Lurking in the darkness — a birth mother!
Jul 29, 2008 Adoption
Yes, there she is — scuttling across the yard, flashlight in hand, creeping around the doorway ready to SNATCH THE BABY!
Arghhh.
WTF about the freaking MYTH THAT WILL NOT DIE and is contributing to people LOSING access to their children????
I’m so angry right now.
So Supergirl, the daughter of a blogging first mom, had what sounds like a fun visit with said first mother. And at the end of it (according to adoptive parents) Supergirl says, as they’re driving away, “I don’t want her to take me.”
As I said in the comments there, Madison has never said that but she has expressed some of that same fear. From that blog entry:
The part that’s particular is how she wants reassurance that she can think about Jessica as a mommy without worrying that it’ll rock her world and actually make it so her Thomas the Tank Engine pillow and favorite pink shoes suddenly end up at Jessica’s house and she’ll find herself living somewhere else. I think she wants to hear that her life is sturdy and permanent and can withstand her struggle to understand things.
So if Madison said, “I don’t want her to take me” I’d have said, “Pennie would never take you, honey, she knows that you live here with us.” I would talk and talk and talk to her about it. I’d talk to Pennie about it so she could say, “Yup, you live here with your mommy and daddy and Noah and Peanut. That’s where you live.” (And Pennie has reiterated to her that she knows just where Madison lives and just who her mommy is because Madison has challenged her on it making sure that everything is okie-dokie and safe.)
What I WOULD NOT do is stop visits because — hello, doesn’t that just tell the kid they ought to be scared? That birth mom ISN’T safe???? And do they think that this is going to assuage their daughter’s concerns? Because I remember talking to an adult adoptee who had a closed adoption who said, “I was always afraid my birth mom would come and snatch me.” It’s not like absence makes the heart grow less worried, people. Absence can just feed your fears.
I just think that aside from the whole closing of a working open adoption thing, here’s a chance to start processing adoption with your child and the parents get all knee-jerk about it and just freak the hell out. And that makes me NUTTY, just NUTTY. Are THEY afraid Supergirl is going to get kidnapped? Because if they’re not, what in the hell would make them solidify that fear for their daughter? I mean, when Noah was afraid of robbers outside the window I didn’t go, “OH MY GOD — you’re right! We better go stay in a hotel!!!!” No, I saw those fears as developmentally appropriate for a kid who’s growing up and being — as healthy, normal kids can be — scared of all that growth and separation. Likewise when Madison was afraid of riding her taller bike I didn’t say, “You know, you probably will fall. Get off it and go back to your trike. Seriously. It’s weirding you out too much!”
What I think Supergirl needs is to hear FROM HER FIRST MOM that she will be staying right where she is and all the grownups know it.
And you know, another thing Madison needed to hear from us (and maybe Supergirl needs to hear, too) is that she can love Pennie with abandon and we grown-ups will hold her steady. Brett and I won’t feel betrayed, Pennie won’t usurp our parental status — we all remember where Madison lives and the roles her different parents play in her life.
Since we were able to give Madison that reassurance, she is so much more comfortable with Pennie and in loving Pennie and in telling ME that she loves Pennie and in telling PENNIE that she loves Pennie. It has been a good and healthful thing to work through and to me, open adoption made all of that easier to work through. I’m so sorry for Supergirl and her losses. And I’m angry, too. Because I GET wanting to protect your kid but I don’t get closing a working open adoption. I just don’t get that. It just seems so so so so wrong.
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Tags: Adoption, adoptive parents, developmentally appropriate, Madison, open adoption, raising adopted kids
Second choice vs. Second best
May 30, 2008 Adoption, Infertility
Sang-Shil Kim has a moving post explaining why sometimes we adoptive parents don’t do a whole lot of good with our fine platitudes. Still I think our platitudes are the best we can do. I can’t rewrite history and the truth is that first I tried to get pregnant. This may hurt Madison or it may roll off her back — I don’t know. It’s one of the things I can’t control for her.
I’m not abdicating responsibility here but I’m recognizing the limits of my influence. I can’t make things not hurt Madison and it seems developmentally appropriate for an adopted person to process his or her adoption through their parents’ narratives (both by birth and by adoption) and so at some point she likely will need to integrate my infertility story with her birth/adoption story.
As a parent, one of my challenges has been to find the careful balance between taking responsibility appropriately and taking on too much responsibility. For example, my infertility journey wasn’t such a terrific thing for Noah. I was preoccupied and depressed and Noah couldn’t understand why I wanted another kid when he was so happy being an only child. There’s an entry somewhere in my archives where he said to me, “Why am I not enough for you?” I know it’s not the same as an adoptee struggling with hard-core feelings of rejection but I’m saying that every parent has to understand the way their choices impact our kids AND the limits of our ability to address that impact. Ultimately, our kids need to figure out how to live with inconvenient truths. I don’t think it helped when I said, “Oh Noah, you’re just so swell that I need to have another one of you little ankle-biters around the house.” But it’s all I could say. It was true that I wanted another baby and that having “just” Noah didn’t fill this need in me. It was also true this wasn’t about him only how could I expect a 5-year old (I think he was five) to understand that?
Madison — like every adoptee — gets it coming and going. For one, she has to find a narrative that works to explain to herself why she is not with Pennie. She can go to Pennie for answers but she’ll need to find a way to make sense of it herself. For two, she has to find a narrative that works to explain to herself why I tried to get pregnant before turning to adoption. She can read my blog and watch me work through it in virtual time but that doesn’t mean it will answer all of her questions satisfactorily. This is one of those times where I can’t fix it.
I don’t abdicate my responsibility to her to help her process this but I do recognize that it’s her work to do and that even if I do the best job I can, I can’t control her feelings around it.
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Madison has an elephant in her pants
May 28, 2008 Adoption, Uncategorized
She has a stuffed elephant tucked in the front of her pants and my stats right at the very minute say that I’ve had 666 visitors. Quick, someone visit so I can erase the Satanic number!
I’m not getting too far into the infamous Mme Tay comment (because then I’d have to read the whole discussion and I’m not going to) but I’ll address what Suz said since her site is where I first heard about the dust-up:
It seems that several adoptees felt validated. There is some service there, no? When they spend their lives being told to be grateful, having their feelings and rights ignored, I would imagine it would be of service to have someone finally say what you knew all along - even with a nasty tone and intent.
Could she have been nicer? Of course but when so many people in adoption avoid, deny, lie about, manipulate and abuse the truth, its is a bit refreshing to have one person be honest - even if they forgot their social graces (and is likely a total nutter) … For me, and I would guess some adoptees, its about being SEEN.
Certainly honesty in adoption is in short supply although I don’t think whatsherface Tay was being honest so much as she was being nasty. Well, there’s no point arguing about that any old way (because it could be she’s just some troll and not what she’s representing). The real point that Suz was making (I believe) is that there are plenty of adoptees who have grown up feeling like replacement kids (and there’s enough adoptee narrative for us all to nod our heads in understanding) and that many of ‘em would have a much easier time finding healing if their adoptive parents would say, “Yes, you weren’t what I really wanted.”
At the AAC conference I attended a terrific talk led by Barbara Ann Gowan who talked about her experiences growing up a biracial adoptee in an African American family. It was one of my favorite presentations. Anyway, she was talking about a friend of hers who adopted a child with serious special needs and later had two bio kids. She didn’t adopt after infertility; she adopted because she knew this child in another capacity and when the opportunity to adopt her opened up, she took it. One day she said to Barbara, “I am harder on her than I am on my other kids. I don’t like her as much.” (Important point: When she said this, too, her daughter was presenting some major challenges.) Barbara’s response? Good for you for being honest — now go get help.
Some of the adoptive parents in the audience were offended by this other woman’s feelings. How dare she feel differently about her adopted child? How dare she express those feelings? And Barbara patiently tried to explain that her friend should be applauded for being honest with herself because if she couldn’t be honest with herself, she couldn’t get help for herself and for her daughter.
I think that there can be barriers to attachment in adoption that simply aren’t there in a lot of bio relationships. Not that attachment is a sure thing in bio relationships either. Attachment barriers can be emotional, circumstantial, physical — there are lots of things that get in the way. In adoption there are additional issues like our kids’ histories or the circumstances surrounding their adoptions. Being honest about those issues can help us head them off. (Like reading up on attachment before we bring older infants, toddlers or older children home. Like finding support as we struggle to build relationships with our kids’ first families. Like confronting any residual infertility grief before we begin our homestudy.) And like Barbara explained to us, it helps us handle problems when they arise after, too. So honesty is, as always, the best adoption policy.
I know how guilt can cloud a parent’s ability to be honest though because as a kid I experienced that, too. And as an adult, I saw parents in shelter and now I see parents in my social group who can’t confront the harm they do their kids because to confront that is to be swallowed up by guilt. We parents — adoptive or not — can help each other cut through our denial by having honest discussions, sure. But Ms. Tay? That’s not the way to do it. The way to do it is the way Barbara did it — by sharing stories with compassion and kindness and by holding people responsible even as we accept their limitations. And yes, we adoptive parents need to not gasp in horror when others among us say, “You know, I’m having these socially unacceptable feelings…”
To me there are two issues here. The first is that hate-mongering comments suck, period. Gross generalizations don’t serve discourse. The second is that apparently honesty IS in such short supply that some people found the comments comforting. But to my mind, that doesn’t make her comment ok; it just highlights how much more work needs to be done.
(For the record, I wasn’t offended on my own behalf by her stupidity and gross generalizations but on my daughter’s behalf. My daughter is indeed a prize. She’s pretty f*cking amazing, set-the-world-on-fire fantastic and sure as heck not a consolation package.)
And now my stats are 697 and Satan has been banished from my statcounter. Cool.
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Tags: adoptive parents, adoptive-parenting, flamewar, flamewars, mean commenters
More chatting with Madison
May 27, 2008 Adoption
The hospital in which Madison was born plays a big part in the story of her birth and adoption. She likes to hear about me rushing down the halls to get to the maternity ward — to get to her. This is her favorite part of the story and the piece she asks for most often. I’ve told her that someday we will go back and visit there so she can see where she was born.
Yesterday we were driving to an event and I told her we were going to pass the hospital. She craned her neck to see it but it was outside Noah’s window (so called even when Noah isn’t occupying the seat next to it, which he wasn’t) and we were on the freeway going fast. I told her we’d see it again going home.
This time she caught sight of it because she could see the big lit-up letters spelling out its name.
“Oh!” she breathed. “There it is!”
She really wants to go back and see it.
“To see the babies,” she says. “But I won’t turn INTO a baby again, right, Mommy? Because I’m a big girl now.”
I think going back there is something we need to do soon. That way I can show her the door I came in and the halls I rushed down. We can get french fries at the Wendy’s where I took Noah the day he met her. Hopefully we can peek at the babies and maybe — just maybe — I can get a kind-hearted nurse who will let her see one of the rooms so she can picture where she lived her first three days.
She has taken to heart our previous conversation about staying with Pennie. Maybe passing the hospital put it at the forefront of her mind because she brought it up after while we were tooling around looking for a bank machine to pay for parking.
“Mommy, Pennie should babysit me and Noah while you go to a meeting,” she told me.
“Or maybe Daddy and I could go have coffee while Pennie babysits for you guys,” I suggested.
“If you bring me a danish. No, two danish. No, three danish!”
Then she was quiet for a bit.
“At our house, not Pennie’s,” she added. “And with Noah.”
So those are the terms. That seems doable. I told her she can call Pennie and let her know she’d like to have her come over and babysit. Noah will be happy to set himself up with a video game and ignore them both so Pennie will still get alone time with Madison and Madison will get alone time with her.
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Tags: adoption stories, adoptive parents, adoptive-parenting, birth stories, ctts, Madison
New tough question over at Open Adoption Support
May 26, 2008 Adoption
I’m hoping that those of you with foster-to-adopt experience can weigh in. Of course the situation is different than for a child placed at birth and this mom is trying very, very hard to do the right thing long-term for her son with very little support.
My son calls us both mommy. Am I doing right by him?
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Tags: adoptive parents, adoptive-parenting, foster adoption, foster care, foster-to-adopt, open adoption, open adoption support, openadoptionsupport.com