this woman’s work

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Dawn, you hate adoptive parents, don’t you?

Contrary to popular belief, I gave up self-hatred around the same time I quit listening to The Smiths on obsessive repeat and started wearing colors. I don’t hate adoptive parents, obviously, being that I am one and being that there are several besides myself that I quite like (I’ll start with my husband).

But you think all adoptive parents should feel guilty.

I do not want all adoptive parents to feel guilty just like I don’t think all white, straight, middle-class people ought to feel guilty.  But I do think it behooves us to know that most of us don’t come by our successes — even the hard-won successes — without the halo of our unearned privilege. How we choose to acknowledge that privilege and work to end it is up to us but seems like feeling guilty — because I have been known to indulge — ends up being awfully selfish. (It lures us into thinking we’re making change merely by the act of suffering.)

Well, you’re always on the side of first parents!

I’m not the one forcing people to take sides. I come by my beliefs honest — at the knee of my ever-lovin’ feminist mother. And please note that Pennie doesn’t always agree with me. If I were going to change my point of view to try to curry favor with first mothers, she’d be at the top of my list. But — alas — I can’t help but believe what I believe even when it makes me more or less popular.

So do you want kids to rot away in foster care and orphanages without ever having a real home?

Frankly when I write about adoption I’m writing about the particulars of domestic infant adoption. The issues sometimes overlap but are certainly not the same as those found in international adoption and foster-to-adopt. There is a different urgency in foster-to-adopt and in international adoption because in those situations there is a child who needs a home. That’s not to say that this very pressing need negates ethical issues  just that the issues are different and, I think, more complicated.

In any case, in domestic infant adoption there is much more obvious coercion and because the relationships are more direct, there’s more possibility for hopeful adoptive parents to hurt/help the situation.

If you hate adoption so much, why don’t you just give Madison back?

Oh this question! One I’ve heard from pro-adoption and anti-adoption folks alike! Amazing but yes, some of them have something in common (rigidity). Giving Madison back (besides creating a whole host of issues and being based on a whole host of wrong assumptions) would do nothing to solve the issues inherent to domestic infant adoption.

Listen, adoption as a reproductive choice needs to exist. But it’s just not a free and clear choice for most women. As I’ve said zillions of times before, even if a woman is perfectly happy with her decision to place or truly feels it was her best option and even if she feels her agency/attorney did absolutely right by her, there is still a larger system at play that is problematic. Those bigger things at play are what concern me.

Do you think every adoption is bad?

No. I don’t even think every domestic infant adoption is bad. This is complicated but I’m going to give it a whirl. There is a big ugly over-arching system that’s rooted in -isms. Those -isms (racism, classism, heterosexism) create unfair advantages for some of us and unfair disadvantages for others. In adoption some of those -isms are so deeply ingrained that people pretty blithely celebrate some of the things that are most ugly. Domestic infant adoption — as a whole — treats children like commodities and the women who carry them like they’re disposable. But I don’t think every adoption is bad because within this system we are individuals.

I have said a million times that in a perfect world I don’t think adoption would exist (because we could all have our children at exactly the right time in exactly the right circumstances and our families could look any way we liked) but in an imperfect world we need to try harder to be ethical with each other.

Well, why do you have birth mothers on pedestals then?

I don’t. First parents are people — some of them suck and some of them are awesome (you know, just like adoptive parents and other generalized groups of people). I can only tell you that our cultural biases are so enormous that we (collective we) have a tendency to forget the humanity of the people that we (collective we) are keeping down. As a person with a vagina, I have a particular interest in the systemic ways we punish women for being women.

So who is Madison’s real mother?

Madison has two mothers and they are both real. By honoring the truth of Pennie’s motherhood I am not denigrating my own. Having Pennie in her life does not make me any less Madison’s mother. Likewise my active parenting of Madison does not make Pennie any less her mother. This is not a contest. I can see your child’s first mom in your family without missing the truth of you. I can see your joy without ignoring her sorrow. I can acknowledge your gifts without denying hers.

Over at Writing My Wrongs, Suz is making the incredibly brave decision to share her “unwed mother” diary with us. It’s heart-wrenching and valuable, especially for any of us harboring delusions about the kind of women who place their babies for adoption.

You must get this extension: Better GReader :: Firefox Add-ons

It lets you click within your google reader to open a person’s page, which means no more clicking through the reader and opening a new tab or page so you can comment or read past the short excerpts. That way when you’re done reading (and commenting) you just keep scrolling through your reads. Yes, my friends, you never need to leave your feedreader to read your blog friends!

Excerpts of feeds? DRIVE ME CRAZY. I know some of you are all about the stats (and may I mention that if you have wordpress and are hosting you can use the feedburner plugin to see how many people subscribe to your feed regardless of where they’re reading — no it doesn’t help your ad stats but it’s good for the ego).

It’s rare that I click through to read a whole entry because I’m subscribed to (I just checked) 269 blogs so yes, generally I scan (a bunch of those are work-ish related and a handful of total timesuck mp3 blogs but that’s also not counting my livejournal friends list). But now my feedreading life is easier!

Please join me in the goodness that is  Better GReader.

(I assume, of course, that you’re already a Firefox person and not using that bane of the web designer’s existence, Internet Explorer. And if you’re not, join the beauty that is the opensource platform!)

I’m taking the day off (I always work Sunday anyway while Noah is at religious school) and heading to my sister’s so the cousins can play together. And it’ll be nice to let this rather noisy blog be a bit quieter today.

Yesterday I took the kids to homeschool gym and then came home to the busy blog and then went out to a book reading and then took the author out to dinner. I was so absolutely wired by 10pm that I couldn’t stop running my mouth (poor Brett). I’ll get wired at my sister’s, too, because when we get to talking we really talk. Like crazy. Like people who are there with us have trouble keeping up.

The author I met is Richard Wirick whose book, One Hundred Siberian Postcards, he wrote for his daughter who he and his wife adopted from Russian about two years ago. He’s a beautiful, beautiful writer and he has this wonderful, deep voice so that listening to him read was awfully nice. Then dinner was nice, too. We talked more about writing than about adoption because I know very little about international — especially Russian — adoption. We did talk a very tiny bit about adoption reform in the context of Russian adoption but really it was mostly the writing. And it was interesting. And snowing like hell so it took awhile for me to get home afterwards.

I’ve been itching to write lately but work’s been so busy. Still it’s that thing I said at the beginning of this full-time freelance — there’s finally enough time. And so I’m itching to write but don’t feel frantic because I know that there’s enough time to write and to work. Thank goodness.

(Thanks to writer networking I’ve doubled my agents-to-pitch list so I have another few months before I have to consider what to do next!)

Suz speaks and I obey. (Because she has funnybones.)

Dawn - I am curious, what do you feel is behind that kind of attitude? Ignorance? Anger? Denial? Bliss?

I often wonder what is gained by those adoptive parents (besides the obvious - our children) who like to blame the victims in adoption (or refuse to believe there are victims).

As an adoptive parent (and progressive one who sees all sides) I would love your commentary on what motivates The Andrea type of comments. Are they feeling guilty over their adoption? Hiding an unethical adoption? Have not yet come to terms with their infertile status? Is it cognitive dissonance?

As someone who WAS indeed very much capable and desirous of of parenting her child, yet sent away and threatened with lawsuits so that my baby could be obtained and later sold to the highest bidder, I always find myself wondering why is that fact so hard for some adoptive parents to truly grasp? It has to be a fear based response, no?

Here are various reasons why I think some people cling to untruths about adoption:

1. Internalized sexism. (Thus that whole madonna/whore complex that some adoption folks are rocking.)

2. Justification to dissuage their guilt.

3. Jealousy about fertility that morphs into personal hostility.

4. Ignorance about the social realities underpinning adoption.

5. Sheer laziness. (Honestly, I think some people just don’t want to think that hard.)

6. Inability to think critically.

7. AND (drumroll) the privilege that an adoptive parent doesn’t HAVE to think about it because no one really asks us to.

So far I’ve had three agents take a pass on my book (although one expressed great enthusiasm for the book although he felt it wasn’t a great fit for his list.). And I really want to write it so it’s back out again. I want to write it because I think these kinds of discussions are way too segregated in our social discourse. I was thinking on that when I was thinking about how we only talk about first parent grief in the context of reunion or the dear dead days of the baby scoop era. (Note: Kateri’s right, Juno is changing that some and if you haven’t please read her awesome interview.) I’ve read some international adoption memoirs that address the presence of first parents but I think it’s more palatable for people to do that within the context of an international discussion because in the memoirs I’ve read, the child is already in the orphanage and “free” to be adopted. I really want to bring it into the context of domestic infant adoption.

This is the thesis of my book: I cannot be a good mother to Madison unless I accept the presence of her mother who was here first. It is the paradox of adoption: To truly become Madison’s mother, I must make way for Pennie to be her mother, When I understand Pennie’s inherent motherhood (not qualified) then how can I stand by and allow her motherhood to be disparaged? How can I not look critically at the circumstances that made way for me? It’s an easy step from, “Pennie is Madison’s mother” to “and I don’t want to see my daughter’s mother treated that way.”