available through these programs;
• I didn’t want our family to simply pass. I wanted to be a loud, proud adoptive family. (Irony alert: People often assume Madison is mine by birth.)
• I felt like if we were at all capable and willing to adopt transracially, we ought to do it.

Brett realized that race was less an issue than the program and he was very interested in the Korean program. He liked the quality of the kids’ care in Korea and he also liked that his dad had ties to Korea. (Brett’s dad was stationed there and he put together a program with his platoon to raise funds to help support an orphange during his tour.) But part of it, too, was that Brett was doing the whole “Asians aren’t quite as not-white as black kids” and he really wanted things to be easy. Me, I thought adopting internationally transculturally felt harder. I told him that I knew where to go to find resources and support if we adopted an African American baby domestically but it would be a whole new learning curve to figure out where to go if we adopted a baby from Korea. And while I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America, I do know what it’s like to be an American. It’s one thing to jump American cultures but a whole other thing to jump international cultures.

Much heated discussion ensued. Then we looked hard at our finances and realized that Korea was off the list anyway.

Meanwhile I was looking — just looking, mind you! — at domestic agencies anyway and that’s when I found out that at that time all the agencies locally had a racially-based sliding scale. (Happily our old agency no longer does this; now they use a sliding scale based on the income of the adoptive parents.) I didn’t know that it was cheaper to adopt a black baby than it was to adopt a white baby and when I found out it was with a mixture of surprise (is this legal?) and horror (for obvious reasons). But mostly I was just like, “We can get a baby! We can get a baby! We can do this!”

I can’t remember how I got Brett on the same page I was about openness. He has always been a step or two behind me on our family building decisions (if I’d waited for Brett, he would still be running the numbers to see if we could afford Noah) but he’s also always been willing to let me drag him along. So I did. I read the books and then talked to him about it. I talked him into filling out the forms just to see. He went to the trainings and his worries started relaxing. More and more he realized that open adoption — however scary it might feel for us — was the just thing to do. Also (and this is huge) Brett is a man of faith and sometimes when it got hard or the two of us were at an impasse I’d say, “Pray on this one, Brett, and let me know what you hear back.” And I guess what he heard back is what led us to Jessica and to Madison.

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