Speaking when it's not your turn

Adoption 7 Responses »
Apr 222009

I got exciting news last week from the editors of Mothering and Blogging; their proposal for the NWSA Annual Conference was accepted and I’m going to be on a panel in Atlanta with some of the other authors in November! I’m very excited about it not least because I’ll finally get to meet Julia in person!

I announced it on Facebook, which is when I found out that a friend of mine’s panel wasn’t accepted. Her panel was about adoption and two of the other women were Anne Fessler (who, of course, wrote The Girls Who Went Away) and Marianne Novy  (who wrote Reading Adoption); my friend also happens to be a first mom. 

The conference topic is “Difficult Dialogues” and it seems to me that a panel about adoption from the vantage point of an artist (who is also an adoptee) and an academic (who is also an adoptee) and a academic-in-training (who is also a first mother) would be pretty amazing. I don’ t know who else might have been on the panel with them and I don’t know why the panel got turned down. I can guess but I might be guessing wrong.

Funnily enough, my essay in the blogging book? It’s about how blogging about our adoption and hearing from first mothers changed my adoption in real live true technicolor life.

Now the blogging pitch wasn’t about adoption and the fact that my essay happens to be about adoption is just coincidence but still, it made me think  (again) about how adoptive parents have so much more power than any other player in the triad and how I need to think about that. I feel like it’s my responsibility to speak to this privilege and to speak about the missing player in our discussions but I do not think it’s my right to speak FOR adoptees or first parents. It’s a fine distinction but an important one. Frankly, adoptees and first parents do not need me to speak for them — people have been speaking for adoptees and first parents for far too long — but they do need me to be an ally because I have more power than they do.

In the cultural conversation about adoption, the adoptive parents’ needs always seem to hold sway. We are omnipresent whether we’re wanted or not and we get far more latitude in our feelings.

At Open Adoption Support, I have always felt like I needed to err on the side of not offending first parents, which is why I made a statement about, well, first parent as a term. There was one person who came to my site and couldn’t even fill out the survey I had up there (remind me to upload that powerpoint — from last year’s AAC conference presentation — to slideshare, will you?) because she found the term “first family” so offensive. She said that her daughter had no family before her adoption, end of discussion period. And while the circumstances of her child’s adoption could make her animosity towards that family understandable, her inability to fill out a survey seemed like a bit much. She immediately felt erased by the word “family” and she shut down. 

When I got her feedback, I revisited the term because the goal of that site is to offer support to the people who need it as they’re living open adoption and if people are actually being driven away by the language, I felt like that was something I needed to think about. But then I decided once again that just as important as reaching as many people as the site can, it also needed to clearly be an ally — or as clearly an ally as a site an adoptive parent set up CAN be. And part of that alliance is being willing to offend adoptive parents for the sake of welcoming first parents. 

I know that it’s easier for people to hear me as an adoptive parent than it is for people to hear Pennie or to one day hear Madison. I know that if either of them are critical about adoption people will say they’re just angry or selfish or ungrateful. But if I am critical about adoption then it carries different weight because I have no personal axe to grind. I have my beautiful family thanks to adoption. I have nothing to gain from looking critically at the institution of adoption and a lot to lose (namely my security as a “good adopter”). That’s why it matters that I’m willing to talk out loud about the things that worry me. That’s why that article in Mother Jones mattered.

I know that my voice finds an audience that I don’t always deserve just by virtue of my privilege and it humbles me and influences what I say when I’m in front of that unearned audience.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

Adoption 22 Responses »
Jan 152009

That’s a Pink Floyd song — do you know it?

I was sleepless and worried last night and then got to thinking my way through it.

There are things that happen in our adoption and though I’m a party to it, of the triad members I am the least playing player. I mean, the role I’ve chosen is fairly passive really especially now that Madison is taking more control and initiating more contact. For someone like me who likes to get in and muck around, it can be hard to step out and let things play the way they need to play, especially because I love both the players so much. Sometimes I feel torn by feeling in the middle more than I should. I want to do something but am blocked by contradictions. And then I try not to act at all until the situation truly invites me.

(Yes, there are things happening. No, I’m not ready to talk about it but soon.)

When I think about this in light of the discussion in the comments, I realize there, too, how I am the least playing player. I told Paragraphein on her blog that I’m resistant to the idea that we (triad members) can’t all just get along in part because I’m the most privileged person in the triad. I have lost NOTHING in this adoption so of course I don’t always understand why we can’t all just join hands and sing kumbaya together. So much of it is theory to me and it’s easy to forget that it’s not theory to people who are living it out as adoptees and first parents.

I can see how in the future I might visit this thinking on Pennie and Madison not necessarily between me and them but between each other because I am a person who likes to muck around and I am pretty blindly privileged and so sometimes I want to work things out for them that really don’t need me working them out. Because it’s between them. And the things they’ve lost in each other are things that have nothing — nothing — to do with me. This is a hard thing for me to understand.

Here’s an example. Noah was upset about something and wouldn’t tell me what because it was a private, personal upset. And it drove me crazy! I couldn’t understand how this kid who used to get mad at me because I didn’t remember HIS dreams, who slept with his head rammed into my armpit for more years than I care to remember because it was as close as he could get without actually crawling back inside of my skin, who screamed bloody murder and inserted himself between me and his father anytime we tried to grab a smooch — this kid wouldn’t tell ME what he was worried about?

But of course it was none of my business.

Likewise there is a place I cannot go between Madison and Pennie and beyond that a place I cannot go within the triad.

Adoption did not happen to me in the same way. Adoption, for me, was fundamentally different. It was all gain and no loss. I can sympathize all I want but then there’s a place I cannot go.

I don’t think this makes me always wrong in every discussion or other triad members always right but I do think it means that I have to shut up now and then and listen and — most importantly — take folks at their word sometimes even when I don’t want to.

In my own life, in our own adoption, it’s hard sometimes to know that in an essential way I will and should be on the sidelines and can’t fix things or make it better or even insert my own $.02. It’s hard not to be a player but that’s my job. Sometimes.

That’s what I’m thinking about today.

Why blog it now?

Adoption, Race 4 Responses »
Jul 262008

The incident I’ve been blogging about happened months ago and the fall-out happened weeks ago. So why blog it now? Well, because Madison brought it up and frankly it’s been on my mind (like crazy) since it happened.

She misses the wife in question and she misses the kids. She wanted to know why she didn’t see them anymore. I told her because we didn’t want to be around [husband] and that [wife] & [husband] were a package deal. (I think she knows that [wife] is angry with me, too, because lord knows we’ve talked about it often enough around here — poor Brett helping me process the thing to death.) I said, “Do you remember why I’m upset with [husband]?” And she said, “Yes, because he said…”

Me: Do your remember what he said?

Madison: You say it.

And you know, I didn’t want to say it. I wanted her to say, “I have no recollection and would rather skip over here and play with my dollhouse and smile all the live long day!” I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to say it because she couldn’t remember and wanted a reminder or if she couldn’t bring herself to say it. And I was hoping it was the former and that I could find a way to wriggle out of it. Like, “Oh! She doesn’t even remember! I’ll change the subject!”

This is where the goodness of blogs come in. I thought about Susan Ito and John Raible and Jae Ran Kim and Sang-Shil Kim and all the other transracially adopted adults who have shared their stories. If I changed the subject, she would take on the shame and there’s no way that I want my daughter taking on any shame from this. I knew I had to be the one to say it so I did, I repeated what he said and my daughter screwed up her face, shoved her forehead into my arm and started to chew on my shirt.

“He doesn’t like me because of my brown skin,” she said. “Does he not like [his child]? What about [his child]?” Then later, “YOU like brown-skinned babies!”

For the next 24-hours she’d bring it up randomly. She’d talk about how mean [husband] is because of what he said. Mommy, remember what he said? And why did he say it? Why was he mean? Then we’d list all of the grown-ups we knew who are nice and NOT mean. Because, I told her, most people are nice but some people are mean. It’s how the world is. We are lucky to have so many nice people around us and the mean people? Well, once we find out they’re mean, that’s the end of that!

I understand why parents don’t want to address this stuff because I don’t want to address this stuff. I want to pretend that she’s over it, totally forgot it, has moved on with her life and that it’s not even a blip on her radar. But I agree with you all that our reaction is the only thing I can control and that she needs us to say it out loud and react in no uncertain terms. She needs to know that we have a zero-tolerance rule about this and that there are no do-overs for racism and that we are always unequivocally on her side.

One of the first people I talked to about it was Pennie. For one thing, she knows these people and even if it hadn’t involved Madison I likely would have told her ‘cuz, you know, we talk about my friends and her friends and our dealings with them. But I also told her because she’s Madison’s first mom and because she’s an African American woman and so I doubly value her input. Being naive, what surprised me was how not surprised she was. Sad, disappointed, angry — yes but surprised? No.

My white world (myself included) had this “but she’s so young! why does she have to deal with this now?” sad reaction but my of-color world had this “ahh the inevitable has happened” resignation and sadness reaction. So when Madison asked me to say it, I channeled the mothers of color who I know (online and off) and knew they wouldn’t try to get out of it. They wouldn’t squirm and try to pretend it didn’t happen or try to distract her, they’d say it and face up to the truth, which is that it was said, my daughter heard it and yes, she still thinks about it.

(What prompted this was having a fall-out with a park friend — someone she barely knew — who said something 4-year old mean, which made her remember every mean thing anyone ever said to her finally landing on this one and focusing on it like crazy. This is the first time she’s brought up her concerns about the other kids in the family.)

(One more thing — the reason I password-protected the other post and not these latest ones is because the password-protected post got into other family members reactions and I wanted to keep that un-googled.)

Over at Susan's house

Adoption 4 Responses »
Mar 162008

Tonight, she told me that she wished–in the part of the [Jane Brown] playshop where they made wishes about their birth families–that we knew more about J. and S., her birth parents. She cried a bit, told me we don’t even have a picture, we don’t know anything about them. “You know a little bit, but I don’t know anything,” she said. I told her that I would never, never, never have secrets about her first family, and that everything I know, she will know. I also said, “Sounds like you’re feeling sad.” So we talked about her sadness for a while, and I told her that I’m sad, too, that she doesn’t know much about her first family. We ended up talking about the possibility of her having siblings in her first family, and she went to sleep planning to dream about living with her brothers and sisters and birth parents. She told me I could come in the dream, but that I couldn’t live with them.

from Crunchy Granola

Because I know there are a lot of other adoptive parents who wonder, “Is it normal for my kid to think about this stuff?” Or “should I bring up their adoption if they don’t?”

It’s easy to think that if our kids don’t talk about their adoptions it’s because they are totally cool, absolutely fine with it and perfectly normal, healthy adoptees. I think we need to stretch our concept of normal and healthy. It’s normal to think about the way things might have been; it’s healthy to grieve our losses. A child can be cool, absolutely fine with his or her adoption and still sometimes need/want to talk about it or feel sad about it.

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