this woman’s work

I hate head colds because I can’t think properly when I’m living with one. And I can’t make the two phone calls I need to make because I sound like a rhinoceros is sitting on my head. (I’ll make ‘em tomorrow, I guess.) Yesterday I worked on breaking everything I need to do down into teensy-tiny baby steps so that I could do a little bit at a time and then go upstairs and lie down. See, this part is like having a real job only without sick pay or even unpaid leave. Rats.

The kids woke up early to decorate the house for Halloween. Madison remembers doing all of this last year (when she was two!) because she’s like an elephant with her memory. Honestly, she remembers stuff like crazy. Noah does, too. He remembers the apartment we lived in when he was two. I’ve decided I have the smartest kids alive.

Madison and I are picking Jessica up from work today. I’m going to do my best to stay far away from Jessica who doesn’t need a cold to derail her incredibly busy school/work schedule. Madison is very excited because Jessica bought her glittery toenail polish.

Erin (who has the cutest little Who-ville of a child over there) posted something about parents with bio kids who worry about openness being unfair to said bio kid to which she says, “What the heck?” (Or as Madison says, “What the hoogah?”) So allow me to pontificate on openness and Noah.

Noah figured out early on that adoption that included the first parents made sense since he was involved in the waiting, involved in our first match and unmatch, involved in the candles we lit and prayers we sent to the family who would one day choose us. He didn’t meet Jessica until after Madison was born but then we (Brett and I) only met her once ourselves. She and I talked on the phone a lot but we only saw her that once when we first officially matched.

You may recall (if you’ve been reading that long) that I wasn’t sure about Noah meeting Madison before the surrenders were signed because I was worried it would be hard on him but then I changed my mind because if Madison did end up coming home with us, I wanted him to meet her the first time with Jessica. I wanted him to be able to tell her about that meeting (especially since we had no idea how our relationship might change and if Jessica would be a part of our lives, etc.) and we wanted him to see his sister with her first mom so he would truly understand where she came from. And if Madison didn’t come home, I wanted him to be able to say good-bye, too, and to know that little girl was ok with her mom.

(On my facebook account is a picture of them from the first time they met. Noah was very shy with her — wouldn’t touch her — but enamored all the same.)

Once Madison came home and Jessica started visiting, Noah was someone she could relate to because while Jessica hasn’t had a ton of baby experience, she has a little sister just a year younger than Noah and her best friend, Sam, has a nephew about Noah’s age. He could help break the ice during nervous first meetings and I remember on our very first mother’s day celebration that he came out with his whole collection of micropets and entertained us all with them. Also Sam is a huge batman fan and Noah has his share of batman paraphernalia (although his super hero of choice — at the time — was more spiderman).

Noah really loves Jessica and Nate and Sam. In fact, we’ve had to talk to him about giving Jessica and Madison their space because he handles their visits with the same show-off enthusiasm that he welcomes visits from grandparents. You know, he brings out all of his latest toys, shows off his cool dance moves and generally is excited about having visitors to his humble home. He also had a good time when D (Jessica’s little sister) came to visit.

Noah instinctively understands how and why Jessica matters to us and to Madison. He notices when Madison does things that remind him of Jessica (and now D — Madison makes a lot of faces that look like D these days! Particularly her, “You said what?!” face). He talks to her about Jessica, and he talks to her about when she came home and how he fed her a bottle and watched television with her on his lap and how he picked out a pink poodle for her while we were at the hospital.

He’s also training us. He asked about Madison’s bio dad a long time ago and he’s talked about his concerns (pre-adoption) about having a family that doesn’t match and then later about feeling worried about people not realizing that she’s his sister. (He takes great pride in her and it bothered him to think that people might not assume that he’s her brother because they don’t have the same skin color.) As it turns out, he’s been able to model matter-of-fact responses to people — mostly kid — questions for Madison like, “Yes, she is my sister and yes, she’s adopted.”

Jessica makes time for Noah and has brought gifts especially for him. Like when Madison was tiny and she brought over a bunch of candy she’d won from her job for Noah. While she is definitely Madison’s special person (I mean, it’s not like she pretends to be Noah’s birth mom, too, you know?) she does have a relationship with Noah. She asks him what he’s going to be for Halloween, she helped him carve a pumpkin when she had them over for pumpkins. She tells him stories about how she used to tease her little brother and she laughs when he tells stories about teasing Madison.

There was a brief time at the beginning when Noah felt like it wasn’t fair that he didn’t have his own Jessica and sometimes he feels left out when I have to pull him aside and remind him to give Madison some time with Jessica because he wants to play, too. But he does get it and he likes having her in our family. Jessica matters to him and he looks forward to her visits. He’s not confused by it — honestly, I think kids can get this stuff better than grown-ups sometimes because they don’t bring as much baggage to it.

Edited to add: If anyone has any questions about Noah and our adoption, ask away. I’ll hit him up for answers if need be; he won’t mind.

I’ve been thinking about my sexual history because I’m thinking about my infertility book (that keeps morphing into this and that and something altogether different and then back again). I always feel like infertility memoirs I’ve read so far don’t talk much about the non-procreational kind of sex unless they’re high-lighting the great irony of using birth control in the past and using birth encouragements in the infertile present. This seems so incomplete.

For me, my infertility experiences brought back a lot of my teen-age shame about being a sexually active 15-year old who was trying to be responsible and getting lectured every time she put her heels in stirrups. That is a bigger irony in my mind — chastising the teenage girl for keeping her pap smear appointment and paying for her own birth control. No wonder most of my friends didn’t bother.

Anyway, I read Jenna’s and Angela’s recent entries in this mindset of my angry teenage self and it got me thinking.

There’s this part of my history that I have never, ever, ever written on blog and I rarely talk about it because it’s probably the thing that I feel most ashamed about and it’s complicated and not something I’ve ever really figured out. But reading these entries made me feel like I knew what I wanted to say about it although I’m not sure how much I’m going to share. (I’ll know when I’ve written it.)

When I was sixteen I hooked up with a guy who was twelve years older and had sex with him although I didn’t want to. It wasn’t date rape because I said yes but it left me feeling violated.

Part of the reason I allowed this to happen is that (as many of you have experienced for yourself), if you’re a teenager and having sex then you’re already a ruined kind of person and it seems unreasonable to say no to this guy since you have already said yes to that one. This is something huge I want to get across to my kids: You can say no even if you’ve said yes before. But in the teen world of the 80s (and one assumes in most other decades), once you’re deflowered you kind of give up your right to play virgin. The best example of this I can think of is a male friend of mine who was a virgin and who said to me, “Why won’t you have sex with me? What’s the big deal when you’ve already done it?” And I thought, “Is he right? Should I just do it?” And this is really what happened with this guy who was 12 years older only his arguments were more complex and more flattering.

Afterwards, I felt like crap and I felt used and I was angry that I’d betrayed myself with this guy (and betrayed my friend who was dating that guy, which was a huge part of it all for me and profoundly changed my self-perception). But I also felt responsible and so I tried to pretend like it was ok and tried to pretend that maybe I even liked him and this was a further betrayal of myself. And it really wasn’t until I met Brett and confessed all to him that I felt absolved because Brett helped me see that I was 16 and I was up against someone smarter and not very principled whether or not he realized how manipulative and underhanded his behavior was. I’m sure if I told this guy (if I could remember his last name because I’ve truly blocked it out) that I felt he took advantage of me that he would be totally surprised and that his version of events were that he met this randy little 16-year old and we enjoyed a fun evening together way back in the fall of ‘86.

Part of me really wanted to go with what was surely this guy’s version and for a long, long time I tried to see it that way because the other option (to call myself a victim) seemed like a lie and also who wants to be a victim? But what I didn’t see until my confession to Brett was that it was possible to find a middle-ground, which would acknowledge the complications of sexuality and personality and that this middle-ground also understood the limits of culpability.

There are many versions of truth. It’s true that this man was much older than I was and that this gave him the upper-hand. It’s also true that I pulled my tights off myself. It’s true that I was responsible for my choices. It’s also true that I was in over my head. (I’m trying to write this while Madison slurps mushy raisin bran and slams a metal car on the table next to me so I keep losing my train of thought.) These things are all true. I had to figure out how to reconcile truths that ran into each other and made a lot of confusion. How could I be responsible yet still feel so victimized? How could he be the bad guy when I walked willingly into that apartment with him? It seemed lose/lose. I couldn’t figure out how to recognize his coercion unless I lied to myself. (He didn’t hold me down or steal my clothes or force me to do anything.) But thinking about it made me want to throw up so surely something bad did happen?

That’s how I managed to slip into shame and blame. It was my fault. I was a bad person. A bad slutty person, actually, so I may as well start wearing my skirts shorter and laugh it off, right? Only I wasn’t laughing.

Jenny Garp fictionally wrote, “I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect.” She may as well had written, “I had a vagina. That made me a sexual suspect.” The older I get the more I realize how complicated sexual roles are and how easily we fall into things and then twist ourselves up to make it all fit. I couldn’t maintain the personal contortions it took to make sense of what had happened. When I told Brett (who somehow managed to see me inside the situation, unlike other boyfriends who couldn’t see past the stereotypes anymore than I could) he helped me see that lots of things could be true; that I didn’t have to succumb to any paradoxes.

I think of this when I think about first moms who don’t know they have the right to grieve regardless of how complicit they were in their adoption decisions. Sometimes it seems like if we tell ourselves it’s all right to cry, we have to give some of our power up first. But if we give that up in order to have the grieving privileges of being a “victim,” we deny the truth of our experiences and then we can’t find comfort.

I remember a friend of mine who had been raped when she was 13. The first time she told me about it, her story was that she’d been gang-raped and beat up. But as we became closer it turned out that what happened is that she was raped by her crush and that at first she was a willing participant. Why did she change her story? Because when she told people that she went with him, that she wanted him to kiss her, that she liked what was happening at first, who would care about what happened afterwards? The lie was her protection but it also betrayed her. It made her a liar and it made her a sneak and it made her feel guilty all of the time and it made her, ironically, feel more responsible and more complicit in the rape but what choice did she have? The world is not nice to women; she was already a sexual suspect just by showing up.

It’s easy to get in so deep that we don’t feel like we can turn around and go back. We have to learn how to forgive ourselves for making choices that lead us someplace we didn’t want to go. Sometimes we say “yes” because we don’t know how to say “maybe.” And sometimes when we say “maybe” the world hears “yes” anyway. Sometimes we have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.

We don’t have to accept the narrative that’s thrust upon us because people assume a predictable trajectory. Saying yes to a man, saying yes to an agency, saying yes at the hospital or in a dark apartment doesn’t mean we don’t have a right to our regrets. We don’t have to apologize to anyone (except perhaps — lovingly — to ourselves) for being too naive or too young or too ill-informed or too willing because we were doing the best we could.

Maybe that guy didn’t victimize me but that doesn’t mean that I knew what I was doing. He doesn’t have to be a bad guy but I also don’t have to be a slut. The truth is more complicated and ultimately it doesn’t matter how the world sees it as long as I make sense of how I have to see it. I was in over my head. That’s all there is to it. I wish it never happened but it did. No good things came out of it — no great wisdom or great compassion or the kinds of things that make a trial worth it. Still, it happened. It’s part of my story and I forgive myself for it. I acknowledge my responsibility but it doesn’t take away from my acknowledgment that I was also an injured party. It’s the big challenge, isn’t it? To live with those paradoxes.

My last (pre-bald doll) post about being in the hospital garnered some interesting comments. Two folks (one here, one at my LJ-crosspost) said that they feel adoptive parents should absolutely NOT be at the hospital. (One person is an a-mom and one is a first mom.) I’ll expand on what I said in response in the LJ comments.

I have really mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I get totally squicked out when I read about potential a-parents being at the birth and even sometimes being at the hospital because I understand that our presence can be coercive. And I know from reading some accounts that being there often brings with it a strong sense of entitlement to that baby and even, unfortunately, to the birth experience. On the other hand, any woman — making an adoption plan or not — obviously has the right to decide who is with her when she gives birth and who is there at the hospital to visit. So I cannot say that a woman considering an adoption plan should have fewer rights than a woman who isn’t (even knowing that it’s totally not the same thing).

Originally Jessica did not want us at the hospital but she changed her mind when Madison was born. Brett and I were both ok with not being there but when she asked us to come, there was no way we were going to say no either. Not just because we wanted to meet Madison but also because Jessica said she wanted us there and if she wanted us there, we were going to be there. But I was really floundering at the hospital. It was hard to know what to do or say and it was difficult to know how to support Jessica without being intrusive.

It’s impossible to look back and predict how our being there impacted the outcome of our adoption (would Jessica have placed if we hadn’t been there? I have no idea) but I can look back and see how our being there impacted my feelings about our adoption. I want to explain more about that but I’m running out of words. I can only say that it was spiritually humbling to be there and the experience changed me profoundly. (That’s the whole Salon essay if you think about it — I don’t know if my transition would have been as deep and as hard and as fulfilling if I hadn’t been there.) But of course it’s not about me and what being there gave to me as much as what my being there might have taken from Jessica. (And she doesn’t blog, sadly, so she can’t tell you.)

So my thoughts about this are that the expectant family — particularly the expectant mother — have a right to dictate how it goes during the birth and in the hospital but I think a lot of women are making these important decisions without really knowing what it all means.

Think about it — it’s hard to figure out how to write a plain old vanilla birth plan before you’ve given birth. Now think about writing a birth plan, a pre-adoption plan, a birth plan in case of adoption, a post-birth/pre-adoption plan, etc. etc. etc. I think an agency needs to be very forthright when they help a woman figure this out. I think they need to say (and maybe some do — maybe ours did, I don’t know), “IF you want the potential a-parents there, ok, but here is what you need to know about this. Here are your rights. Here is how I will kick them out the minute you give me the secret signal we’re going to come up with right now. It’s about you, it’s about you, it’s about you.”

I don’t know how much that would help but I also don’t think there’s really any way to fully prepare any woman for the impact of her birthing decisions and hospital stay before it happens whether she’s considering adoption or not. I think the best adoption professionals can do is be absolutely clear about what they’ve seen before. They need to put it all out there and not try to “protect” women by holding back information (likewise I think it’s wrong to “protect” women by limiting their right to create their own birth/adoption plans).

I don’t know. It’s incredibly hard. I think of things that agencies could do like have a brochure talking about hospital stays written by women who chose adoption and women who ultimately didn’t. You know something to talk about the minefields of having potential adoptive parents there and some ways to handle scenarios. But realistically, a lot of women wouldn’t read it because what I hear many first moms saying is, “I didn’t want to prepare because I didn’t want to face it.” I feel like when I say “agencies should do this or do that” that I’m asking way too much of the expectant mothers in crisis. So then I think the agencies need to be more proactive at the hospitals and really tune in to what the mother is saying and really keep a leash on the adoptive parents. We adoptive parents are just some special kind of crazy, seems like. Ugh. And maybe being proactive means discouraging women from inviting adoptive families there but ultimately it’s her choice. I don’t know. It’s like pre-birth matching — potentially coercive but I think it’s wrong to tell a woman she can’t start planning her adoption before the baby is born.

There’s so much obvious coercion and need for reform like for-profit agencies and unlicensed facilitators and professionals who ship pregnant women to Utah to avoid their own state laws. I can totally get behind those reforms. But when we start talking about limiting women’s rights in order to protect them, I get uncomfortable. Jessica was angry the agency wouldn’t show her profiles when she was seven months pregnant and she didn’t give a damn if the agency did this in part to protect her (because they felt no woman should be meeting with agencies before she’s felt her baby kick and is clearly showing and because they felt that longer matches resulted in more unreasonable hopeful adoptive parent entitlement) and in part to protect potential adoptive parents (because they felt longer matches were too emotionally difficult). And she would have been angry if the agency told her she wasn’t allowed to have us at the hospital when she called four hours after Madison was born and asked if they thought I would mind visiting.

You know, I think it’s impossible to make definitive statements about these muddled areas — pre-birth matching, hopeful adoptive parents in the hospital — and how they ought be for every family unless you have a very black/white view of adoption. If every adoption is by definition a failure of the system because a mother loses her child and a child loses its mother, then these things are surely always bad. But of course not every adoption is a failure (at least not in the views of this blog author) anymore than every adoption is rainbows and sunshine and guiding stars and sun (warning, that link is annoying and could be triggering).

Hmmm, as I write that I think this is a big part of the problem. Of course an awful lot of adoption talk is on the side of rainbows and sunshine and adoptive fathers cutting the cord of the baby and adoptive mothers tearfully hugging her child while the birth mother smiles and says beatifically, “He’s in the right place now, Mom!” (I mean there are a ton of those stories out there.) It really sets everyone up. So you’ve got adoptive parents who have these high expectations of bonding from the beginning and you’ve got expectant mothers who have these high expectations for themselves. (And all this adoption lore perpetuating these stereotypes.)

I guess the big issue is that we all of us — adoptive parents, expectant mothers, agencies — always think adoption is about getting a baby from here over to there. That’s the past tense of adoption, really. Adoption is first about a woman facing a crisis and it’s all about her and that crisis. If only there was a way to make money out of supporting women in crisis, then we wouldn’t need reform. Because I think this would all be different if the pre-birth matching and the hospital visits happened in the context of empowering a woman in crisis (in the context of serving that woman) and not in the context of that past tense of adoption. Well, that’s all theoretical though isn’t it? Because it’s a market economy and we adoptive parents are the consumers in all of this. (sigh)

I have to go make dinner now so I have to quit writing about this even though I feel like I had this little mental breakthrough for myself.

Boomerific asked:

The thing I like best about our agency is that there is no such thing as a ‘match.’ If the potential birth mother and potential adoptive family want to meet, the social worker will facilitate it. But no money changes hands and no promises are made. As our SW says, “it’s not a match until the baby is in your [adoptive parents'] arms.” I really like that way of looking at it. I like that they recognize potential birth mothers as true mothers both before and after the papers are signed. Our agency is part of a community health organization that provided health care for women in crisis long, long before there were adoption services on site. Before a woman comes to adoption she has full access to all of the resources of the community that might be necessary for her to parent. Of course, no situation is totally coercion-free, so I’m still cautious. What is your advice for any pre-birth contact so that the situation is as coercion-free as possible? What should potential adoptive parents say or do to make it clear that they don’t yet view themselves as parents and don’t view potential birthparents as their personal baby-factories?

My long answer is below the cut.

(more…)

But not as tired as my sister. Her daughter, Lucia Rose, was born today weighing 7lbs 1oz. She is just beautiful! We spent the day at the hospital and so we are all of us pretty well done in!

I just wanted to add that adoption is really hard. When people tell you, “Oh if you can’t have babies, just adopt!” They don’t know what they’re talking about. This is hard. I’m happy (obviously) to be doing it and if Madison doesn’t come home with us Friday, I will get back in that damn pool and wait for the next match but it’s hard. And if I wasn’t ready to be doing it, it’d be way too hard to do.

This is such a surreal experience and I do feel really lucky to be having it; I’m not saying for one minute that I have any regrets. I want our baby to come exactly this way but getting from there — when I was working for a bio baby — to here wasn’t exactly a hop, skip or a jump.

We are doing this because we want to do this and that includes all the ucky parts. Frankly, being at the hospital this much is emotionally difficult and if I had my way, I’d be hiding under the bed until J. signs the papers. But this is what I need to do at this point and so I’m putting my heart out there because both J. and Madison deserve to have me do that — I owe it to them. If I wasn’t ready yet, if I wasn’t 100% ready for an adoption, this would be way too excrutiating and I don’t think I could manage it.

So for those of you who aren’t there yet or who might not ever be there, next time someone tells you to “just adopt” you tell them that you talked to a potential (hopefully you can skip that “potential” part soon) adoptive parent and she said that they should go to hell. That’s an official Go To Hell from someone who knows whereof she speaks. I’ve talked to some people who feel a little (or a lot) guilty about not being ready to adopt and I will tell you now that your guilt is unwarranted.

When and if you dobecome ready, you’ll know you’re ready because the scary parts will still be scary but not insurmountably scary. You may still grieve the loss of your dreamed-of bio baby but it will not eclipse your dream of an adopted baby. And when and if you’re ready, you will say, “Wow, this is really great but I can totally see why it’s absolutely insane to tell people to ‘just adopt.’”

I didn’t update because I was at the hospital! Thank you so much for the well wishes; I’m saving all of them in case we get the privilege of parenting Madison. They will be a really special keepsake for her. And I told J. that across the country, people were thinking of her.

On to the hospital update! I didn’t expect to visit J. since she originally didn’t really want us there but then our social worker called and told me that I might get a call. Noah was at my sister’s so I could get my article done (ummm, yeah, it’ll be a late night tonight!) leaving me free to say “Yes!” when J. asked if I would come by.

(Re., the childcare: Noah is not sure about meeting the baby with an audience and we’re also trying to be really clear that this is still an up-in-the-air thing so we’d rather he not meet Madison until the papers — if they are signed — are signed. We did get pictures however and he pronounced her “cute” and then said J. didn’t look like he expected.
“What did you expect?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing, really, so that’s why it was a surprise.”)

J. is very very extremely tired but doing well and pleased as punch. She is awfully proud of Madison as well she should be. Madison is absolutely glowingly beautiful and so damn big! She weighs two pounds more than Noah did (and is an inch longer) and babies that size look like they’re about three months old!!!

She looks a lot like J. — same nose and same face shape. She has a ton of hair. And she has really big feet and long fingers! (J.’s brother is tall so perhaps this speaks to future height!) She is also one sleepy baby, which is understandable.

We did end up sending flowers after talking to her friends and checking in with her social worker. So far, our boundaries have been very good and I hope that J. has the room she needs to make her decision.

I’m absolutely exhausted and emotionally wrung out. I don’t know if we’ll be invited for another visit (Brett didn’t get to go because he was at work) but having this one was a blessing. Even if J. chooses to parent, it means a lot to me to have a picture to put to Madison.

The other thing I wanted to mention is how it was clear to me as I rocked Madison that I am still — as they say on the adoption boards — guarding my heart. She certainly doesn’t feel like my baby yet and part of me is sad — I wanted an instant flood of love — but part of me is feeling patient. If Madison comes home with us, I’m going to snuggle up and kiss every little part of her and let myself fall in love. For now this distance makes sense but it does bring me some sorrow.

This morning when I stepped out on my deck I saw that the forsythia had bloomed. It’s like it woke up just to welcome Madison to the world.

I have interviews scheduled for the rest of the week all around our usual classes and appointments. If I haven’t gotten back to you to set up a time, I’m still hoping to but am feeling slightly swamped. I want to start writing in earnest this weekend but that doesn’t mean I’ll be done researching.

I talked to our social worker, Denise, yesterday. I wanted to hear more about the kind of counseling that potential birth mothers receive before placement. She says it varies with the needs/wants of each birth mother.

There is some mandatory counseling, especially at the very beginning and then after the baby is born and the mom rethinks her decision. I asked our social worker what that looks like. At that first session they discuss with the potential birth mother why she is considering adoption and then try to see if her reasons are things that are “fixable.” For example, a potential birth mother who is creating an adoption plan because she’s broke or because she’s arguing with her parents might be choosing “a permanent solution for a temporary problem.” (This is a line I hear a lot so I think it must be official adoption lingo.) At the hospital, they do it all again since having the baby in arms makes for a complete reevaluation of what is driving her adoption decision.

“If it’s just about money,” said my social worker. “We try to help her figure out a way to parent anyway; nobody should give up a baby because they’re poor.”

Another thing I’ve discovered in my latest meanderings through adoption literature and web sites is that potential birth mothers who have seriously considered parenting and then rejected it are more likely to feel good about their adoption plan and less likely to have regrets should they place their children. This makes sense, doesn’t it? I asked my social worker this and she said yes, which is why that first session includes trying to help the birth mother figure out a way to keep her baby despite whatever obstacles she’s experiencing.

I wish I could see one of these counseling sessions in action. I wish I could learn more about their policies. You know, the kind of thing that you only know if you work there — the behind closed doors stuff.

I talked to Maria (as I said) the other night and told her that as I’ve been reading more about adoption, I totally get her decision not to use an agency. I didn’t realize how different agencies can be. I think that ours is a good one — obviously or I wouldn’t be using them — but I’ve been reading some other adoption stories where the agencies are clearly just out to make a buck no matter who gets hurt.

When I look at some of the private adoption stories, I think it looks exhausting. All of that networking!!! Ack!!! But from what Maria says, it doesn’t have to be that hard if you do your homework.

What I’m saying is, again, there are a lot of ways to bring a baby/child home to your family so should you choose the adoption route, don’t get discouraged. There’s a way that’s right for you.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a woman who counsels pregnant women. At one time, she opened her home to a young pregnant woman who was planning to place her baby for adoption. We were talking specifically about how pregnant women connect to the children they carry because my friend does workshops on this.

Anyway, I was telling her about another friend of mine who had an abortion in her youth and that friend (I will call her H) was talking to me about the radical difference in her experience when she became very happily pregnant years later. H told me that she was aware of every bodily change of her last pregnancy, how she was enthralled by the way her body made way for the baby she was carrying. She compared this to her early, unplanned pregnancy.

“I didn’t feel pregnant, like I was carrying a baby,” she explained. “It just felt like this terrible thing that I needed to fix. I didn’t even notice how my body changed because I didn’t want to see it.”

Now I don’t want to get into an argument about reproductive choice; I’m just using this to illustrate this discussion I had later with my other friend, whom I will call U.

So I was telling U. about this and she was agreeing that this is something that she sees. And she was reminding me that it’s this disconnect that can drive adoption plans, which is why so often (at least 50% of the time, according to my social worker) women who were planning to place their babies for adoption will change their minds once the baby arrives.

U told me that the young woman who stayed in her home was very committed to her adoption plan. She had specific goals — finish college, go on to grad school — and felt strongly that her baby should have two parents. She was in love with the couple she chose to parent her baby and they enjoyed a strong, supportive relationship with each other.

Then she had the baby.

Suddenly, U told me, this woman realized that it was a baby she was having. Not any old baby either but this baby, this particular daughter gazing up with wide, dark eyes.

I remember this feeling when I finally got to hold Noah.

“Oh so it was you all along!” I thought. Everything clicked and I knew it had always been him, this particular person who was my son. It shaded my memories of my pregnancy — a very much wanted, very planned pregnancy — to know that it was Noah in there rolling and stretching. (As an aside, I think that this is how it will be when we finally meet the baby we will adopt. A click, a recognition and suddenly the waiting all seems worth it to get to this particular small child in my arms. Knowing this helps me understand the rest of what I’m talking about in this entry.)

I wonder what this would be like if I was not planning to parent my baby, what it would be like to recognize my baby and — most importantly — change my mind. I imagine how my black and white pregnancy would suddenly bloom into technicolor like when Dorothy entered into Oz. I think about the terrible thud I might feel when I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to keep that baby.
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That’s what they call it when adoptive parents start feeling like they have a right to parent their child through adoption.

Adoptive parents don’t have nine months of bonding leading up to the birth of the baby they will parent and there are emotional obstacles to entitlement, too. For one, as our social worker was careful to remind us many times, until the adoption papers are signed, the baby is still the birthmom’s. I know, it seems obvious but I imagine that when we get matched, it might get harder to remember.

“There is always,” said our social worker, Denise. “A 50/50 chance that the birthmom will change her mind and decide to parent.”

She said that sometimes potential adoptive parents are upset when the birthmom makes decisions with which they don’t agree. Perhaps she takes her baby home with her for the time before relinquishment. Or maybe she doesn’t allow the adoptive parents to visit the baby in the hospital or she may make medical choices that are different than what the adoptive parents would have chosen. She can do this because she is the parent up until she signs the papers.

Denise also said that it will be tempting to try and read into the birthmom’s behavior. If she takes the baby home, does that mean she’ll parent? If she leaves the hospital without so much as holding the baby, does it mean she won’t?

“It’s always 50/50,” Denise told us. “It’s going to be the hardest wait of your lives.”

We saw the ranges of burgeoning entitlement in our second training class. We were one of about 28 couples and some of the couples were already claiming babies that weren’t even on the horizon. Such was the case of the woman who said, “So if the birthmother dies during labor, do we still get the baby?”

“No,” said the trainer. “And in fact we did have this happen before. If the birthmother dies during labor, the decision about parenting the baby would go to her next of kin.”

“And they don’t have to place the baby with us?” the woman said in disbelief. “Even if that was the plan?”

“Death tends to mess up plans,” the trainer answered wryly.

There’s a potential adoptive mom who is already feeling pretty entitled.

From what I’ve read, this kind of entitlement may be part of infertility grief (”Please please give me a baby!”) or might be due to prejudice against birth mothers in general (”A woman like that has no business trying to raise a child!”). I don’t know. I don’t live in that woman’s head but every question she asked at the training basically came down to, “Who do I have to pay to get a kid around here?!”

On the other end of the entitlement spectrum was a couple so broken-hearted that it hurt to look at them. Two of their placements had been disrupted. This means that for whatever reason, the baby was not adopted. It could be that there was no baby (scams), or simply that the mother decided to parent. Sometimes she decides to parent after the adoptive parents have been very involved in the pregnancy. They may have gone to prenatal appointments or even attended the birth. This was the case with the sad couple in their second disrupted placement. Throughout the pregnancy, the birthmom was adamant that she was going to place the baby. They were at the hospital, they had been embraced by the birthmom’s family, they had a baby shower and named the son they thought would be theirs but at the end of 72 hours, the birthmom decided to parent and they went home alone.

“I imagine you’re feeling very numb about this,” commented one of the trainers. “As if you might never get a baby.”

The husband shrugged and his wife nodded and looked down biting her lip.

“It may take some time for you to feel like you’re really parents when you do get your baby,” the trainer went on. “But I promise you that if you can hang in there, when you do get your baby, you’ll know that it was exactly the baby you were waiting for.”

This is a common theme in adoption discussion: The baby you get is the baby you’re meant to have so hang in there!

One of the reasons that our agency filters the help from potential adoptive parent to birth mom is to keep extensive entitlement at bay. Birth moms can seek some financial help from the agency and the adoptive parent who is matched with her is supposed to contribute to that. However, because the agency acts as a mediator, a birth mom will not feel that she has to place her baby because she “owes” the adoptive parents. I’m not entirely sure how that all works but I do know that in Ohio, birthmoms aren’t supposed to live with potential adoptive parents for just that reason.

Part of me thinks this is a very good plan because from reading birthmom stories, I know that the sense of obligation a birthmom might feel is potentially very real and compelling. How awful to think a woman is placing her child with someone else because she would feel too guilty if she backed out on the deal! On the other hand, I think that if a woman decides to place her child with someone else, it’s her right to dictate the situation including whether or not she will live with the adoptive family she’s chosen for her child.

There’s a very good piece of creative non-fiction about a woman who opens her home to a birthmom whose baby she is hoping to adopt in the book Wanting a Child. It’s a very brave essay. Check it out.