Happy Mardi Gras!
Feb 24, 2009 Adoption
Madison’s maternal birth family — both sides — were long-time residents of New Orleans. Her grandfather’s family moved away a decade or so ago but her grandmother’s family didn’t go until Katrina swept them out of their homes. (Most of them are in Houston now.)
Pennie didn’t grow up in New Orleans although she lived there for a few months while she was pregnant and she did inherit some killer recipes. When she goes to visit her family she comes back with fresh idioms that make me laugh and a new appreciation for the things that make her family unique. (She has an aunt named Peaches, for crying out loud! I love that!) Also? Pennie’s Grandfather was one of the Mardi Gras Indians (read more about their history here — it’s really interesting).
Whenever I think about Pennie and New Orleans, I think about how she is a master at code switching. She grew up in suburban Tacoma listening to Journey but her people have deep roots in the 9th Ward District. And then I think about her transracially adopted daughter here in our family and how her experiences influenced that decision (to place her brown-skinned daughter with white parents). I know that this decision wasn’t popular with her extended family down South although my (brief brief brief) experiences with them have been nothing but fine. I think about that, too.
I hope we can get Madison down there sometime — Pennie and I keep talking about it. But money is never in the right place at the right time. Madison might not get to meet them until we’re all dancing at Pennie’s wedding. I don’t really expect her to have a strong relationship with them because it is a big, busy family and we live far away. But I want Madison to feel some sense of access to them enough that if she was in town, she could pick up the phone and find someone to invite her over for dinner. I know they miss her and they love her but there are just so many obstacles.
(When Pennie first visited after Madison’s placement, she found that her god father had framed pictures of her and Madison and hung them up and down his hall. This gives me hope.)
Mardi Gras is just one of those times that I find myself thinking a little bit more about adoption than I usually do.
(This post brought to you by rumination!)
Tags: Adoption, Family, hope, houston, katrina, New Orleans, Recipes, transracial
More from that book
Sep 26, 2006 Adoption, Race, Read/heard/seen
By the way, here’s the official site for her book and the documentary that inspired it: SecretDaughter.com
I wrote this up last night but firefox crashed and I lost it.
June Cross was placed in an informal adoption when she was about four because she couldn’t pass as white. (She is biracial — her mother was white and her father was African American.) There’s a harrowing scene when she’s splashing in a bubble bath during one of her visits with her mother and her mom idily says, “If only you hadn’t gotten so dark, you could have stayed with me.”
Her aunt and uncle (really her parents’ old landlords) take her in but never legally adopt her (something that becomes a problem towards the end of the book when her aunt is ill). And she continues to have regular visits with her mother, Norma, who also sends money for her keep.
Throughout her life, June’s loyalties are torn as she grapples with family, with race as perceived by her family and with race as is the reality of living in America in the 50s and 60s. For transracial adopter such as myself, there is a lot to think about.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was rocking Madison last night was the revelation in this book (not in the documentary) that June has an older sister who was placed for adoption in a formal, state-supervised adoption. (There are very little details about this in the book but June’s sister is white so race isn’t an issue in that adoption.) She also has an older brother (older, too, than the lost sister) who was raised mostly by Norma’s mother. Then even later, June discovers that her mother was farmed out to relatives, too, as a child. June herself never has children.
This was hot on the heels of reading this (courtesy of a link from Susan):
Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.
–from an essay by Alison Larkin
It’s strange how things get handed down. This, of course, made me think about some things specific to our adoption and specific to my family of origin, (which includes a history rife with reproductive crises and difficult resolutions).
Then (because my mind will wander however I try to reign it in), this made me think about FauxClaud’s tragedy post because I was thinking about how deeply run our choices and how impossible it is to take adoption as a stand-alone event in anyone’s life.
Anyway, I’m not quite ready to articulate how this is all coming together in my head but this is how it’s all running around in there.
Tags: Erica, essay, Madison, transracial, wordpress
Invisible blackness
Two (or three?) people sent me this post: High School Haze « A Birth Project. I’ve had her on my bloglines for awhile now and when I read this post I was thinking of Jessica who grew up in a mostly white community and who’s experiences outside her home mirror this in some ways. I know that she has had to defend her blackness to other African American people before. At the same time, because she has black parents, she is able to take for granted her choices in a way that Madison can’t. This makes her the best resource for Madison because she is (obviously) Madison’s mother but also because she straddles two worlds and has most of her life.
It’s another plus for open adoption — I feel very fortunate that Jessica is available to answer my (sometimes stupid) questions and to be a part of our commitment to help Madison forge her African American identity.
But now I’m going to segue to something else I’d been thinking on that is about transracial adoption but isn’t related to the post linked to up there.
One thing I hadn’t understood is how adopting transracially would impact my extended family. When I thought about it, I thought about it in terms of how they would treat our child by adoption. But what I’ve discovered is that adopting transracially has changed the way our relatives think about black people and also how they relate to black people.
What I’m hearing from some relatives is that having Madison in the family has personalized racism for them in a way that’s making them more sensitive to injustice. I am thinking specifically of a relative who ran into an old friend, who is African American, and they were talking about high school (this is why the Birth Project post made me think of it) and when she was listening to the friend she realized in a way she hadn’t before what it must have been for this friend to be one of the only black students in that school. And this led to a discussion that probably wouldn’t have happened if Madison hadn’t been a part of her family.
Because our family has become more sensitive, they are understanding and encouraging when I talk about our struggles to create community for Madison. Because they love Madison, they are more likely to hear (for example) about a friend’s experience in high school and then bring that to us with concern about what they can do to help Madison not feel as alone. I hadn’t expected to find so many partners in our relative and it’s heartening.
Now I have to go shower so I can take Noah to religious school so I can’t write more like I wanted to. Rats.
Tags: Erica, high school, Madison, Noah, open adoption, racism, transracial, wordpress
