Quick post about (my) adoptive parent loss
Jan 15, 2009 Adoption
I almost wrote this into the last post but I was too busy waxing poetic.
For some adoptive parents (myself included) there was loss in my journey towards adoption (infertility, miscarriages) but adoption itself for me? No loss! (You’ll notice I used “I” statements when talking about loss in my last post. That was deliberate.) For me it was all gain and no loss. None. Zero. Zilch.
Someone (not me, not necessarily any of you) could argue that I “lost” being the only mother and I’d say, “I didn’t lose that — it’s how adoption works.” It only looks like loss if I define adoption (as some folks do) against the backdrop of conceiving and birthing a kid.
This was not something I thought before (read my archives if you don’t believe me) but it’s something I think now. Like I could also say I missed out on being pregnant with Madison, right? See how that stops working when there’s no backdrop? Because in adoption I couldnt give birth to said adoptive child because then it’s not adoption, right? So there’s no loss for me there seeing as how it’s the definition of adoption. It’d be like saying that I lost not getting to know Noah’s first mom. It makes no sense. (Again, this isn’t something that I always felt but I feel it now.)
All of my losses happened before Madison and before we even started thinking well and truly about adoption. Again, “I” statements. Other folks might feel differently and I’m sure not saying they shouldn’t.
Tags: adoption ethics, adoption reform, adoptive-parenting, loss, open adoption
Careful with that axe, Eugene
Jan 15, 2009 Adoption
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.
Tags: adoptees, Adoption, adoption reform, ethics, first parents, loss
Heavy adoption questions
Jan 12, 2009 Adoption
And now Marley and Suz shoot us right back into adoption territory!!
Not that I’m ignoring Joy, there’s a busy discussion happening in the comments to this post. But I’ve written so much of it before (that Pennie has a right to her decision, that I refuse to dictate how she or Madison should feel — good or bad — about the adoption) that I’m not up to writing it again. I understand, too, that the divorce anology is way imperfect but I think the parallels work — it’s a legal family decision made by adults that hugely impacts kids often negatively but is made without their input. Also it’s another place where adults tend to downplay how the kids feel about it. So that’s why I chose it.
Reading the comments did make me think more about the term “parent” and “parenting,” which segues nicely to linking up Thorn’s thoughts on Shannon saying that open adoption can queer a straight family. While Pennie and I don’t co-parent (because I hold the legal reins in our relationship) I think she’s still a parent. I think that when she’s with Madison she does parent by definition. I mean if she’s a mother, wouldn’t she be a parent? She tells Madison to calm down or helps her pour herself some milk or wipes a tushie now and then. Plus she gave birth to her, which is pretty darn parental. I don’t know. The terminology sometimes makes me so tired. We get so hung up on what Pennie IS and what she ISN’T but there aren’t words to help people understand her place in our family and in Madison’s life that don’t have a whole lot of baggage.
Thinking today about the “queering” of our family made me think about how people sometimes say of a gay couple, “Wait, so who’s the husband and who’s the wife?” I feel like that’s what they try to do to Pennie — but who’s the real mom? On the Facebook relative widget, I have Pennie labeled as “My Daughter’s Mother” because that’s it, isn’t it?
(sigh)
Marley asked:
Why do facts mean nothing when working on “progressive” adoption legislation–or even talking to people about adoption. You can spew out a list of facts a mile long and all you get back is yabutt. If there is a response at all. Obviously people prefer their personal mythologies and you/we are “uninformed,” “uneducated” or plain stupid. And, of course, there are also agendas, which are sacrosanct. Adoption saves babies, for instance, and you’re just a baybee killer.
Marley, you answered your own question. Sacrosanct agendas and baybee killers. (sigh again) And being deathly afraid of queers of any stripe. There’s one way to be a family and that family can have one mom, one dad and a smattering of babies although one boy and one girl for best results. God forbid anyone screw with that. I DON’T get it — especially when adoptees and first parents are standing there saying, “BUT THAT WASN’T OUR EXPERIENCE!” Truthfully I am still naive as hell because sometimes I read Marley’s blog and think, “You have GOT to be KIDDING.”
Now we throw up our hands in frustration and note that this makes for another smooth segue right into Suz’s question:
Do you think women, infertile women, will ever come to realize that they dont have a “right” to take the child of another simply becuase they cannot have their own? Do they realize they are transferring trauma? Why do some women think they deserve a child and others dont? Is it true that as long as there is no “cure” for infertility women will be actively harvesting the children of others?
Well, I think this misses the mark. It’s true that “family building” drives the industry and that the people who generally want to build families are we infertile types but we’re all operating under these huge fallacies about parenthood and womanhood and motherhood. I mean, we’re all buying the same bill of goods that motherhood is the be all and end all if you can do it right (i.e., one mom, one dad, one of each kid) and that we are living lives unfulfilled if we don’t have kids. Couple that with a hard-driving biological urge and you’ve got some pretty fierce entitlement.
Plus for infertiles like me, you have a whole world telling us to never give up — your child is out there somewhere. (I think the infertility industry does a number on women, too.) And we all know that any serious issues with adoption are dismissed out of hand (look at Marley’s question) and so the whole issue is pretty loaded to tilt towards getting grabby.
Most individual infertile women I know (and I know a lot) are pretty lovely people just like anyone else and — other than some screwy ones online — I haven’t met any that are actively harvesting the children of others. I mean, most of us want to build a family through adoption and when we start down that path we’re operating pretty blindly. If we come across an unscrupulous agency or lawyer, it’s not always easy to tell. Plus we have a whole world telling us that adoption is grand (it’s the same world telling potential birth moms that adoption is the most unselfish choice they can make). And the adoption reform movement is still hampered by constituents whose education tends to skew toward caustic. But I feel like the internet has also made a stronger, more effective dialog possible and that with institutions like Ethica and the Evan B. Donaldson Institute there can be real change made.
I think it’s important to bring the discussion to people outside of the adoption world — to people interested in families and in women’s rights and in parenthood. I know that people outside the triad are interested because many of my readers (and most of y’all aren’t connected to adoption) tell me so. I also think that we have to work on the rest of the world, too, because you’ve got folks like Ann Coulter saying that single mothers can only raise strippers and rapists and murderers and it’s those views — far more than baby yearning — that makes adoption possible.
More of what Ann said on FoxNews:
HANNITY: Let me go to Ann. Let me go back to this single mother — this single mother issue here, because you make a pretty profound point that isn’t often made.
You know, I thought we live in a land of the free and home of the brave — brave. You have choices in life. You know, for example, if you decide to get in the back of a car, and you start making out with your boyfriend and girlfriend, and you start removing one article of clothing after another.
COULTER: Right.
HANNITY: This is a choice to get in the car. This is a choice to take off the clothes. This is a choice to have sex. You do it of your own volition.
COULTER: Right. And it’s a choice not to give an illegitimate child up for adoption, which is, I say, surprisingly, I think to me, an interesting statistic, is that adopted children rank better on every measure of well-being.
They don’t think about being adopted. Their parents don’t think about them being adopted. They have less use of drugs, less run away, less criminal behavior than non-adopted children.
And adoption is discouraged while legitimacy and single mothers are elevated as if they are, you know, the personification of selfless virtue.
She may be one of the most offensive people saying it but she sure isn’t the only one. The money from us infertiles may drive adoption but it’s our economic and moral damning of “inappropriate” mothers that keeps us supplied.
Ann Coulter isn’t getting paid by adoption agencies, she’s just steeped in anti-woman rhetoric and wants to create policy based on it. She’s not the only one.
Tags: Adoption, adoption agencies, adoption legislation, adoption reform, ann coulter, ethica, ethical adoption, evan b. donaldson, first parents, questions
