I was emailing back and forth with a friend this morning who was asking some questions related to the powerpoint sample and my own adoption experiences. It’s stuff I don’t write specifically about here because it concerns extended family and likely they wouldn’t want me to or other people in the family wouldn’t want me to. I wonder how it’ll go if/when I write a book about it because then I’ll want to include it.

But there’s a slide in the powerpoint show that talks about friends/family support and so I wanted to say that no, my family hasn’t always been as supportive of our open adoption as I would like. The ones who were least supportive have come around but their concerns were typical: That we were preventing Pennie from moving on; that Madison would be confused; that we were making too much of her adoption. And there was a (blessedly short) time when there were feelings of competitiveness on this side of the family. (Something else — a long time ago Laurel talked about how she felt that adoptive families and first families often mirror each other in their challenges and the survey results bear this out although generally the feelings — as measured in the survey — are stronger in first families. So if adoptive parents feel insecure, likely first parents do, too, only more so. Which is to say that I’m not privvy to Pennie’s family’s feelings but I can guess.)

Even now when we do have support and encouragement, we have other family members who are determinedly neutral, which to me feels negative. This is a studied neutrality, a “let’s not bring it up and it’ll all be fine” that’s really a polite rejection. I don’t see how you can be neutral about our relationship with Madison’s first family without some measure of dismissal not just of Madison’s first family but of Madison herself because they are of her and she is of them.

So what do I mean by neutral? I mean never asking after Pennie (if you’re the kind of person who might ask after other extended family, why wouldn’t you ask after Pennie?). I mean making a “hmmm” sound and changing the subject when I bring her up. I mean steadfastly ignoring the obvious, which is that Madison is adopted.

When we had family members struggling with this the argument was that Madison didn’t need to have her adoption emphasized and so we ought to pretend she was “just like” a bio child. Pictures of Pennie, regular visits and discussion — these undermined the “just like” play-acting and the people who espoused the play felt that it would be damaging to Madison. My argument is (and was) that ignoring it would create way more tension and worry. The other thing is that we all needed time to get used to things and why not get this awkward fumbling out of the way while Madison was small?

This is how it’s worked out, too. The relatives we see the most all pretty much take it for granted now and no one blanches when they see Pennie’s picture displayed with the rest of the family pictures. I just wish more people would feel comfortable asking to see them or deliberately walking across the room to look. That would feel welcoming to me. (I understand that some folks are guided by the misapprehension that it wouldn’t be polite to express particular interest but I’ll tell you right now that it would be absolutely polite. It would be no different than saying, “Oh is this so-and-so holding baby Noah? How adorable!”)

I think that the machinations of “just like” play-acting are more outrageous in a transracial adoption anyway. There’s no passing here. Perhaps this is why neutrality seems even more like rejection to me or why neutrality seems so much more obvious.

I’m not bashing people who err on the side of caution, by the way. And I’m talking about family, not friends because family has the benefit of our point of view to lead them and so their choice to act as if adoption didn’t exist feels much more blatant.

But there’s a possibility that things will be different this visit since some of the family members I’m talking about here are people I’ll be seeing in Oregon. (And to any family members who are reading this and wondering if I mean them — I know who reads my blog out there the great Pacific Northwest and so if you’re reading this? It’s not you.)

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