Adoption | this woman's work

Wednesday we went to the fair

Jul 232010

It’s an annual tradition. My mom celebrates her birthday by taking my sister’s family and mine to the fair and spoiling the kids rotten. My kids look forward to it like they look forward to Christmas or Halloween. The very first words Madison said to me that morning were, “I’m going to have Italian ice and an elephant ear both!” The kid was still trying to focus her eyes but she was already planning ahead!

The fair we go to is the local county fair and it’s teensy-tiny, which makes it absolutely manageable on a weekday night. It’s always brutally hot and humid and sometimes it rains (not this year thank goodness) and there are just a handful of rides. It’s smallness makes it perfect because the boys can take off on their own without worrying anyone and it’s pretty impossible to lose anyone. You can also do every single thing two or three times if you want and still have time to check out the animals.

This year Madison was too big for some of the little kid rides and too small for most of the big kid rides. That was hard on Noah when it happened (later than it happened to Madison — she’s very tall for her age) but Madison took it in stride. And that picture there is her with Brett riding The Drop. First words when she came down the stairs after? “I am never doing THAT again!” But said laughing and excited and she is already planning to do it again next year.

The fair bookended a week of crazy fun for Madison. She had the PDX cousins in town and that meant visits to the ice cream shop and late nights through the week. Then Pennie took her out on a date (we watched Roscoe and Tommy had to work so it was just the two of them). Then Pennie and Tommy and Roscoe took her swimming and out to dinner and for more ice cream.

Let’s just say Madison’s bedtime routine has been a wee bit ganked and now with this awful heat, none of us is sleeping all that well so it’s been a bit crazy around here.

After her swim date with Pennie and family, Madison came home and cried and cried. She was sorry that it was over. She said, “I don’t want to be home with you! I want to be having fun with Pennie!” I said, “It’d be great if fun things never ever had to end.” And she said, “I don’t want them to end!” Then she conceded that I was fun “sometimes” because I let her walk on the low wall by the ice cream shop but that I am not as fun as Pennie because I was making her brush her teeth. I said, “Listen, honey, when Pennie chose me to be your Mommy Mama, she assigned me the job of being the mama who makes you brush your teeth. That’s my job but we can sit here while you’re sad for awhile more.” Eventually Madison brushed her teeth but she did not like it! And she only sorta liked me.

Honestly sitting there, I felt kinda like the divorced mom with the non-custodial dad who wines and dines the kids and then drops ‘em off, you know? I felt a little bit like that. I felt a little bit sad that I couldn’t be the Fun Mama. It’d been a long day and I was hot and tired and I’ll admit that I drooped and had to close my eyes and take a deep breath about it.

I want my kids to have great times with lots of folks and I don’t always have to (or want to) go along. And of course, I especially value Madison’s relationship with Pennie and I am grateful when they get to be with each other. I also LOVE that Madison is old enough to grab her carseat out of the van, stick it in Pennie’s car, climb in and wave good-bye. I love that she is old enough to take ownership in that way. Still. I had a moment there on the couch. A droopiing moment.

I was thinking, too, about them all heading out to go swimming. Roscoe looks just like Tommy and Madison looks just like Pennie and they are a beautiful little family together. I was thinking about that and about the glorious intimacy of swimming. Yanking on that sticky swimsuit, washing Madison’s hair free of chlorine afterward in the shower. The two of them having that time together makes me very very happy. (I know that being Pennie’s best beloved fills Madison’s heart up in indescribable ways and I believe it fills up Pennie’s heart, too.)

But, as I was telling LiaNotJuno (not linked here because I’m not sure that she needs/wants the traffic), I can see how this can be a challenge for people.

LiaNotJuno asked me how I got to this place in open adoption and I told her that in general (because in particular it has so much to do with Pennie) I can see three things that played into my orientation towards open adoption:

I’m a feminist so I believe in Pennie’s right to create her own version of motherhood. (Note: My feelings about her freedom to do this have changed since learning more about the way the adoption industry works but I still absolutely believe every woman has the right to create her own version of motherhood.)
I’m a crunchy granola earthmama who believes in a child’s intrinsic tie to the woman who grew him and gave birth to him.
I’m a child of divorce and I understand that the boundaries of family are permeable.

Although I felt like the put upon divorced mom for a minute there sitting on the couch, I also know that in a zillion ways our open adoption is nothing like that. But I get that feeling and I was thinking on how that feeling might sit with someone who has a more troubled open adoption or has less faith in (or is more threatened by) the idea that their child has a profound tie to this other parent or who is a child of a much more contentious divorce and experiences that feeling as CONFLICT.

I have been trying to put myself in the place of parents who struggle more with their children’s relationships with their first parents because I feel like I really need to learn some more compassion and understanding around this. Earlier this summer I was put in the position where some parents with whom I philosophically don’t agree have been reaching out to me for support and even though some of what they said made my spine freeze up, I realized that if I want to be a counselor, I really need to tone down my activist reactions and start listening. Obviously online discourse is very different than one-on-one in-person discourse and I learned a lot by listening and then trying to dig through my own experiences so that I could identify with what they were seeing even if I still had strong feelings about what they needed to do. And what I found is that if I’m listening, it’s not that hard to understand where someone is coming from and I become a lot more useful to them AND a better advocate.

So as I sat there on the couch watching Madison drag herself to the bathroom to brush her teeth (tears, oh the wailing and the tears!) I thought, “Remember this right here and imagine what it would be like not to be interested in shrugging it off or not being able to shrug it off. Imagine making decisions from THIS PLACE of exhaustion and insecurity.” Because I want to be able to be a counselor who can say, “I get that. I hear you” but who still is working to get people to work through that and get back to where they need to be for their kids.

I hugely value the online activism that I have been fortunate enough to witness and sometimes participate in but now I want to do less of that to focus more on in real life service and learning, which is why I’m excited about school. I think that will make me a better activist long-term, too. So I’m gonna shut up and listen more.

Mostly. Because I’m still gonna talk.

Anatomy of an article

Adoption, Writing 17 Responses »

Jul 022010

I wanted to write a little bit about the process of writing that Brain Child disruption article. It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve written something this reported that wasn’t straight service and I loved writing it even though it was hard and I had a lot of adoption-related nightmares while I was writing it. This is very long so I’m putting it all below the cut (I also don’t have time to edit so forgive any stupidity on my part) but I thought other writers might be interested in this. This was my query letter, which I pitched in December:

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The Myth of the Forever Family

Adoption, Writing 35 Responses »

Jun 302010

My article on adoption disruption and dissolution is up at Brain Child (and of course on newsstands now):

When we adopted our daughter, Madison, six years ago, the judge was clear. Legally, adoption bound our daughter to our family as if she had been born to us. She would have the same rights as our biological son. We owed her the same level of commitment. A few weeks later, Madison’s amended birth certificate would arrive, with my name as her birth mother and my husband’s name as her birth father. All of her original birth records would be locked up, sealed away, inaccessible. At the end of the brief ceremony, the judge banged his gavel and officially pronounced us—in the language of the mainstream adoption community—“a forever family.”

That ceremony lawfully inducted us into the myth that adoptive families are expected to live by. Our families are supposed to be “just like” biological families. That’s why we adoptive parents roll our eyes when celebrity magazines talk about Angelina Jolie’s “adopted children” instead of just calling them her kids and we swear up and down that we are the “real parents.” Some hopeful adoptive parents even wear T-shirts that announce that they are “Paper Pregnant,” as if they feel the need to validate their way of building a family by equating adoption with a fundamental physical experience.

In many ways these adoption myths serve us and our kids well. Children should not face discrimination for how they arrive to a family. They should have inheritance rights. Adoptive parents should never question their obligation to the children they commit to parenting.

But in other ways, adoption myths betray our children by giving lie to their origins. They are not born to us. We do not create them. They arrive to our families with histories that precede their lives with us. Embracing our children means embracing their stories even when they are difficult to hear.

The hard truth is that adoption is not just like giving birth. It is rarely as straightforward. And as much as we would like to think otherwise, not all forever families are forever.

via Brain, Child :: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers.

There was A LOT of great discussion that could not make it into the article, which I am very sorry about. I also talked to families who ended up not feeling comfortable being quoted for the piece but whose experiences informed my process. You can discuss the article here (at the Brain Child discussion blog) and I’ll be checking in there. I’ve also invited the people I interviewed to weigh in but they are busy people so we’ll just have to see.

This was a hard but rewarding piece to write and I just hope that I did justice to the topic.

One more thing — whenever I write about Madison’s sealed-away birth certificate and the new fake one that she has, the editors stop me and ask me if I’m SURE about that. The editors at Salon even said, “Is that legal?” So many people outside of adoption get that it’s insane, which makes it more bizarre that it’s controversial to people inside adoption.

This Is My Daughter's Mother

Adoption 13 Responses »

May 252010

I’m over at the Huffington Post today:

Over lunch the other day, I asked my 5-year old daughter what I should write in this essay.

“I’m going to write about your adoption,” I told her. “What do you want people to know?”

“I want them to know that adoption is hard,” she answered right away. “I want them to know it’s hard being away from your real, real mommy.”

via Rebecca Walker: This Is My Daughter’s Mother: Dawn Friedman’s Happy Family.

Living contradictions

Adoption 4 Responses »

May 202010

I’ve been thinking about Mei-Ling’s response to my kids’ interview post and her blog about it here. I was thinking about it while the kids and I were riding the bus to park day and wishing I had a keyboard. It was this part that got me thinking:

So when I say I wish I had been raised by my other mother this phrase points out by default that I wish my adoptive mom hadn’t been my mother. In order for my original mother to have raised me, my adoptive mom would not be raising me now.

It was making me think on how sometimes we find solace in our grief by saying, “If that first thing hadn’t happened, then this laster thing wouldn’t have happened. And this later thing which has happened is good so that first thing which also has happened was good, too, because it led to this.”

But this seems particularly cruel solace when it’s a child’s loss and when that which is most essential to you (your parents) feel somehow dependent on how “appropriately” you manage this loss.

Yes, of course Madison and I have talked about this, too. (This child, she can talk, thank goodness because then I get to listen.) That whole adopted self integration? For her it’s partly about accepting the paradox of loving one and profoundly missing the other. Noah has talked about it some, too, his love for her and his sadness at her sadness and how grateful she is here and how sorry she is sometimes oh so very sad.

(And you know, as I type this, it makes sense that sometimes at her most sad she goes looking for Noah who is not as much part of the “one or the other” paradox but is a kid like herself, just luckier in the early start department but still at the mercy of the adults around him.)