Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up, 101
Trigger warning: This post discusses adoption and disruption in light of the recent news story. It may contain issues that are triggering to adoptees, biological parents, or adoptive parents.
Additional Note: Yes, I know I didn’t include a link to the news story and I spelled the boy’s name wrong. Someday that kid is going to grow up and google himself, and I just don’t want to be a part of that media blitz for him.
Having worked within adoption (and still working fairly close to it), I can tell you that it is the least simple thing ever. There are no easy lines to be drawn about what is definitively good and bad. Adoption is a lifelong experience – for adoptees, for birth parents, and for adoptive parents, aka the adoption triad – and there is never a crystallized moment in time against which all mistakes, accomplishments, intentions, and actions can be measured, though we sure do try. The temptation is to choose one snapshot and say, “You see? You see? This is what adoption leads to!” The snapshot may be a happy adoptive family, or an abusive adoptive family. It may be a happy reunified birth family, or an abusive birth family. The snapshot may be poverty so entrenched that its existence makes the rest of us who live comfortably seem demonic. The snapshot may be a very angry adult adoptee, or a very happy adult adoptee. It may be a group home full of violent, traumatized long-term foster children. It may be yet another international agency indicted for massive fraud. The snapshot may be a birth mother coerced, manipulated, lied to, isolated, shamed, and ignored. It may be a birth father desperately searching for the child he never knew existed. Or it may be both birth parents speaking to their child over the phone because they are a part of an open adoption.
Of course, a snapshot is just that: one single view into one single moment. People grow. People change. They uncover new knowledge about themselves, or others. They increase or decrease their awareness of others. They have troubles, and they get better. The poster child for “adoption is the best” could easily become the poster child for “adoption is so fucked-up” if you just take the snapshot a few years later and change the background music to panicking violins. The simplification of adoption into goodbad creates a calming moral superiority that puts the heart at ease on even ground. When you really dig into how adoption goes right and how adoption goes wrong, you find it has a wide umbrella. You can’t really discuss the good and bad of adoption unless you’re also willing to touch upon racism, sexism, class disparities, the national economy, the global economy, abuse, drugs, homelessness, xenophobia, violence, abortion, employment, First Nations, history, policy, LGBT rights, religion, natural disasters, disability, etc. etc. ad nauseum. AND THEN, you have to discuss how YOU (yes, YOU) have contributed to each and every one of these things, and what YOU (yes, YOU) should be doing to make these things better. Because if you don’t want these things to be better, what right do you have to complain about them? And, more importantly, if you don’t want these things to be better, what right do you have to parent a child whose existence was shaped by these things? That’s a very personal thing to say. A lot easier to look at one horror story or another and say, “Well, I would NEVER” or look at one inspiring story or another and say “Well, I would ABSOLUETLY.”
There are people much more qualified than I am to dissect the latest news story, such as other adult adoptees, who, let me put this out here, should be your FIRST source for information on adoption – if they’re not, you’re not actually interested in learning about adoption, and might want to spend some time reconsidering what it is you’re actually interested in. But after watching the general state of discourse surrounding this goddamned news item, I do think I have some education I could offer on the basics of Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up. This information was acquired by spending more than three years working with an organization involved in the adoption field, and, more specifically, answering the phones in said organization. I have fielded weepy/angry/opinionated/crazy/frightening calls from just about every person in the adoption triad, not to mention a few agencies, and that taught me a lot about just how fucked-up adoption can sometimes get, and why.
So, here are some things I think you, Joan Schmoan, ought to know before you start talking about this story in public.
Trigger Warnings Are For Everybody
Since most people come to my blog because they’re interested in discussing rape, I’ll use an example that may be relevant. Imagine this: you are a rape survivor and/or somebody close to you is a rape survivor and/or rape is on your goddamn mind and a painful and personal topic, for whatever reason. A news story makes the rounds: a woman has accused a celebrity of rape. You cringe, because you know what’s coming. For the next several months – more if there’s a trial – you are going to be hearing about this in detail. You, for whom rape is a very painful topic and a personally relevant experience, are going to turn on the TV and hear a news anchor discussing where sperm was found on the alleged victim, and in what quantities. You will turn on the radio and hear a radio personality call the alleged victim a whore, and describe how the (detailed, sickening) vaginal tears we know about because they were released in the leaked police report couldn’t possibly indicate rape because. You will read a blog and there will be a leaked photograph of the alleged victim’s face, possibly with a comment thread inching into the thousands where internet people are hashing out the finer points of “hit it or not.” You will go to work and your co-workers will be at the water cooler, discussing how sad that case is but really this is why they teach their daughters not to drink or wear low-cut blouses, and let me tell you, their daughters know better. You will be eating lunch in a restaurant and you will hear the people next to you talk about their shared love for said celebrity, and how the alleged victim is obviously mentally unstable and should be locked up, or at least grateful for the sexual attentions of said celebrity. And then, if the case is dismissed, you will be treated to a ringing Greek chorus on the bus and on the street and at family reunions and out with friends about how she was a stupid lying slut who probably deserved it (even though she was lying and “it” never happened???).
General people may very likely understand why a rape survivor would not enjoy the fuck out of your “objective,” ignorant opinion on rape (even if they think it’s stupid or the rape survivor is wrong, it is not a FOREIGN CONCEPT that rape survivors exist and some of them have lost their sense of rape joke humor). Adoption issues – and the existence of people in the adoption triad – have not reached a very public saturation yet. Most people aren’t aware of the fact that when they publically discuss a case like this, there is every chance that they are doing so within earshot of an adoptee, biological parent, or adoptive parent. And any one of those people is likely to have a much more nuanced, experienced, and personal interpretation of events than your idle water cooler jabber can evince. Imagine what, “That mother must be evil,” sounds like to an adoptive parent who had to place her child in a residential treatment facility because he attempted to slit her throat. Or imagine how “That poor kid’s going to be fucked-up the rest of his life,” or “Oh, he was from Russia? Yeah, all their kids are fucked up,” sounds to the adult or child adoptee. Or, try, “That poor kid, first his real mom abandons him and now this,” around a birth mother.
For the next few months, daily triggers are going to be completely inescapable for adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents. Be sensitive to that. If you don’t know how to be sensitive to that, learn. Put trigger warnings on blog entries. Do not make assumptions as to the mental stability, ability to love, or life experience of ANYBODY in this news item. And if somebody from the adoption triad speaks up around you, SHUT UP AND LISTEN. You don’t know what it’s like to be involved with adoption. And if any of this news story has come as a surprise to you, then you really don’t know.
Everything About Adoption Hurts
This is not to say that everything about adoption is wrong, but everything about adoption is painful. For our modern, legal concept of adoption to exist, families must be broken. Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case scenario having already come to fruition. From there, you’re working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be. It is that should be that necessitates education, sensitivity, and trigger warnings, because it never goes away.
When a story like this arrives, the impulse is to compare it to the opposite and compare it to more of the same. The news drags up stories of other Families Gone Wrong, and Families Gone Inspiring As Hell. A false dichotomy is implied: there are adoptions that go right and adoptions that go wrong. But the truth is, behind every adoption is a family that went wrong. Behind every adoption is a tragedy so horrific that it should not have existed. Every adoption that occurs is a black mark on the humanity of the rest of us, because every adoption represents parents who were unable to acquire the assistance, resources, or community necessary to raise their children or plan their families.
I know that sounds really harsh. Again, to tailor things to my usual audience here, I’m sure there’s a lot of you that have experienced some form of abuse or rape. In trying to survive, get your life back on track, and go on living, you have probably had to learn a lot of new lessons and skills. Those lessons and skills may have perhaps become invaluable. You may have found that your trauma has brought you to places you otherwise would not have gone, and you’ve found priceless moments, feelings, or people there. The good I have now does not justify the things that were done to me. Nor is it appropriate to ask the flip side, if I would give up the good I have now if I could have not been abused. The two do not weigh each other out, and never will. They are connected only insofar as one is cause and the other is effect; justifications, balance, or “worth it” doesn’t come into it at all. They simply are. I have lost what should have been, and I will never stop grieving that, even as I celebrate what is.
Because I want to get on with my life, I don’t spend all my time seething about what I lost. What I lost is unknown and inaccessible; what I have is known and can be acted upon. And sometimes, in that realm of what is known, something comes up that I know I didn’t do before, that I know wouldn’t be an issue if only. And I get sad, or I get angry, or I write a big fucking blog post. I do something to acknowledge that I lost something I had no choice in losing, and to acknowledge the fact that behind every lesson I learned, every gift I have, every way my life is different now — good or bad — there is an inhumanity that should not exist. And the fact that that inhumanity does exist is a blight on the humanity of all of us.
My main point here is to warn everybody against coming up with – and expressing out loud and in public – black and white assumptions about how good or bad adoption can be. Adoption is not easily judged as good or bad, because adoption itself is a symptom of something else. If the origin of adoption is the destruction of a family, then nothing that comes from that can be explicitly good. At the point where adoption is a viable option, we have already failed to do our best, and all alternatives are an equal failure of the village that should have been raising this child.
To be more concrete, avoid sentiments such as, “You would rather zie should have…” As in, “You would rather he stayed in the orphanage?” or “You would rather his adoptive mom be arrested?” or “You would rather he be in American foster care?” There is no perfect option; they are all painful, and they are all wrong, because none of them should have to be options. I would rather this child lived in a world where his biological parents were able to raise him. Compared to that, every other option is crap.
International Adoption Is Fucked-Up
Yes, I know that’s a blanket statement. I’m not going to change it. International adoption is fucked-up.
That’s not to say that everybody involved in international adoption is evil, exploitative, racist, stupid, mean, greedy, or what-have-you. Some of them are, I would personally wager many. Some are truly well-intentioned people who want to find homes for children; they enter the field because it is full of children and that is who they want to be with, help, understand, love. But international adoption is also about money. It is one of the most expensive things you can do, outside of going to college or buying a house. And any industry with that much money flowing through the pipeline also attracts people for whom money is a primary motivator. And yet, for some reason, Joan Schmoan is shocked — shocked! — whenever the newest international agency scandal hits the news, and still considers the scandals to be wild exceptions rather than constant possibilities.
If we were talking about, say, tennis shoes, you would not REEL in SHOCK and HORROR to discover that an industry that generates billions of dollars for a product in demand is also full of people who are interested in maximizing that profit by exploiting human beings. Sweatshops? Okay, old hat, everybody knows sweatshops exist, I mean, DUH, companies want to make money! What kind of fantasy world do you live in where companies who want to make money DON’T exploit human beings at every possible opportunity to do so?
Yet you say these same things about international adoption — it’s an industry that generates a lot of money for a very wanted product, and will exploit human beings to maximize that profit — and people LOSE THEIR MINDS. Because international adoption involves BABIES, so the people involved in the industry couldn’t possibly do evil things, right? IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT THE PRODUCT IS; a company that funnels tremendous amounts of money is going to exploit human beings to maximize profit. Oh, yes, but not YOUR international adoption agency – they have POLICIES about ethics and they ASSURED YOU that they only trade with authentic orphan products, no baby-selling here. Also, they will ALWAYS be honest with you, because that’s what people who are asking you to sign a check for 30k are, first and foremost: HONEST. (Note: I’m not addressing domestic private adoption agencies, because while they get up to some heinous shit, they are operating under a very different set of laws than international agencies.)
Let’s all give international adoption agencies the biggest benefit of the doubt in the entire world. Let’s say all the employees involved are really, truly unaffected by vast quantities of money and the possibility to acquire more. Let’s say all the employees want nothing more than to find homes for children. First, they have to find those children who need homes. And international adoption agencies are not social services. In the United States, if you want to adopt a child, you can go to social services, because social services is where children go when they can no longer live at home. If you’re adopting an international child, you are not adopting them from the organization that takes charge of them when they cannot live at home. You are adopting from a third party who has somehow acquired access to a product. And the ethics of the adoption rest entirely upon that “somehow.” Was that “somehow” legal? How does that “legal” compare to your morals? After all, the law isn’t morality, and it’s legal in other countries to do things that I find morally repugnant. It wasn’t so long ago that it was legal in this country to rape your wife. So it may not mean much that an orphan was acquired “legally” if you don’t know what “legal” means. How stringent is the paperwork that proves the legality? How trustworthy the procurer of the paperwork? Did the agency confirm the legality, independently and with their own staff? Did they confirm the “official” story of events with the child? So, already, you have a benefit-of-the-doubt adoption agency that has perhaps acquired a child that is coming from a very different circumstance than they’ve been led to believe. What the agency knows is what they will pass on to the adoptive parent, and that knowledge is what the adoptive parent will use to make a decision, but the agency may not know everything.
Let’s continue to give international adoption agencies the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say they uncover something unseemly about the adoption. Perhaps they suspect the child is not an orphan, or was not willingly relinquished by their parents. Maybe the child begins to act out in ways that indicate past sexual abuse. But this adoption is SO CLOSE to going through, and they know that if they tell the potential adoptive parents about this new discovery, the whole thing will get derailed. And if the whole thing is derailed, this child that the agency worker has such compassion for is going to remain in an orphanage when they could have been in a family. The agency worker has met the potential adoptive parents. Zie feels that they are strong, good, smart people. Zie is sure they will be able to deal with the child’s new issues. And so zie continues the adoption, never mentioning these pesky new issues that have cropped up. Zie is sure they will be worked out. And, really, isn’t it better this way than the alternative, to let the child languish in an orphanage? (See my point above: there is no “better this way” – all these options are bad, and once money and lies are involved, they are steadily getting worse).
International adoption agencies run a shady fucking business, by definition, even if they mean well. Even if I assume that all people who work for these agencies are truly good-hearted and well-intentioned (and I don’t), there is nothing that is going to go smoothly when your business model is babies and children being traded for a staggering sum of money. There will be lies, there will be deceit, there will be corruption, and then there will be a family that has been brought together with these methods. This is not to say that parents who want to adopt internationally are bad people. I am highly suspect of their motivations (discussed more here), but the way a person starts on a journey isn’t how they end. A parent who wanted to adopt an African child because they somehow thought that would be fundamentally different than an African-American child is starting their journey as a racist asshole, but they can end that journey as an anti-racism advocate and white ally who has done tremendous work (uh, please note, white people: you can do this any time, you don’t have to wait until after you’ve transracially adopted). But this is to say that it’s not at all inconceivable that the international adoption agency in question lied to Artem’s mother about his state of mind and state of health. The state of international adoption is fucked. She probably was lied to, or had some truths sugared. That’s what happens when you’ve got a wad of cash you’re flashing about.
Adoptive Parents Don’t Listen
Now, let’s throw international adoption agencies the biggest doubt-benefit party they’ve ever seen. For the sake of argument, let’s say they did everything “right”, or as right as can be. They check and double-check with biological families to be sure they had made an informed and capable decision. They acquired staff that got to know the adoptee in question well-enough to write up an accurate file. They informed the potential adoptive family of EVERY SINGLE possible issue the adoptee might have, including issues zie hadn’t exhibited but were common to children of his age and predicament. I will bet you five billion space dollars that I know just what his parents said:
“I will just take him home and love him and it will all work out.”
I will bet you five billion space dollars that you have said something like this, too. Parents, before you had kids, how many of you looked at some children acting up in a restaurant and said, “GOD, why don’t they just do X, then their kids would do Y. I WOULD NEVER BE LIKE THEM.” And then it’s five years later and you’re covered in spaghetti and you’re like whatever, Me From the Past, I can’t even describe how stupid you were because it would be like describing the color blue to a blind man. YOU CAN’T EVEN COMPREHEND.
Adoptive parents do this, too. Even the ones who are/were social workers and know stories about children that would make your stomach turn. There is understanding trauma, and there is parenting, and then there is this narrow little Venn diagram strip in between where very few people reside, and all of them were very mistaken about what they thought this would be like. I have spoken to adoptive parents who were told, very clearly, what issues they ought to expect. They attended training classes. They got certified. They read books. They had social workers with bitter, bitter laughs and horror stories that they did not hold back from telling. And yet, they would call me and they would say, “NOBODY TOLD ME!” And I would say, “What about these 50 pages in your case file that say, ‘WE ARE TELLING YOU WHAT THIS WILL BE LIKE?’ “ and they would say, “Yes, but I didn’t realize it would be like THIS!” They’re not lying, and they’re not being deliberately difficult — they were told what it would be like, and they could not conceive of it.
I’m not insulting adoptive parents. Like I said, everybody does this. You can’t know what you don’t know. And no matter how many times adoptive parents are told what to expect, they still believe that they will be the one family in all the billions of families that won’t have to deal with that shit. They will be smarter. They will love harder. They have discovered the secret that all the people before them did not, and that secret is being them which means they’re just naturally special.
So you combine that natural tendency of all parents with any amount of embellishment, withholding, or outright lies from an agency, and you get a completely unprepared, surprised, resentful, and shamed household… with a kid that very much needs love and permanence and support caught in the middle. This is maybe one reason why, during this whole news story madness, you will hear people saying that you can’t blame Artem’s former adoptive mother — she didn’t know. That’s probably partly true — she probably didn’t know. That doesn’t mean we can’t blame her.
The Village Needs To Step Up
Have you ever had a friend that, like, has a headache? And they keep complaining about how much their headache hurts. They interrupt you to describe how much it hurts. You are trying to talk to them and they are not listening, because they are holding their head. And you tell them, here, have some ibuprofen. And they say, no, no, it’ll go away, and then jam their thumbs into their temples and go “OOOOAOAOAAUGH what were you saying about the otters now OH GOD THE PAIN.” And eventually you snap and say, “Either take something for it or shut the fuck up! You don’t get to just sit here whining!”
Here is something horrible for you to know: people do this to adoptive parents.
Bioparents, they get to vent about their kids. Even if their kids get up to all sorts of heinous shit, they get to go to their other adult friends and talk about how hard it is to be a parent. And there is usually sympathy, or support, or just a shoulder.
Adoptive parents? People – really and truly – will tell them to either give the kids back or shut the fuck up, as if they are nothing more than a headache you are obnoxiously complaining about. Because these children aren’t theirs, the pain caused by raising them is optional. Which means adoptive parents don’t get to complain, because in the minds of non-adoptive parents, they could always take the ibuprofen. Every time an adoptive parent attempts to vent – a very normal and necessary human interaction – they have to first step back and judge What This Will Say About Adoption. The other person – the ventee – may decide that what the adoptee does is so wild, so perverse, so outside the norm that all adoptees are damaged goods. They may go around espousing this, out loud, to others, a la “Oh, no, don’t adopt! My brother adopted and all adopted kids totally fuck cats.” Or, the ventee may decide that any adoptive parent with a difficult child has brought this upon themselves. You chose to adopt, and you choose to keep this kid that’s not even yours, so you don’t get to complain anymore. Take the ibuprofen, or shut up. If your biokid was fucking cats, you could probably find somebody who knows you and respects your abilities as a parent and will say, “I don’t even know how this could have happened, I know you always did your best. They must be so angry or hurt to do something like this; did something happen that you don’t know about? You’ve got to get them some help.” But if your adopted kid fucks cats, it will be, “What is wrong with that kid? They should count themselves lucky that you’re willing to put up with that. I don’t know why you are. Are you going to keep them? I can’t see why you would, the grief they give you.”
Can I tell you something? I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP. I know it sounds too evil to be believed, that people would say this. I will also tell you this: I thought it sounded too insane to be believed when I first heard that white people dig their fingers through black people’s hair without permission or even the briefest of acquaintance. When I first heard about racial profiling, I thought it was probably a little bit exaggerated. But I have the privilege of never having to experience these things. If I hear about them, it’s through a watered-down media report or anecdote through another privileged person. Unless I have actually taken the initiative to educate myself, by listening to the people who experience these things, I would not know that they happen as frequently and severely as they do.
So I am telling you, THIS REALLY HAPPENS, and if you know adoptive families and haven’t heard about it, it might be because the adoptive parents in your life have judged you against the What Will This Say About Adoption standard and have decided that you are not a safe bet for Getting It.
I am also going to tell you something else horrible: Even social services will do this. Adoptive parents at their wits’ end will call social services and be told, “You adopted this child. I don’t see why we should help you. What’s wrong with you, that you can’t raise your child? Don’t you love them enough? Why did you adopt this child if you’re so unstable you can’t handle them?” I AM FOR REAL. THEY SAY THIS TO PARENTS. And, I mean, best case scenario: you find a sympathetic social worker who directs you to a place to get a voucher for therapy, since you can’t afford the intensive therapy your kid needs. But the only therapist in town really doesn’t get adoption issues, or maybe is just ineffective, or maybe is actually detrimental. Is there a support group? Maybe three towns over. Can you get a babysitter, so you can at least get a night off to clear your head? Ha! Who’s going to babysit for the kid who fucks cats? Maybe your family will babysit? Oh, hell, no. They don’t get why you haven’t just given the kid back yet, for god’s sake, it’s not like he’s family. Eventually, you find a place you can just barely afford that offers intensive services. It’s a residential treatment facility, and it’s in the next state. So, you take your child who already has intense abandonment issues and you drive them one state over and leave them in the care of strangers, all the while promising that you are not abandoning them.
Adoption disruptions are not some strange, sick, perverse concept that cannot be understood. Adoptions disrupt for the same reason that adoptions exist: because we as a society have failed to exhibit our humanity by providing assistance, support, and a community to help a family stay together. You really cannot judge just from the words “disruption.” I know the easy, knee-jerk reaction is to assume that the adoptive parents involved in a disruption are weak, lazy, unloving, or have horns growing out of their butts. Okay, probably some do. But you can never know what has gone on in a home to cause this ultimate decision; you can rest assured, there was something horrible and it ought not have happened. And, here’s the important part: IT’S NOT ABOUT THE KIDS. People can learn to adapt to all kinds of situations they didn’t think they could handle, especially when their children are involved, but they cannot do these things if it jeopardizes their (or their child’s) ability to eat, sleep, or generally be actually, physically safe. Adoption exists because a parent found their need to eat, sleep, and be safe could not co-exist with their child’s need to eat, sleep, and be safe. That’s also why adoption disruption exists. Somebody tried their best, but without the support they needed to keep on eating, sleeping, and being safe, their best wasn’t good enough.
I have been cringing throughout this media debacle every time I hear somebody say, “You can’t really blame her.” I can, and I will. While I understand that disruption is awful, and that you cannot judge what happened to bring a parent to that point, I can judge how she chose to disrupt. I have worked with a family that disrupted because the only way their son could receive the services he needed would be if he became a ward of the state. This isn’t uncommon — there are generally more accessble and affordable services available for children living without families than there are for intact families desperately trying to stay together. This kid was old enough that they could explain this to him, and naturally, he did not believe them. He perceived what they did as a rejection, an abandonment. But you know what else they did? Every weekend, every birthday, every holiday, they visited him at the group home where he’d been placed. They wrote him letters. They bought him CDs and clothing and books. They helped him with his homework. He was still a part of their family; they just weren’t capable of providing him with the day-to-day parenting he needed. They could still provide him with the love, with the sense that somebody out there in the world cares enough to make a significant effort toward your well-being, and they did. There are a million ways to manage a disruption, and this mother chose a way that maximized all possible damage to her son while minimizing all possible damage to herself. I can blame her for that. She may not have had a choice but to disrupt – I won’t judge or blame her for disruption, because I don’t know what happened – but she did have a choice in how to accomplish that disruption, and I will blame her for that.
But I will also blame others. In fact, I will blame every adult involved in this child’s life. Every single adult bears responsibility for what happened to this child. That includes you and I. It takes a village, and the village failed. Every time you say, in public, where somebody with an intimate connection to adoption can overhear you, “Well, you know, I hear those kids from Russia are all sociopaths,” you are shitting in the middle of my village. You are shaming adoptees, you are insulting birthparents, you are shutting the mouths of adoptive parents who now know that you think their family is wrong. I am quite certain that in the years that Artem spent in America, there were multiple adults that could have reached out and made a difference, to him or to his adoptive mother. There were likely services they were turned away from. Therapists and teachers who knew nothing about adoption, and didn’t educate themselves. Other adoptive parents who refused to listen to what grown adoptees say, and spread about horrible advice for his adoptive mother to pick up. There was an entire family network that refused to take Artem in when his adoptive mother couldn’t hack it anymore. There were neighbors that did not offer to help.
When an adoption disrupts, you do not get to say it was the fault of the child. It wasn’t. But you also do not get to say that you can’t judge the parents, you can’t really know, you can’t really understand. You can, and you do. Because you’re doing it right now. Adoptive parents in the US start with the same beliefs, the same thoughts, the same feelings you do. You know how they feel, because you feel it, too. You feel that children from other countries are probably really messed-up, and so did she. You feel that you don’t get to blame her, and so does she. You feel that you don’t really get to blame anybody, and so does she. You feel that she is a horrible beast, and likely, so does she. And, I’ll put this out there, if she had not disrupted and kept him, and he acted out in public, she would have been a horrible beast then, too.
There is a lot that is complicated about adoption, a lot that requires education, but adoption doesn’t exist in a world that is separate from you. You can begin to understand how this happened right now by understanding that everything you say and think about adoption contributed to this adoption disrupting. What you believe is not radically different from what the people who were actually in a place to stop this disruption believe. What you believe is not radically different from what the people who were in a place to eliminate the necessity for an adoption to even happen believe. If your understanding of adoption and disruption ends at, “Some kids are fucked-up” and “Some mothers are evil,” now you know how such a thing could happen. It’s because other people – people who are in a position to help children and help mothers – believe exactly what you do.
A Pre-Emptive Note on Comments:
I have seen too many adoptee blogs have comments go off the fucking rails to not put this out here before the post goes live. Adoptive parents: CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE AT THE DOOR. The world is already full to the brim with people who know how you feel about adoption, and there are plenty of other internet communities where your voices can be heard. Adoptee and birth parent voices are given priority here. This doesn’t mean you can’t comment, but DO NOT argue with adoptees about how they feel, DO NOT step in here without having done your Racism 101, and DO NOT cast aspersions on birth parents. The phrase “angry adoptees” is an auto-ban.
Sorry about this disclaimer to the adoptive parents who are awesome; I’ve met you and I know you’re out there, though you’re generally not the ones kicking up a pity party on the internet, so you don’t end up with big fat disclaimers at the end of posts.
Disclaimer Number 2: FUCK THAT SHIT.
Trackbacks and Pingbacks
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- Pull something good from the Ashes
- | kimberlycreative.com
- A Brief Introduction to Adoption
- chickwithmonkey
- I Am Shocked, Shocked And [snore] | Adopto-Snark
- Gold Standards « STFU Adoptoraptors
- Yes, Jeanne Sager, There Is a Line in the Sand. | Adopto-Snark
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Where is a good place for prospective adoptive parents to learn more? What blogs and books or other resources would you suggest? I am 99.99% certain I will remain childfree, but if I change my mind I will adopt and I would like to know as much as I can in advance.
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I will get back to you later on this, as I’m trying not to waste my night on the computer. I would suggest googling “adult adoptee blogs” to start with. In the meantime, anybody else have suggestions?
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This is a really good post; thank you for writing it.
I have long had a creeping, vague feeling that adoption was far from the simple issue most people make it out to be. With the ease that “why don’t you just adopt?” is thrown about by anti-choicers or those struggling with infertility, it is framed by many as this simple, beautiful thing, and it’s really not, for the reasons you describe.
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Thank you so much for this.
I have two adopted sisters who both still deal with the trauma from the situations they came from and it gets so hard to deal with people telling my mom that she chose fucked up kids, so she has to deal with the fucked up consequences and needs to stop whining about it.
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Thank you, I am now reading http://twicetherice.wordpress.com/ who is an adult adoptee. I will be very glad to hear your other suggestions. Thanks.
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I didn’t quite adopt, instead I chose to raise my stepson.
I can’t even begin to relate the horror of the first year. The screaming and outbursts and temper tantrums…
I love him, and I don’t regret it. However…
All parents need to be told that their kids won’t like the same stuff they do, won’t have the same personalities, won’t react the same way to things. And that it is hard, hard work. Neverending, mindnumbing, soul-eating and patience-thinning hard work.
And that’s just with a relatively “normal” kid! Throw in a few curve balls and life can seem lifted from the pages of a Kafka novel.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or shouldn’t be done. It means that people need to have realistic expectations prior to making a decision, and all parents need real support, not the “Oh, call if you need anything!” kind.
I volunteer as a guardian ad litem. It’s a window into just how wrong a kid’s life can go, and we see how many issues they carry with them.
I had a “friend” tell me that I could never love a stepchild the way I would love a “real” child. Bullocks!
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I found this article very interesting – thanks for writing it, because it brought to light aspects of adoption that I didn’t know much about before.
Regarding the harsh and unfeeling responses people give to an adoptive parent whose child turns out to have problems, well… I fostered a homeless kitten and later adopted her. She is not a perfect kitten. She sometimes pees on the couch and on my bed, which is annoying and disgusting. When I expressed my frustration and dismay at the mess, my sister said to me with a wise shake of the head, ‘We told you not to keep her!’ and I was shocked at the insensitivity of the comment. I kept the kitten because I *loved* her, and because I knew it would be hard for her to find a good home otherwise. I hate the pissing, but that never makes me regret adopting her.
That’s just with a KITTEN. I can only try to imagine how hurtful and maddening it is to be told that you shouldn’t have adopted your KID because he or she turns out to be difficult to raise – and how much harder a human kid’s difficulties are to deal with.
(Privilege disclaimer: I am not for a second saying that my kitten experience puts me on the same page as people coping with a troubled adopted child, any more than I’m saying ‘People are always asking me if my naturally blonde hair is dyed so I can totally identify with black people who are the targets of uninvited hair-feeling,’ but this little experience is sort of my starting point for trying to understand the bigger and more severe experience. When we try to educate ourselves about something new to us, we can only start with what we know, right?)
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One of my greatest loathings is the use of ‘just’ in any suggestion to do something that, for the person concerned, there is no ‘just’ about it. It’s a big flipping deal.
Well that was inarticulate. I hope the meaning got through.
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As someone who is considering adoption in the future, this has given me so much to think about and discuss with my partner. I thank you for that.
I always knew it would never be as easy as “just love the kid and everything will work out!” – but being aware of many of the other possibilities that I never knew to consider… yeah. It’s good brain fodder.
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“I have lost what should have been, and I will never stop grieving that, even as I celebrate what is.”
I am a birth mother. I put up my baby for adoption while I was still pregnant (yeah, adoption at birth in the old pre-abortion years style, not the same). I was young, but not as young as the frightened girl in the standard narrative “should” be. Old enough to know better. I killed the should have beens for a lot of people – myself, my family, the baby’s father, his family, the adoptive parents and most importantly the child himself. Didn’t look after myself properly when I was pregnant. Pregnancy denial.
I have a lot of privilege, so I didn’t get as much judgement as someone else would have, and the judgement I got was more along the lines of “how come a nice highly educated white middle class girl can’t look after her baby?”
People don’t think about the triggers around adoption, and for the most part I just kind of put up with it because there isn’t really another choice, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I’m the one who damaged, what, ten lives because of my poor choices, after all. I tell you something, though, I ain’t never watching Juno, not if it’s the last film on earth.
Thank you, Harriet.
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Thank you for writing this. I’m not an adoptee, or an adoptive parent, or a birth parent, so this is a window into a conversation that I honestly didn’t even know existed. And, even more than that, it identifies exactly what was wrong with the conversation I had with my mother after I heard about this news story, which went something like:
Me: Can you believe this? How could someone do this to a kid?
Mom: Well, you know, all those Russian orphans…
That pissed me off, and I couldn’t even identify why until I read this. So thank you.
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A conversation like that is one of the reasons I wrote this. People at my work are talking about this a lot, because I work in a field closely related to social services, and it’s actually a relevant topic for our workplace. My boss mentioned that Russia was now shutting down international adoptions, which was maybe a good thing. I was about to chime in with, “Yes, I agree, since the agencies obviously aren’t doing proper home checks or providing post-adoption services, and who knows what else they’re screwing up that hasn’t yet reached crisis point,” but she continued with, “Some of those kids, you know. They’ve got a real social problem over there.”
Now, I know my boss isn’t speaking out of ignorance. In our line of work, we have actually dealt with some of those kids, and yeah, they have got issues. That’s less about Russia and more about orphanages — any child raised in an orphanage is going to have a lot to deal with. And it is a serious social problem when you have children being raised in an orphanage and sold to American families, rather than finding ways to keep them in their community.
But she said this within earshot of another co-worker of mine who is an adult adoptee. I don’t know how she felt about it. I didn’t like her having to hear it. She, like most adult adoptees I’ve talked to, has admitted to having “wild” teen years as she dealt with her identity issues. I’m sure, more than once, she overheard somebody asking her parents why they didn’t just give her back. I’m sure it was a possibility that was constantly on her mind — it is for most adoptees. So it’s a short leap from, “Russia needs to stop adoptions because all those Russian kids are fucked-up” to “This state needs to stop adoptions of black foster children because all black foster children are fucked-up… I mean, look at the way you acted and look at the way the kids that come through our workplace doors act.” Nobody said that, but nobody has to: if the principle is valid for one exoticized group of minorities, it’s a slippery slope to the others. It’s an unintentionally evil (and often obliquely racist) thing to say: kids don’t deserve families because adults abused them and governments failed them. Now those kids are damaged and nobody good should be inflicted with them.
The conversation I want to hear:
You: Can you believe this? How could someone do this to a kid?
Your Mom: Well, you know, the Russian government/international adoption agencies… they’re more for the highest bidder to dump these kids off than they are for helping or healing these kids, so they stuck him with somebody unprepared for how messed-up he was.
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(Disclosure: Was object of a closed adoption in infancy. Have survived to cantankerous middle age.)
Appreciate the endorsement of adult adoptees as a source of information, but long experience suggest that experiences are diverse, and that Views Differ[tm]. So, I’m not sure which truth that buys readers. (FWIW, I happen to be part of that possibly annoying and seldom-heard-from faction who have had strong families and much love, and who don’t wish to complain.)
That having been said, I’ll quibble mildly with the notion that all adoptions require a family going wrong. For one thing, sometimes, there was a family but they died. (Orphans get adopted.) Then there’s the fact that sometimes pregnancy just happens: Being a guy, I know I’m on perilous ground, here, and can only hope to vaguely emphasise with what that’s like, but I can hazard a guess that some such gals cannot (mixed feelings notwithstanding) even consider a family, at least not then, and so calling that a family gone wrong seems to not do justice to (some) such situations.
But painful, sure. My heart goes out to all concerned, of course.
I can say that sometimes the adoptee and his/her family do not have to endure pain, at least going by what my parents, sister, and the guy I shave tell me, and is A Good Thing for all of them.
And thank you for working in the adoption field, by the way, from the bottom of my heart.
Rick Moen
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Wow. Reading this post, and the two previous adoption posts you link to, have caused me to seriously re-consider my desire and motivations to adopt. We have two children, and for medical reasons I won’t be able to give birth to a third child. We’ve given a lot of thought to adoption over the last year. Without going into details, I’ll admit that I was not planning to adopt out of foster care.
I get it now, though. This was about me wanting a third child. For the money spent on one international adoption and the subsequent parenting of that child, I could enable multiple children to stay with their birth families. The time spent on parenting over the next few decades could be spent on advocacy instead — helping to eradicate the conditions that necessitate these adoptions in the first place.
It hurts, losing the opportunity to love another child, but far more children would end up with families than just the one I would have been able to adopt.
Thank you for this.
You are the best!
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Well, i have no (not-media) knowledge about this, so it was quite new to me. Interesting. Hm, does ‘surrogate mothers’ thing, or whatever it is called in English, is similar or different?
On a side note, i have hardly (if ever) met a person yet, that didn’t have huge issues (realized or not) with their biological parents, either (something Darlene hinted at)
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Thank you so much for posting this. I had to close my door at work and cry.
My husband was adopted as an infant.
I began to write a synopsis of all the ways this has affected him, and us, and our children, but I don’t think I can. It’s too large and complex and overwhelming.
I used to be one of those who blithely said, “If I can’t have kids, I’ll just adopt” and “I love big families, I’ll adopt a lot of children!” Now, I wouldn’t say I’m opposed to adoption necessarily, but…you’re right that it’s a tragedy. It’s always a tragedy. Adoption only happens because something has gone horribly, terribly wrong.
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As an adoptive parent- I want to say thank you on behalf of my children for encouraging people to be sensitive in the next few months. Bravo!
“but she did have a choice in how to accomplish that disruption, and I will blame her for that.”
Exactly.
For your readers who are considering adoption there is a resource section on my blog with several links to adult adoptees.
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My biological father died in an accident before I was a year old, and my mom remarried when I was three. So I’ve always understood, rather personally, that adoption wasn’t simple. (Hell, I would have been adopted, legally speaking, by my stepdad if my biological father’s family hadn’t objected.) There’s just so much more going on than in an intact family, and some of it’s going to be weird no matter what. And, hell, I had the best-case scenario going on, too – nobody was “at fault” or anything – and the best I can say is, it’s complicated.
Sadly, my mom has never figured out the similarities. And now that my (half)sister married a boy who was adopted, my mom’s been saying all kinds of unkind shit. Like, the in-laws won’t care much about my niece, because they’re not blood relations. Which kills me, for my niece’s sake and my own.
Of course, she’s never let a complicated situation go by without making a simplistic judgment on it. She’s not alone in that habit. But, damn, when can we get to a point as a species where we can hear about something and NOT assume it’s simpler than it looks, and NOT assume we could easily fix it (if we, you know, wanted to), and NOT assume that anyone in the middle of the problem is incompetent, or evil?
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Seriously Harriet, this is brilliant.
My experience in this realm was under the sort of “best possible” terms, fitting a made-for-Lifetime-TV type of script where despite the what should have beens that were lost, everyone has a decent and happy what is.
You got it EXACTLY FUCKING RIGHT. And all of that shit you talked about STILL happened under the most luckiest best possible less than one in a million chance scenario.
It still sucked.
It was still very fucking high risk all around.
There was still profit driven fuckery despite stringent US law.
There was still plenty of sorrow, pain, fear, blame, badfucking times to go around.
What Sarah said upthread is exactly right too: anytime $_PRIVILEGED SOMEONE makes a statement that $_MARGINALIZED PERSONS shoud just $_X …. what they should be doing instead is excercising better judgement by doing some shutthefuckups.
Thank you so much for this post. And for making me laugh while reading this post.
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I know that adoptees have very diverse experiences, and that went into my endorsement of them as first sources for information.
I think your perception of my definition of “going wrong” is different than what I meant. I would certainly say that an entire family dying is something “going wrong.” I would also say that unplanned pregnancies are something “going wrong.” I think “I just don’t want to” is a valid enough reason for a woman to decide not to raise her child, but I also tend to think that a lot of the unplanned pregnancies that end in adoption do so because we as a society aren’t overly supportive or friendly toward mothers or parents in general. For somebody to say, “I can’t afford to raise this child,” or “I can’t finish college if I have this child,” or “I can’t have a job and this child,” that’s definitely an indication that something has gone wrong. We should not have a society where a woman has to choose between survival and a child, nor should she have to choose between education, viable or satisfying employment, housing, or any other fundamental and a child.
I have known some adoptees who report that they are doing just great, thank you. I’m not one to tell people how they feel — obviously you’re repressing your pain!!!! — because that’s pretty arrogant and creepy. If they’re doing just great, then so much the better. But I also don’t like to take any one person’s experience at any given moment and say, “Ah, that is how you feel about this thing forever.” Because I have also known adoptees who were doing just great until they had their first kid, or until they got married, or until their adoptive mother died, or until any big critical life event happened, and then suddenly they discovered new feelings to contend with. I’m not saying that to imply that all happy adoptees are secretly unhappy, or will be once something scary enough happens to them. I’m just saying that any endorsement of how a person feels at any given point in time is only an endorsement of how that person feels at that one given time. I find, in the adoption world, there’s a tendency to take that one moment and say, “WE MADE IT!” when, as long as you’re alive, there’s many more moments of “making it” to go.
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I don’t feel like I know enough about surrogacy to say a lot about it. It’s a fairly new thing, and it may yet evolve in different ways that I don’t know very much about. I would recommend reading the chapter on surrogacy in Killing the Black Body. Prior to reading that book, I had been considering donating eggs for the money. Afterwards, I decided I couldn’t be a part of an industry that, though it would have treated me pretty well, exploits the poor horrifically.
I will say, from my personal experience, that I know this: the majority of the parents who adopted after multiple failed infertility treatments and/or surrogacy attempts were the most abusive adoptive parents I had ever met. Those kids were Plan D to them, and they couldn’t get over their resentment at having spent tens of thousands of dollars only to have to “settle” for “damaged goods” children. These were the parents who consistently threatened to give their kids “back.” As always, this is not a blanket generalization of all infertile adoptive parents — one of the best advocate and best parents I know discovered adoption after failed attempts at treating her fertility — but it’s a trend I couldn’t fail to notice in my job. That’s what happens when you have the ugly intersection of societal expectations of worth (you must BE A MOTHER or you are NOTHING), money, and privileged people who have been told they can’t do a thing.
As to issues with bio parents, yeah, that’s the thing! Sometimes adopted kids have extra bonus issues, because they come with extra bonus life experience, but often they’re just having normal kid issues that get pathologized. Russian adopted kid acting out = diagnosis and attachment therapy, white biokid acting out = oh that teenage rebellion, kids these days.
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I always used to blithely say that, too. Once I started working in the field, I experienced both an intensified desire to adopt and an intensified trepidation. I know how much these kids need, and how much I want to give it to them, and I don’t know if I could. It’s one of the few situations in life where it seems like failing would be so much worse than not trying, and yet not trying is also a failure of a different kind.
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It’s all pretty alien for me, but i have to say it puzzles me. I mean, it’s like these folks (Pland D ones, fe) treat their children as commodity, playthings, or something like that, and i have weird feeling that if they got a biological child it wouldn’t be all shiny happy family either…
But perhaps that’s common. I have rather peculiar circle of acquitances/friends and i know perhaps three people that have kids, so my personal experience my be skewed. Oh, and it’s not that i’m that young, i’m 32. Still, why people do this? The societal expectation to have a child, or is it like buying a cute little puppy/kitten?
So, you’re basically saying that’s the biological offspring is part of the mainstream narration, and so it gets all sorts of excuses, explanations, privilege, sucking up, while adoption is a deviation (sociological, not-normative meaning), so it instead gets scapegoating, blaming, generalizes personal instead of specific circumstancial attribution of behaviour?
But then again, i just realized i know one person who has quite complicated family arrangement (includes 2 adopted childre, 7&12 years old), and the few times we talked about it was all about overcoming issues, but it was treated as something normal. You know, they had rather bad past, and they need that and that and time, and their behaviour is quite reasonable (as in having reasons), even when pretty asocial at times… uh, my point is, i think there is no point in singling out adoptees (or anyone) as some special kind of fucked up beings that are bound to be hopelessly broken forever. You know, instead of real human beings that sometimes have rather hard past. Like you, me, or so many other biokids. (quite nice word, btw. Reminds me of cisgender, me like)
On a side note, here (Poland), from what i gathered, you could substitute class for race, since it’s mostly international – poor people from poorer regions of Ukraine. Umm, just a irrelevant remark.
Thanks for the reading suggestion. Although it’ll probably mean i’m going to finally die squashed by the weight of my reading list
(seriously, struggling to read excellent discussion about gender and masculinity at Clarisse Thorn, which you probably know anyway. Then catching up with your blog. Then… you see)
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Hi, Harriet. I believe the ancient Greeks had a rather mordant saying to the effect of ‘Count no man happy until he’s dead’. So, in that spirit one could certainly say that my (or anyone still above ground’s) figurative fat lady has not yet sung. But, at a bit over half a century in my case, calling the adoptive experience uncertain seems like not merely suspending judgement but also garroting it and running it up a bell tower.
Just sayin’.
Practically all of those theoretically great, untroubled, and highly stable biological families in my family’s social circle seem to have ended in divorce at a rapid clip starting in the 1970s, while neither my parents’ marriage nor mine has. (My parents’ marriage ended the way the _other_ 50% of all marriages do, courtesy of my dad, an airline pilot, having not learned to avoid trusting any employer with one’s life. One fatal B707 crash later, we of the next generation added that dictum to our Rules to Live By.)
Could be coincidence or a conspiracy among the gods of Irony, but I’m not sure that’s the way to bet.
Rick Moen
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This is one of the best expressions of this concept I have read! PITHY!
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Thank you
It’s the way the use of the word ‘just’ implies ‘This is really very small and simple, which is obvious to me as an OBJECTIVE, RATIONAL OBSERVER and surely would be to you too if you would just CALM DOWN. JUST adopt. JUST get rid of it. JUST tell him clearly to leave you alone. JUST move to another country.’
That’s what I wanted to say before but the right form of words hadn’t jelled in my brain.
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Harriet, this post is so awesome I will have to come back over the next few days to properly assimilate. I would not normally comment, as I’m not a member of any of the affected groups except “the village”, but I was getting my hair cut today and the client&stylist next to me were talking about the case and made me very uncomfortable. I wasn’t able to unpack the discomfort until I read your post. Thanks for that, and for not disappearing!
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I didn’t mean to say that everybody involved in adoption is on a slow path towards eventual unhappiness. What I mean is, I’m wary about taking any one moment in a person’s life and using it to define them, or define a certain subject as a whole. I have known adoptive families who start out very unhappy, and if we had taken a picture of them at that moment in time, they would be representative of why adoption is the most painful thing ever. A few years later, they’ve got themselves sorted out, and now they’re a picture of why adoption is awesome. What I’m saying is that the happiness or unhappiness one experiences as a result of an event doesn’t justify or define that event as happy or unhappy. I’m sure there have been times in your life that you have not been at your best. If we had taken a picture then and said, “Here, this is the fault of adoption,” it wouldn’t have been an accurate representation at all.
But I would also say this: you had a very good experience. That’s the ideal. Working in the adoption field where I did, I wasn’t hearing from the ideal. People didn’t call me up spontaneously to say, “Everything’s going fine, thanks!” I know there are people out there where everything is going fine. But I also know there are many, many, many people out there where it’s not, and they don’t often get a voice. The narrative is, an adoptee is supposed to feel lucky, and grateful, and happy, and an adoptive parent is supposed to be selfless and angelic, and a birthparent is being selfless before a relinquishment, and is then demonized after. Anybody in the triad who isn’t experiencing those feelings — who has grief and anger and issues that are more complex and don’t fit nicely into any given box — don’t usually get heard until some spectacular crisis like this happens. There are representations of very happy adoptions — like yours — and there are representations of very awful adoptions, like this one. There are very few public representations — or just general public awareness — of the thousands of people living in the ambivalence in between. I don’t agree with using any one moment, one family, or one individual as a representative of all adoption. You are happy with your adoption, at this moment in time: awesome! I’m not going to use your one moment to state unequivocally that your adoption was the greatest thing that ever could have happened, and I’m not going to use it to state that adoption in general is the greatest thing that can ever happen. I’m going to use it to say that for you, at this moment, adoption led to a very satisfying life. Others may get there, but are currently struggling. Others may never get there, or stay there. And for those others, there are a lot of things that we, as a society, can do to help them, and we don’t, because I think we’d rather believe that all adoptions would just naturally end up like yours if the adoptive parents just took them home and loved them enough.
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Thank you for this post, Harriet; speaking as an adult adoptee, I think this is the kind of information people need. The hardest thing, for me, was that my adoptive mother clearly felt that my desire for contact with my birth mother was a threat to her (though they were oddly in agreement on how badly I had turned out). It is vital for adoptive parent to allow adoptees to wonder about their background and go looking for it, if they so desire. Not everyone does, but many of us do.
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I am so happy to hear your take on this! I am not a triad member, but started researching this a few years ago because of people close to me. (In particular, a beloved family member, my uncle’s wife, went through a long and terribly painful search for her birth family while I was a child.)
I highly recommend reading the blog Birth Mother, First Mother Forum. http://www.firstmotherforum.com/
They have a definite point of view, and I wouldn’t link to them in a lot of places, but I trust that anyone who reads here is the kind of person to delve deeply and understand before commenting. They also link to a lot of good adoptee blogs and have some regular commenters who are adoptive parents who “get it.” There is a wealth of information in the archives, and links to articles on the topic. Also required reading are two journalists (I’ll try to find links) who researched international adoption and the conclusion is like Harriet said above, and that basically there is no such thing as a young, healthy, adoptable baby orphan.
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Articles:
EJ Graff’s research on international adoption (free registration required):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/10/15/the_lie_we_love
A journalist finds her daughter’s birth mother to be sure she wasn’t coerced:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/did-i-steal-my-daughter-tribulations-global-adoption
This one will break your heart. Try to imagine for a moment a child kidnapped from the USA and taken to India and nobody doing a damn thing about it. Never in a million years, right?
http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/meet-parents-dark-side-overseas-adoption
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Fantastic, and I think I may, at some point, get the guts to forward your adoption posts to my younger sister, who is thinking of adopting one day. She is one of those idealistic 20-somethings who heard about Darfur in high school and raised money for child soldiers and went to South Africa in college and read The Poisonwood Bible and now wants to adopt some African kids one day. Last time she said this, I spluttered something out about the immense challenges of trans-racial and international adoption, and she kind of waved me off with an “oh, I know.”
Her fiance grew up in Thailand, the child of missionaries (mission work is a whole big issue that I won’t even go into here), and their family adopted a Thai child. Stephanie gushes about how wonderful this adoptive situation is but of course doesn’t think about the fact that a) she has known this family for only a fraction of their lives together, b) the adopted child was raised in his native country, speaking his native language, where the vast majority of the people around him looked like him and could help him understand the culture he was born into, c) he had an adoptive family that was committed (for professional and religious reasons) to living and working and at least partially assimilating into that culture, and d) the were in a position to verify the bio-origins of the child, since they were living in the community in which he was born. Since her fiance has no desire to do any kind of mission work in a foreign country (for all of the reasons one might think), they are not likely to replicate this arrangement.
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I’m paying close attention to this, because as the above commenter said, problems with adoption are something that that I never really realized existed to the extent that they do. I don’t have anything to contribute on that front, really. I’m just paying attention.
I do have a (mostly irrelevant) question, though. I’m surprised about the whole hair-touching thing, and I’ve spent a while this afternoon trying to figure out how it could be rationalized as acceptable. What possible motive could you have to touch someone’s hair?
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If you’ve never heard of this, I don’t think I should be the one to explain it to you. I’ve never seen this happen to a PoC, and I never grew up even believing this was an option in the universe of possibilities, so my take on why it happens is going to leave something short. I’d recommend hearing it from the people who’ve experienced it. Here are some links to get you started:
http://whattamisaid.blogspot.com/2009/09/no-you-cant-touch-my-hair.html
http://www.divasranting.com/blog/2010/01/18/no-you-cant-touch-my-hair/
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Wow, that’s..
I’m flabbergasted.
Thanks for the links, Harriet. I can’t think of anything to say. But I’m glad I know about this now. Just another facet of my white privilege showing.
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Thank you so much, Harriet, for enlightening me on this subject.
I spent some time in an orphanage in Kenya that pulled at my heartstrings, and thought seriously about adopting one of the children there – and as some other wise commenter (anon_mom, I think) said, for my own desire to have a child, rather than use that money to help several children stay with their families. I never thought about it like that before.
I have no idea whether or not I am able to have bio kids, it wasn’t the sort of thing that ever mattered to me (being from a mixed family, I am lucky to have a stepmother who loves me as much as she loves her bio children), I naively thought I could give one child a chance at a better life, avoid adding to the problem of overpopulation, and satisfy my desire to be a mother all in one go. And in my naivete, I foolishly thought that all that money must be going to a legitimate organisation, because I’ve grown up privileged in western culture where things aren’t supposed to be corrupt, etc etc. And so on.
So thank you, for shedding light on the darker side of international adoption, and giving me a lot to chew on.
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man i love the way old people talk. i feel like i’m reading an email from my dad. yay awesome dads!
/offtopic
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Thank you for such a through and accurate discussion of this subject.
I became acutely aware of some of the issues of adoptees in high school, when I was suddenly thrust into a semi-surrogate mother position for someone in my band section. He had been abandoned at 6 months, and adopted (domestically) by a family with one son already. However, while his brother loved him unconditionally, the parents definitely differentiated between them, and he ended up with some major abandonment issues. I ended up being on the listening end when he was working through some rough stuff, and wound up calling the suicide hotline and getting him committed overnight. It didn’t matter how much other people showed their loved, he felt fundamentally, that he was unwanted. Thank goodness for good therapists (unlike his first, who was trying to “cure” his homosexuality, but that’s a separate issue).
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This is really well done, Ms. Harriet.
I would only add this: women who give birth and become parents are also often subjected to comments along the lines of “well, you wanted a kid, so just quit yer whining already.”
Sort of like this here:
http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/but-isnt-it-rewarding/
(Please note: I didn’t write that blog post myself.)
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Sometimes you have to marvel at the English language. I mean, look how many passive-aggressive translations we have of “shut up already!”
Thanks for pointing this out. As I’m not a bioparent, and am of an age that I don’t know a whole lot of bioparents as colleagues or friends, this is something I didn’t know about.
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EXACTLY! Why can’t we be more kind to each other? Why can’t we be the kind of people who listen to our friends’ complaints with a sympathetic ear, an understanding that, “yes, you chose to become a parent, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard sometimes. Sometimes you really need to whine and bitch about it, because it’s exhausting and frustrating and NOT VERY REWARDING when the object of your constant attention and devotion can’t even say a simple thank you because they are 5 months old.”
It all seems to come down to “why can’t we be kinder to each other?”
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Before I read all the comments and I just want to say: OH HELL YES, WHAT HARRIET SAID.
My youngest sister came to live with my family when she was 2. She is 13 now. She was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and has intense feelings of abandonment. She has communication with her birth mother, her half-sister, and her half-sister’s grandparents (who have custody of her half-sister). My parents did/do not have legal custody – my little sister’s legal guardian is her grandfather, who realized he could not care for her and chose a family who could.
Our family is a large one – this sister is the youngest of 12. We thought we had seen everything. WE HAD NO IDEA. Even as a 2 yr old, my little sister had a lot of pain and acted out. The other younger kids were usually the recipients of that rage, even though they were probably not intended targets – and now have a very complicated relationship with her. They say hurtful things that make her feel like she is not part of the family. It’s a terrible cycle – she’s hurting, so she lashes out, they’re hurt, they lash out. We older siblings (in my case 26 years older – we have never shared a home for longer than a visit) can see the improvements and changes as she gets counselling and matures, but the people living in the household have a much more difficult time. To make matters worse, my father, who treated this youngest sister as his special little girl, recently died. Her birth mother promised to come and visit and grieve with her, broke her promise, saying that she needed to save the travel money to buy a new truck. Meanwhile my little sister is having a breakdown over dad’s death and is hurting because there are few pictures of only her and dad and she’s not smiling in any of them. Of course, you weren’t smiling, you were an unhappy little girl BUT IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT AND YOU ARE PART OF THIS FAMILY but somehow we can’t help you believe it. (All the normal teenage angst AND YOU’LL NEVER UNDERSTAND piled on top probably doesn’t help.)
and I’m just rambling, sorry. I just wanted to say YES, IT IS FUCKED UP AND ALL WE CAN DO IS THE BEST WE CAN. And I guess this is all coming from the privilege of being part of an adoptive family but not actually living that life. We are all close though; after dad’s death we have set up a sort of respite system – those of us with our own homes take in the younger kids for a week or two. Taking my younger sister out of the house gives those at home a break and makes her feel special because we want her. (It’s framed as a special visit during the holidays not as respite to her.) and taking the other kids out of the house gives them a break too (and means that they all get special attention from us so they are all being treated the same). Not an option for smaller families than ours… and I’m rambling again. Guess i just needed to share.
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I am a birth mother and to be blunt I never found my experience to be a horror or a situation that should never have been. I never thought of myself as being “family” with biokid. I didn’t want to be a mother, the risks of having an abortion at the time I finally found out that my flu wasn’t the flu were not ones I was willing to undergo in a big city hours away from my home and adoption was the way out of this situation I didn’t want to be in.
I admit that the choices I had were probably very different than the ones many of my American peers would have in the same situation. I had access to cost free birth control from age 14 and abortion at the local hospital in my home town up to 13 weeks. After that you had to go to one of the free standing clinics in the provincial capital where it was still free but more difficult to get to and required an overnight hotel stay. That wasn’t really in the budget for a 15 week pregnant 17 year old.
18 years have now passed. Biokid and I are Facebook friends and have been for two years. She understands why she’s with her parents from my point of view and she also understands that her life would not have been anything like the life she has had if I had decided to try to live up to someone else’s expectations for what a young woman who found herself pregnant “should” have done.
We’ve only talked briefly about this so I don’t know exactly how she feels about it, but I’m pretty clear on this. It was not a horror or terrible experience. I’m glad that I got the experience of being able to give birth without the 50 to 60 year hangover that usually goes with that. I’m glad that she got something close to a “normal” upper middle class life. I’m glad that she looks like me because no one else in the world does.
But this was not something I wanted support to change the outcome of. The only thing I would’ve changed from that time in my life was:
a) to know that the effectiveness of birth control pills is greatly altered by antibiotics
and if that wasn’t in the cards
b) I really, really should have considered smarter men when I was 17.
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i’ve been waiting for a referral from ethiopia for just over a year at this point, and all i have to say here is *fuck* yeah.
well, okay, not all i have to say.
adopting is a selfish act. and i think prospective adoptive parents need to face that and acknowledge that and figure out how okay they are with that. for various and sundry reasons, adoption was the course i wanted to take. does that mean it’s not selfish? noooo. i am doing this because i want a kid. notice the “i” and the “want” in that sentence.
i’m also doing my best to educate myself on tra issues, to make sure that the agency that i work with is as ethical as it can be, and to try to be prepared to deal with raising a kid who will be dealing with abandonment issues that i just won’t understand.
and i’m also preparing to have my refrigerator and my cube at work be full of crayon drawings and to celebrate the day that my kid learns to throw up into a bowl. it’s complicated.
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I’m glad things worked out well. They don’t for a lot of people, so it’s good they did for you.
I personally consider the lack of effective birth control, reproductive options, or education about birth control to be a horror that shouldn’t be.
“Horror” is too strong a word for some people. I knew it would be, but chose to use it anyway, because there are many people for whom it’s not too strong a word, for whom anything less is a sugar-coating of their experiences. The people for whom adoption was a horror often don’t get a forum to say so. Adoption is something that can also lead to wonderful things. That doesn’t make the horror go away. The two things stand together at the same time. And that’s a very complicated thing to deal with. The people who have experienced the ugliness as well as the wonderfulness often do not get a chance to express the ugliness. They are told that there was good, so the ugliness must have been worth it. Or, there was good, so they should be grateful for the ugly. Or, there was good, so the ugliness doesn’t matter and they ought to shut up about it. Or, there was eventually good, so all the ugliness didn’t matter, or didn’t happen, or wasn’t really that ugly. Or, somebody else had some good, so they will eventually, or they would if they stopped talking about the ugliness.
The people who don’t experience the ugliness of adoption are lucky, and they exist. But they have also been centered as the picture and voice of adoption, and that is a privileged center that pushes the other voices to the side. One experience of adoption does not justify or define the multiple other experiences. And yet, every time a voice pops up to say, “Adoption — full of fucking bad issues!” multiple people will jump up to say, “Well, mine was great, so that’s not true.” I am not saying adoption is bad, inherently, the end. I am saying adoption is not good, inherently, the end.
I am talking about the experiences of a population of people — often underserved, ignored, brushed aside, or actively silenced — within a system full of inequalities. You are talking about individuals. I am very glad that your individual experience was good. But the fact that your experience was good does not change or fix the pain of the many, many people who have bad experiences, and are not allowed to say so without somebody coming along to tell them that actually adoption is really quite pleasant. This is not very different than the experiences of other marginalized populations — PoCs, women, queer, trans, disabled — describing systemic oppression, ignorance, marginalization, and pain, only to have somebody else come along and say, “Well, that’s not my experience, so what you feel, see, and experience must be wrong.” You didn’t directly say this, but it’s the undercurrent I’m perceiving from your comment, since I can’t conceive of another reason why you would feel the need to say adoption was great for you on a forum discussing how adoption is bad for some people. If this was a place where we were talking about how adoption is great, your story would fit in just fine here. But we’re not. We’re talking about how it’s bad and painful for many, many people, so I can’t imagine what your comment is supposed to be other than an argument that this is, in fact, not so.
I am telling you that it is so. There are many, many, many people who have experienced pain in adoption and have not been allowed to speak about this. I know about this, because working with adoption and children is important to me, so I have made it a priority to learn about this issue. It does not have to be a priority for you. It doesn’t have to be a priority for anybody. What you know best is your own experience, and you can speak well to that, because it’s a priority and important to you. You know adoption was good for you. I believe that, and I’m glad. What you don’t know is the experience of others. If you don’t know that adoption is painful to many, many people, I would say it’s because learning about those people, their experiences, and their pain hasn’t been a priority to you. If you don’t have experience with people who find adoption painful, I suggest you gain more experience before you decide to argue that adoption isn’t painful. If knowing about the experiences of people who have felt pain in adoption isn’t a priority for you, then I wonder why arguing their experiences is.
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@ betsyl
I think the desire to have and raise a child is always equal parts selfish and selfless. It gets ugly when a parent can’t admit and work with or around the selfish part. Adoption is really susceptible to the assumption that it’s all selfless, but, of course, that assumption is based on a fundamental concept that these children are worthless and unlovable. It wouldn’t be selfless if there wasn’t something terribly wrong with the children. The kids know that, going into an adoption, and are surrounded by adults who refuse to say so outright. And then everybody is all WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN when the kids act out or aren’t little beacons of gratefulness.
If we could admit that adoption is also selfish, that at least allows in the idea that a parent really wants a child. A child is wanted by a selfish parent. A child is endured by a selfless parent. Not that either is a great place to start, since a child may be wanted or endured for all the wrong reasons, but where a parent starts isn’t where they have to end up. In my personal experience, being taken in by a well-intentioned family when I ran away from home, I was obviously a selfless act. Everybody mooned over the parents who took me in, so unbelievably kind and good-hearted. I got the other message: so kind and good-hearted to take somebody like you in. They couldn’t have been kind and good-hearted unless there was something unbelievably wrong with me, something horrible that had to be endured. If they had wanted me, even for the wrong reasons, I wouldn’t have felt like such a worthless burden.
In Tweak, Nic Sheff talks about the difference between begging and prostituting yourself. Begging, he thought, felt worse, because at least when you were prostituting yourself, you had something of worth to trade. When you’re begging, you’ve obviously got nothing to give that anybody wants. You’ve obviously failed completely to be worth anything to any living person. Obviously it’s a much more extreme situation that he’s referencing, but I really identified with the way he put it. Being a selfless act made me feel like I had nothing to give that anybody would ever want. It made being a selfish act much more attractive, which made it much easier to fall into an abusive relationship with somebody who obviously REALLY wanted me, even though it was for the worst reasons imaginable. What I experienced in an abusive relationship was far worse than what I experienced in a house with people who took me in, fed me, and sheltered me, but I still preferred it. With Flint, at least I had something to give that he wanted, something to trade. I was worth something, I had skills and abilities, instead of being so worthless that somebody had to be unimaginably good to stand the sight of me.
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HarrietJ
I am not saying that adoption is a wonderful thing or a bad thing. It is a a thing. That’s it. But you are.
Your assertion that in all cases adoption happens because horrible things happened and it is bad, the end is as black/white, good/bad, shame/blame as the people the very people who don’t allow the people you seek to empower experienced.
To describe it as a terrible thing that shouldn’t have happened ever because it means that a family failed in all cases and in every way is denying *my* experience. It also seems more than a little insulting and seems to create a victim (or victims) where there wasn’t one. The undercurrent of what I am hearing you say is that it is terrible that my family failed and it’s society’s fault that happened.
I got knocked up because I got a lung infection and I didn’t tell my family doctor I was sexually active because I was getting pills for free from the city health unit. I was sleeping with hot, stupid guys. There was no victim here. This one’s on me. I’m okay with that.
If you had been more general in your comments I wouldn’t have responded at all because bad adoptions ain’t my business. Your automatic assumption that I am not in a marginalized group bothers me as well because I think you’re so caught up in being offended on other people’s behalf that you can’t believe someone in one of those groups would point out your judgement.
I’m not into victim creation as much (if not more) than I am into victim blaming… and I’m NEVER into victim blaming.
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I should have stated, in my comment, that this wasn’t a message I was directing solely at you. I thought of that after I went to bed. It’s also something I was directing at Rick and multiple other comments that I have not let through because they are not as respectful as yours and his, but more along the lines of, “My adoption was fine, and everybody else is just whiners or messed up.”
I don’t assume that you’re not in a marginalized group. But people within marginalized groups aren’t immune from marginalizing others in order to place themselves more in the center and flex some privilege. In adoption, the people who believe adoption is always good are often the center of the conversation, and the center is a privileged place to be. If you believe adoption is good, you’re not likely going to have the general population dismissing your ideas, beliefs, perceptions, or experiences, because the general population believes adoption is good, too. If you believe adoption is riddled with problems, the first thing that happens when you open your mouth is that somebody comes along to tell you that, no, no, adoption is really quite good, and what you have seen to bring you to that conclusion is obviously wrong or doesn’t really exist the way you’re seeing it. Anybody is able to do that, no matter what group they’re a member of.
I don’t believe you failed as a family at all. I currently work with children who come from very abused and very neglectful homes, and I cannot say that I have yet met a family that failed. In every case, there are dozens upon dozens of people who have failed, who are responsible for the state of these children. Often those people include myself and the people in my building, who were unable or unwilling to intervene appropriately. Working in the social services sector, I end up with a much more bird’s eye view of family systems, and I can’t help but see all the ways that a family could have gotten support or assistance and didn’t. That is what makes me say this is a societal failure. I work in social services — we are the basic representatives of society, and what we are and are not willing to put time and money into — and when families fail, it’s because we have failed to put our time and money into the things that can help them.
I believe in the autonomy of women to decide where and when they will raise children. So I believe fully that just not wanting to raise a child is a good enough reason for a mother to place her child for adoption, and I don’t judge that or consider that a failure on her part. I do consider, however, that we don’t prioritize helping parents raise children in this society. I think that is a failure and a horror. I believe you made the decision that you felt was the best one available. I think it’s a horror that, had you decided to raise your child at 17, you would have had to give up substantial and fundamental parts of your life and your future and your safety and your happiness, and even with those sacrifices, you still might not have been able to keep her happy and safe. That is very different from me saying that it’s a horror that you did not raise your child at 17. To me, the horror is that, had you wanted to, it may not have been an option, and if it was an option, it would have come with sacrifices that no parent should have to make, but are considered standard and expected sacrifices in a society that doesn’t prioritize all families.
I never said all adoptions are bad. I would not work in a field that facilitates and advocates for adoptions if I believed that. I am saying all adoptions are painful. Something painful has to happen for an adoption to occur. Saying adoptions are painful is not the same thing as saying adoptions are bad, or ought not happen. I never said all adoptions are bad, and yet that’s the conclusion you came to. To me, that illustrates why I wrote this post in the first place. We have a narrative that all adoption is very, very good; anybody who says anything more complicated than that gets cast as saying all adoption is very, very bad. This is why the people who do experience pain in adoption are marginalized; they’re refusing to fit the standard party line, and are construed as having something wrong with them, wrong with their experiences, wrong with their opinions. This interaction we have had is a very common one. I said adoptions are painful. You tell me that adoption is good, and it’s wrong for me to say they’re bad. Now the entire conversation has shifted to one I was never having in the first place, and I am defending myself from things I have never said. That’s a conversation that people who have experienced the pain in adoption have, over and over, and that’s what makes them marginalized — their perceptions are dismissed if they don’t fit into the nice box of “Adoption Is Good,” even if they do personally feel that their adoption was good.
Adoptions can go on to be very wonderful for all people involved, but that doesn’t negate the pain. In my experience working with the members of the adoption triad, that pain doesn’t often get a place to be expressed, because others don’t wish to acknowledge that it exists or is worth mentioning. The pain adoption causes isn’t a reason to stop adoption. It’s a reason to reform adoption, a reason to put as much effort into other options as we put into adoption, but it’s not a reason to stop adoption. Though I believe society must have failed for an adoption to become necessary, that doesn’t mean that adoption isn’t often the very best option, with very good results (also, please note, I’m only discussing the American legal system of adoption here as it currently is: across history and across other cultures, there are other things called “adoption” that haven’t required the complete dissolution of one family unit to be accomplished).
Adoption is supposed to be just a wonderful, beautiful solution. It can be. But that’s a whitewashing of the pain that can be felt at the same time as the happiness. Many people do not know that there is a lot of pain happening in adoptions, which leaves members of the adoption triad alien and erased from the general population. The reason I wrote this post and stated things the way I did is because I want others who do not have experience with the many facets of adoption to have a basic 101 understanding of the problems, difficulties, and pain that those involved may be going through, especially when stories like this hit the news. Not knowing about that pain can lead to unintentionally hurting others or erasing their experiences. I worry that I am erasing your experiences, but I can honor the fact that adoption was the best option for you and that it was a good experience for you while also believing that you should have had more and better options, and that was a failure on the part of society. You don’t have to believe that last part, but we’ll have to agree to disagree, because I’m sticking to that.
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I was never a family with my biological child.
I am not a victim.
But something was wrong.
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Parenting is hard.
The thing that really chaps my ass about this disruption in the news isn’t the disruption itself, it’s knowing that she did it in the worst possible way. She deliberately harmed a child. I can’t forgive her for that. She had options and she chose not to take them.
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Harriet, thank you for crystallizing all the niggling misgivings and suspicions I have long had about international adoptions. I know that the domestic adoption system has pitfalls and huge issues that many families don’t want to risk, and I can sympathize. But the more I learn, I think that no matter how you slice it, international adoptions are just poorly-whitewashed child trafficking.
I know quite a few families with domestically adopted children and a good number of adult adoptees, but I also know two families who have adopted young Asian girls. I get a sick feeling in my gut when I think about their situations, quite frankly. Both families are Whitey McWhitebread, and had multiple bio-kids before adopting. Knowing a good bit about both families’ financial situations, I don’t know how they pulled off the adoptions.
Family A lives in a decent-size Midwest city that is not tremendously diverse, so of course the adopted child is very visibly othered. The mother yapped incessantly for YEARS about adopting, even before she had any bio-kids, and it was always very, very clear that she felt a transracial adoption would give her mucho diversity cred, in the trendiest of ways possible. She was always so gushy about how CUTE Asian children were, and it is blatantly obvious she saw, and still sees, the child as an accessory and a way for her to point and say, “See? I’m sooooo multi-cultural!” I think the father was less enthusiastic about adoption, but he went along with her wishes.
Nonetheless, I do believe they love the girl and treat her pretty much the same as they do their other children. There’s quite an age gap between the four bio-kids and the adopted girl, too, which I think is also issue-tastic, but less so than the child always being held up as proof of how COOL and NON-RACIST they are. Let’s just say I’m in a position to *know* they hold some very deep racist beliefs, and so does the extended family. Ick.
Family B, well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. She had major medical issues from childhood that prevented her from even considering childbearing for many years into their marriage. He was absolutely ADAMANT that he would NEVER want to adopt, that he could NEVER love a child who did not share his DNA, full stop, end of story. Eventually they managed to have two healthy children, so yay for them, that’s what they wanted. They wanted more kids, but her doctors determined she shouldn’t, for health reasons.
They live in a much more ethnically diverse large city, but still, these people are both full-blood German, and look like stereotypical blond, blue-eyed Aryan youth poster children, as do their bio-kids. Instead of being content with the two kids they had, she essentially nagged him into the Asian adoption.
I was gobsmacked when I found out about it, because unfortunately, he is a HUGE bigot. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve heard out of his mouth. Well, you probably would, actually. At least I know her extended family isn’t racist, but he certainly didn’t get his view from the neighbors.
Again, I think for her, the Asian child is a trendy accessory for the upwardly-mobile life she has always striven to have. It’s a shame; she’s such a smart woman, but she has always let him subjugate her and tell her she’s less than he is, ironically even when she held a VERY high-powered job in finance and made three times the money he did. She gave that up for stay-at-home mommyhood, and that suits him fine. He really likes being the head cheese breadwinner.
For him, I think he just agreed to the adoption to maker her happy and get her off his back, and boy, he sure doesn’t treat the Asian girl the same as his “real” kids. You NEVER see him pick her up or play with her like he does with the older two. It is SO obvious he thinks she’s inferior, and it breaks my heart to see it, and to foresee the issues they will have down the road.
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: It’s funny/sad/horrible how often you see adoptive families where the dad is totally ambivalent, not into it, or completely against it. This isn’t something I’d say is common, but it is a pattern that I have never seen happen the other way around; I’ve never seen a family where dad wants to adopt like crazy, and mom hates the idea but goes along with it. A lot of married couples break up that way, which in many ways is for the best — obviously there’s some serious incompatibilities going on when you disagree on having kids and have them anyway — but for the families that adopted for reasons other than “love kid want kid will raise kid as my own,” the narrative becomes, “I adopted this kid and she broke up my marriage with her issues.”
You also have to wonder what the FUCK is going on with the adoption agency that matches families like that with a kid. “Well, dad says he’ll never ever love an adopted child and thinks they’re worthless and creepy, but we negotiated down to ‘won’t actively abuse them’, so I think we’ve got a deal!”
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The difficulty in writing about the problems of adoption is that the problems began before anyone tried to fix them with adoption. You’re right- adoption is born of brokenness and that ‘what SHOULD have been’ began before the adoption and sadly would have existed regardless of whether or not it even crossed anyone’s mind to attempt to resolve the problem with adoption. Of course many things happen in adoption that can help or hurt the healing process but this has more to do with societies ability to cope with brokenness especially chronic brokenness and issues that often run through families for generations.
I adopted my daughter from foster care but I was very motivated by the fact that she was my first cousin. At this point I have to pause and say that I was related to her birth mother who died when my daughter was 6 months old. I have to say this because the extreme brokenness that she came from was extreme abuse. This kind of abuse does not exist in my family (despite the fact that many big issues can be found by looking at my family tree) but likely had it’s roots in her birth father’s personal brokenness and issues from his childhood. Anyway, I did want a child but bringing home a highly traumatized 14 year old who functioned on the level of a 3 year old has a lot more to do with who I thought my family was and the pain of seeing things go wrong for my daughter for so many years.
I did have it in my mind that if things proved too difficult that I would put her in a group home here locally. I figured this would be much better than having her out of state where her family could not visit and keep tabs on things as frequently as would be necessary. I must admit that being ‘practical’ in this way is a feeling that has only grown for me over the years. I did not end up adopting again for a variety of reasons but during the years that I was considering it I found that I would look at children in terms of whether or not they would be ‘doable’. I know that that can sound harsh because of course all children deserve good homes but whether or not a child fits my skill set is a practical way to determine whether or I can be a good mother to a child.
Adoption for my kiddo has been good for her in a soul sort of way. Fortunately I was blessed with a kiddo that was capable of attaching. Attachment- just like learning to walk or talk- is a brain issue. Helping a kiddo attach after the critical brain development period has a lot more to do with a child’s brain than what an adoptive parent does to help. I wish it wasn’t that way because of course it is easier to support and educate parents in this process than it is to deal with something that is essentially brain damage. I know that she attached in part because she found me ‘worthy’ of attaching to, but whether or not she was capable of this was determined long before I ever entered the picture. I suppose that a case could be made that she is ‘lucky’ to have grown up with a very abusive father vs an orphanage but it is hard for me to go there.
She also is lucky that she does not have any genetic mental illness. I know so many adoptive families that got things going OK and then their children fell apart as teenagers due to inherited mental illness. Things like schizophrenia are certainly no one’s fault but are a very big brokenness. We also don’t have to deal with fetal alcohol effects. You can do a lot for children in this situation but what you are able to do once again has everything to do with ‘what’s there’ when you bring the child home.
Absolutely who the adoptive parents are is important, but adoption is really a neutral thing. It’s neither good or bad. It’s simply one direction that a broken situation can go in. All the players in the situation impact the future only. They do not erase the past. They may not be able to change some physical issues. They may not be successful for some of those reasons and ‘success’-given these deficits- may look very different from what society is willing to accept. I am critical too of the woman who put her boy on the airplane to Russia. I too feel like she had other choices, but I know quite a number of adoptive families. I have seen the good, bad, and the ugly. I know families that have held together against all odds, families where the fact that there is an adopted child does not impact their day to day lives in a negative way, and families that have disrupted. And everyone that I’ve met was clearly doing the best they could in a situation that was simply far bigger than they were. Yes, I feel like I can be critical of this woman but when I heard the story I did not assume that she was flighty or unwilling to own up to her responsibilities. My first thought was that she was likely desperate. I think both are possible. I know I’m preaching to the choir here but I wish that more folks understood the possibility that she may have been facing extreme desperation and limited options.
I’m so glad you posted this article. It’s such a hard thing to summarize. It’s such a hard experience to share because of all the quirks and complications.
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There’s an active discussion on Ask MetaFilter at the moment about closed vs. open adoptions. The conventional wisdom seems to be that in the US, the trend has recently been towards more open adoptions; is this also the case *within* other countries’ domestic adoption communities?
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: I want to put this comment on a billboard.
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I am not, by any means (not even close), to an expert on domestic adoption in other countries. But, to my very vague understanding, the Western world is fairly unique in its development of a system that 1) completely, legally, and irrevocably severs family relationships as a solution to family problems, 2) places children with strangers, and 3) treats a child as a separate agent that must be extricated from their surroundings/family/culture/community before help can be offered. In America, this is just the basic concept of adoption, but it’s a very alien concept in other countries and cultures. Again, can’t speak to other countries, but I know that in the U.S. the… you know, I don’t know how else to say this… the white social services concept of care is consistently bumping up against the Native American concept of care. I’m on shaky ground here — I only know vaguely more about this than I do about domestic adoption in other countries — but to my very limited understanding, the Native American belief is that when you adopt a child, you have adopted that child’s family. The child’s family will always be the child’s family. They can acquire more family, but they cannot acquire less, which means that if you adopt that child, their bioparents are now your siblings, and you need to treat them as such. It’s also my understanding that kin and community members are preferred caregivers, as they are already a part of the child’s life and perhaps family. The child’s family doesn’t get destroyed, but shifted. They were being raised by mom and dad, and now they’re being raised by aunt and uncle, or the neighbors, instead of complete strangers who have no connection with their family whatsoever
White America is abnormal (and, in my opinion, generally perverse) in its belief that children can only be helped individually, after they have been removed and isolated and had their pasts destroyed. An alternative view is that a child is part of a family unit, and any given child is best helped by helping the child’s parents. For a recent example of this concept in action, after Haiti’s earthquake, there were well-meaning donations of formula for babies. Because nobody wants babies to go hungry! Of course, babies would be far better fed if their mothers were adequately fed and thus able to produce milk, but there are less people who are overly excited about lifting grown Haitian women (and their partners) out of poverty.
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One of the best comments I’ve read about the situation, and I can’t remember where I read it or I’d link it, was that our cultural narrative about adoption is hopelessly outdated, because it was formed back in the days when babies and children were most frequently left homeless by the deaths of their families. Today, I think it’s relatively rare for children to land in the foster care system simply because their parents die — there is usually an extended family member, or a family friend to serve as a guardian, or something. If a woman dies in childbirth, we now expect that the baby’s father will raise the child by himself, rather than surrendering it for adoption just because he doesn’t have a wife to feed it or care for it. I’m sure Harriet could tell you better, but my sense is that almost all children in foster care have gotten there by being taken away from their living parents, or deliberately abandoned, rather than simply being orphaned.
I really appreciate this post. I went through infertility, and adoption was never really something that was on the table. I got my share of the just-adopts, and a lot of people got really bent out of shape when I told them, no, I did NOT think adoption was the easy answer or the right one for us. I wasn’t entitled to take anyone else’s baby just because I have more money and broken ovaries, and I think there’s way too much coercion and pressure and race/class failure surrounding domestic infant adoption for me to have ever been comfortable with pursuing that avenue. Any individual woman might genuinely and truly be OK with giving her child up for adoption, as above seems to be, but I had no confidence that I could identify such a woman through the domestic adoption agency system, and even less in the ethics of the international system. As for foster care, I explicitly think of it as being along the lines of a religious vocation, even if your motivations are entirely secular. I did not feel the calling to adopt or foster a child prior to do so, so why in the world would I have done so just because my ovaries broke? How in the world would it have been the right thing for me to adopt any kid because it was better than no kid at all? So for us, it was bio kids or none, and we were eventually lucky enough to have the former.
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I suppose I am an unlikely case, given that I am an American male of European descent adopted at birth by two other Americans of European descent, but, for one, I am inordinately grateful that my parents not only made the decision to adopt me, but raised me as patiently, lovingly, and well as they did. I realize that adoption agencies, especially international ones, are often inordinately shady, and deserve close, close scrutiny. I also realize that every adoption is the result of some tragedy. However, my own personal experiences have been nothing but positive, and after 21 years of life, I know that I couldn’t have asked for better parents.
Perhaps we ought to take child-rearing under any and all circumstances more seriously in this country. Children are not vehicles for your wish to do social work, and they are not accessories to be had because every celebrity in the National Enquirer’s sporting a baby-bump. They are human lives, and while adoption can be a good and beneficial service, removing children from broken or abusive homes and providing an alternative to abortion, standards must be tremendously high, and candidates must be impeccable.
Just my two cents, and they’re probably not even worth that. Have a good day!
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This is such a hard topic for me. My sister was adopted from foster care (she came to live with us at half a year old, and wasn’t adopted till she was in school). My sister, and her bio-siblings, were removed from their home due to abuse and neglect. She had been born, and more or less left in a crib with a bottle for her beginning life. Her siblings were far behind where they should have been at their ages. It took years for the parents to legally lose custody, because they would never come to court because- the lawyers thought- they might have been off having more kids! The mother might have been a better person on her own- my mother, who as far as I know never met, or had the option to meet, the biomom did get letters that made her think this, but we have no idea. She might have been also being abused by the biofather, but either way, the kids were in a terrible place.
My sister does have all sorts of problems and disorders. There is an entire laundry list of disorders, and her abandonment at a young and critical age probably is partially the cause- there is certainly some on the list that are entirely nature, and some that are probably nurture, and a few that didn’t appear till puberty turned her violent. She has an idea in her head that my parents are going to give her back, and my parents (as far as I know) have never said that. She went through a period in early high school where she decided she wanted to be called by her original last name- her first and middle were never changed- though she changed her mind and that only last a little while. More often she is frustrated because she doesn’t know “what she is” in terms of ancestry. A cousin told her, based on her last name, she was probably from a specific country, and she really took it to heart, which may or may not be true.
As my parents’ bio kid, I think my sister is especially difficult because I never really got rebellious or did bad things when I was young- I mean, once I stayed out super late past curfew, and I participated in Senior Ditch Day, but really, I was pretty good kid. I think if they had experienced my rebellion they wouldn’t find my sister so frustrating.
Incidentally, I think my mother’s own issues- including undiagnosed PPD from my own birth- were made all the worse by some of the stress of my sister’s problems, which fed my mother’s problems, which exacerbated her hoarding tendencies till we could probably be on that show, which created an environment which exacerbated my sister’s problems…
I do feel that often these discussions about adoption leave out foster care and foster care adoption, which has its own challenges. This didn’t seem to address it, which might be because Hannah doesn’t deal with foster kids- I am not a regular reader, so forgive me if I misreading- but I do wonder. I don’t think my parents could have helped her parents- although, maybe, I suppose. Nor, legally, could we have their address, although now that the internet is much better than when she was young, perhaps we could have found them. My sister was not the first, but was the last, foster kid my parents took on. They found the system frustrating because information was often withheld from them about the kids because of the parents’ legal rights. For instance, one girl had been sexually abused, which I believe they knew, but they had no idea why her father’s gift of a toy Barbie bathtub sent her into hysterics. That might have been helpful. Or why she hated my father’s beard. Again, had they told my parents on day one, maybe we could have saved a lot of stress.
I don’t know what my parents should have done with my sister. It seems every choice was, and is, second best.
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@JK: This post was mostly focused on international adoption, so it really didn’t address some issues that are specific to adoption from foster care. Adoption from foster care is actually the field I have more experience, but there’s a lot of crossover: sometimes families that drop out of international adoption due to expense will turn to foster care adoption, and sometimes families that drop out of foster care adoption due to its NUMEROUS problems will turn to international adoption. Either way, the position I had at my former employer made me the switchboard that sent them one way or another, since they’d call for resources.
Morally and ethically, I feel better about adoption from foster care than I do about adoption from the private sector or internationally (with the exception of open adoptions in both cases), but that doesn’t mean that adoption from foster care is really just trucking along great. It’s pretty fucked-up in its own right, but in ways that are vastly different than private adoption or international adoption. It’s such a tangled knot that I haven’t really tackled it in a post, and instead have just talked about adoption sort of “generally.”
There may have been things your parents could have done. In retrospect, there’s a million things I could have done to make my own life better, but as I’ve learned to forgive and care for myself, I’ve also learned to have faith that I always did the best that I could with the resources and knowledge that I had at any moment. If I’d known better, I would have done better, but sometimes that wasn’t possible. I expect your parents have done their best. If they’d known better, perhaps they could have done better, but they did their best with what they did know and in the places they could be effective. Adoptive parents are not the only fighters in all the world. During the long path of your sister’s life, there were thousands of opportunities for individuals to intervene and help. Some probably did, many didn’t. When she came into your home, she came into a home of individuals that had committed to help her for a lifetime. When I talk about the village needing to step up, your family did your part. There are plenty of other people who failed to do theirs, which made your sister a much heavier responsibility than she should have been, and left your parents without some of the resources they needed to help her.
I think you summed up what I was trying to say in this post in your last line “It seems every choice was, and is, second best.” In child welfare, we frequently bandy about the phrase/concept “best practices.” “Best practices” means you engage in policies and procedures that have been determined, through research and results, to be the most effective for all members of the adoption triad. I’ve always felt it’s a tacit acknowledgment that you aren’t going to do what’s “best,” but what’s best according to what we currently know and the resources we currently have. Research proves something new, more funding comes into the system, and now we have different best practices — that doesn’t mean that what we were doing before that research and money was wrong, but it was the ceiling of what could be achieved.
At work, when I hear these awful stories of kids getting routed through the system, I often use the phrase “second best practices.” A kid comes into the system, the state fails to give them or their family adequate help, extended family drop out of the picture, teachers refuse to get trained on the kid’s issues, doctors and therapists don’t recognize the problems, the social worker has too many cases to properly supervise, the kid gets further damaged and the family further disintegrated, and now an open and shut case — removal, case plan, reunify — has turned into long term foster care and drug addiction. Okay, “second best practices”: put the kid in rehab and teach them some life skills for when they graduate. That’s the best that can be done right now. Sometimes others have fucked up so hard, the “best” any one individual can do seems so pitifully small.
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You linked to my blog, sisterheping.
I am so glad you did because otherwise I might not have ever read this post, and from the bottom of my heart, I’m not sure if you’re an adoptee – but if you either “get it” or are trying to “get it”…
Thank you so very much.
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@Mei Ling: Not an adoptee. I was a teenage runaway (abusive family) who ended up living with a friend’s family for two years. They were good people and wanted to help, but they made classic adoptive parent mistakes, and after I turned 18, I was family-less and out on my own. I didn’t realize that the mistakes they had made – and the ways I’d felt and acted – were classic adoption mistakes until I started to work in the adoption field. It was really healing to tell my story to a seasoned adoption worker and have them roll their eyes and say, “Oh, yeah, that always happens,” because I’d been feeling like some weird freak with a life nobody could ever understand. I don’t “get” everything about adoption, but I do have a connection that has motivated me to learn more and make it a central topic of importance in my life, mostly professionally.
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OH MY GOD. As an adoptee this post is AMAZING. I just… don’t know what else to say. LOL. I wish I was as eloquent as you!
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Thanks for an excellent discourse on adoption!
It will only change when adult adoptees become the “experts” that legislators and “professionals” hear.
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My adoptee mother comitted suicide two years ago, and I have the feeling that she blamed it on me partially. There are several times when she would look at me and say “I don’t understand how you turned out like this.” Parts of this article describe my experience perfectly. Once I told her “I’m not the justification for your existence” after reading the same statement in the Handmaid’s Tale and her face went white. She stopped talking completely, four hours. And I realized that she saw me as the justification for her existence. It seems unfair that I existed to her just for that.
I’m not sure what else to say.
I’ve had a pretty ridiculous messed up life, and still handle things really badly at 23. I’m not sure how to get over it.
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I found this post through YoonSeon. I hope you don’t mind me linking and quoting (with proper credit) from my blog. Thank you for a raw, real, truthful post.
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I’m an adoptive mom (international: China). I link to favorite posts from the previous week every Sunday, written from all perspectives within the triad. I found this a week late, but I’m linking anyway. My audience is primarily adoptive parents (international), so I wanted to give you a heads up. But wow… just… wow… something we all need to read.
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Holy crap, what an AMAZING post. Thank you.
I liked this part:
And yet, they would call me and they would say, “NOBODY TOLD ME!” And I would say, “What about these 50 pages in your case file that say, ‘WE ARE TELLING YOU WHAT THIS WILL BE LIKE?’ “ and they would say, “Yes, but I didn’t realize it would be like THIS!” They’re not lying, and they’re not being deliberately difficult — they were told what it would be like, and they could not conceive of it.
Harihareswara, in Korea the government is really pushing domestic adoption. (What they really should be pushing, IMHO, is unwed mothers getting to keep their own babies.) More Korean families are becoming willing to consider it, but from what I’ve read, it’s America in the 1950s: the family pretends the child was born to them, and it’s all a big secret.
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“Parents, before you had kids, how many of you looked at some children acting up in a restaurant and said, “GOD, why don’t they just do X, then their kids would do Y. I WOULD NEVER BE LIKE THEM.” And then it’s five years later and you’re covered in spaghetti and you’re like whatever, Me From the Past, I can’t even describe how stupid you were because it would be like describing the color blue to a blind man. YOU CAN’T EVEN COMPREHEND.”
That would be me. I have two biokids and I love them more than life itself and I can’t imagine life without them, but, yeah, that would be me….I always wanted children and I know I would feel sad if I hadn’t been able to have them, but I also always knew I wouldn’t be willing to undergo invasive fertility treatment, and I always knew I didn’t want to adopt. I didn’t know WHY, but your blog is helping explain my own gut feelings to me. Thank you.
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I’m curious, which adoptees will be the experts? The adoptees who are completely against adoption or the adoptees like myself that can see where there are big problems with the system but are fine with their personal adoption experience.
The same question could apply to biological parents. The ones that prefer to keep the adoption confidential won’t speak up, understandably, and the one’s who have no problem with saying they don’t regret their decision are dismissed.
There’s much in this post I agree with but the experience of adoption from all sides are unique to the parties involved and their circumstance. It’s hard to convince there’s failure and need for redress if the successes are not addressed, believed, and examined. They’re not as rare as this post and commentary suggest.
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@All my readers: WOW. This is some serious bullshit. Usually I try to be nice and explanatory and not too confrontational. But I have a limit, and this thread is one. I have seen too many people in the adoption triad talk about badness and get shut down hard, mean, and fucked-up-like, and I’ve reached capacity pretty quickly here. Snark is officially ON.
: ALL adoptees are the experts. ALL bioparents are the experts. ALL adoptive parents are the experts. There is a continuum of experience that branches from horrible to awesome, which is why (as I say here) adoption isn’t an easy ethical concept that’s full of fucking flowers.
That’s the reality of adoption. But reality has nothing to do with the public narrative. The public narrative is that adoption shits puppies, it’s a good thing for everybody, and if there are problems, it’s still going to end up awesome in the end, eventually, once those angry adoptees see the light. People who have had bad experiences don’t fit into that narrative — they fuck it right up every time they open their mouths. And so, they’re silenced, dismissed, disappeared, or pathologized. ‘Cause, hey, some people are happy, so why aren’t you? Dear everybody else reading: IF YOU ASK THAT QUESTION, IT’S BECAUSE YOU DON’T ACTUALY GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE ANSWER. People who have had bad experiences have as much right to be heard — and as much right to have their concerns addressed — as those with good experiences. That doesn’t currently happen, because for every person with a bad experience, there’s somebody willing to come along and explain it away or dismiss it because hey, adoption, it does such good things, god, you’re so angry.
There is a wide, wide, wide world of spaces where people with good experiences with adoption can discuss them. People who had good experiences can generally say, in public, that they had a good experience, and not have strangers, friends, or family members emotionally interrogate them about how they could possibly say such a thing. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege. People with good experiences have a whole world where they can wax eloquently about the awesomeness of adoption without people staring at them in disbelief, shock, horror, or disgust. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege. People with good experiences get to talk about their lives without being called ungrateful, unreasonably angry, traumatized, or unfair. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege. People with good experiences get to describe their emotions surrounding adoption without having their intelligence, sanity, maturity, or basic perception of the world questioned or dismissed. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege. People with good experiences can talk about how happy they are without somebody who is sad telling them that they cannot and ought not be happy because somebody else in the world is sad. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege. Somebody with a good experience isn’t generally going to find people who disagree with them unless they go seeking them out, like you have done here. People with bad experiences don’t have that privilege — the moment they open their mouths to do something as basic as discussing their lives and feelings, people start telling them how wrong they are, and how they really ought to rethink because somebody else has a different life and a different feeling. People with bad experiences — as people in all unprivileged communities — get told that their experience is only ONE experience, but another ONE person with a good experience is actually representative of the real and total experience. As in, “Adoption — sometimes not so great” vs. “Well, that’s just your opinion, one opinion doesn’t make all of adoption bad, and anyway, it was great for me, so actually all of adoption is great!”
Good experiences exist, and they are valid and relevant. That doesn’t take away the fact that they are privileged experiences. Having a good experience of adoption means you don’t have to witness, experience, believe, view, or even know about the ways people with bad experiences have been treated and continue to be treated. That is, you don’t have to know about any of that if ALL adoptees, ALL birth families, and ALL adoptive parents aren’t a priority for you — if you are only interested in the good stories, that’s all you’ll ever hear about. You have to seek the bad stories out if you want to hear them. That’s privilege.
This is a space that gives those privileges back to the people with bad experiences. They get to talk about their lives here without being dismissed, ignored, explained away, or just outright told that their experiences don’t exist or aren’t important. One bad experience of adoption doesn’t negate one good experience of adoption. One good experience doesn’t negate the bad. This is not a zero-sum game, where only one side gets to be addressed — unless this is a game of privilege. If this is a game of privilege, then one side having their needs addressed takes away the luxuries the other side enjoys. I don’t think those luxuries are earned or deserved. Letting the bad experiences become a part of the public narrative about adoption means people with good experiences will no longer get to ignore or dismiss the bad experiences, and it means people with good experiences (and people who have only heard the good experiences) will have to think critically about what they say, how they say it, or what this means to the people around them. To remove the privilege people with good experiences have means that people with good experiences are going to have to deal with hearing about lives and experiences that don’t match up with theirs. Everybody should have to do that. And privileged people have to do it here, or they’re not welcome.
I don’t play zero-sum games here. People who have good experiences of adoption get to keep their good experiences. But they don’t get to take away experiences, space, attention, or resources from people with bad experiences. People with good experiences have enough space, attention, or resources — they don’t need this one. This blog post focuses on the bad experiences. I don’t need to write about the good ones. The rest of the world is already busily discussing how awesome adoption is. If you don’t want to hear about bad experiences, don’t seek out the places where people discuss them — you certainly won’t hear about it otherwise. But if the experiences of ALL members of the adoption triad are important to you, the bad experiences are as important and as valid as the good.
I think it’s very disingenous to say that people with good experiences are dismissed. Here? Maybe. This isn’t a place to talk about good experiences. That wasn’t a post about good experiences. And you had to actively, consciously seek this place out in order to attempt to argue the validity of bad experiences. The people with bad experiences cannot escape the amount of people who believe adoption is always — just naturally, somehow, without any kind of bump from circumstances or privilege — a good experience. They don’t have to seek it out. People with good experiences aren’t in some oppressed minority, never able to tell their stories for fear of being called crazy, emotional, or damaged. They pretty much get to talk about their good experiences wherever and whenever they want without even a whiff of disagreement. They haven’t gotten to do that here, because the people who have been coming here to do so have, in my opinion, been doing so to reassert their privilege in a space that has taken it away from them. If you don’t like hearing about bad experiences, or being unable to dismiss them with a good one, there is no reason you have to be here reading this.
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Amazing post. I have already been following EJ Graf’s and others’ reporting on the problems with international adoption, but this has definitely challenged me to think harder not just about the process of adopting and ensuring that it is ethical, but also my desire to adopt. (Though since what I prefer was to adopt a child from my parents’ country, preferably one from the same region where they grew up, and my family tries to give back to that area and enable people there to have better lives such that immigrating to the West isn’t the only good option, I hope that I’ve preempted some of the issues such as needing to feel a bond with the adoptee’s home country, because I already have that bond).
However, I think some of the stuff that’s come up in comments could be avoided by including an explicit statement in the posts that these adoption posts and their comments are specifically NOT places for people with good experiences to talk. (“People with good experiences have enough space, attention, or resources — they don’t need this one. This blog post focuses on the bad experiences. … This isn’t a place to talk about good experiences.”)
Also, I’m skeptical of the claim that *birth mothers* with good experiences with adoption don’t have to deal with being dismissed and silenced in society generally. (I agree this is true of adoptees and adoptive parents.) There is a pretty strong impetus to see women who “abandon” their babies as totally horrifying monsters, and to focus on pathologizing them instead of on helping them. For a woman to say “having the baby I birthed adopted by a family was the right choice for me” is in some circles no more popular than saying “abortion was the right choice for me.”
So I don’t think birth mothers who speak up on this blog, to say that they don’t consider the impetus behind the adoption a “horror,” are exercising some universally-recognized privilege. There are plenty of people telling those women that they must be so traumatized by their experience (just as people insist that all abortions are traumatic for all women) and that they were victim’s of society’s shortcomings (it suddenly has become fashionable among abortion opponents to be *really interested* in ensuring colleges provide some facade of support to students who are single mothers). In the absence of a disclaimer as I suggested, it might seem appropriate to those birth mothers for them to talk about their positive experiences of adoption on a feminist blog, and to question the term “horror” as applied to the fact of their becoming pregnant with and birthing a child they did not wish to raise.
Obviously that doesn’t mean you should host such comments here if you don’t want to; I’m saying that you might want to make that clear in the post itself, e.g. in the section about how people should conduct themselves in comments, in order to avoid having people leave such comments in the first place.
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“Adoptee and birth parent voices are given priority here.” I took this to mean that what I had to say was welcome. I didn’t actively seek this place out to do anything except for read the post that several of the blogs I read have linked to, in fact, I left my comment on my second read because it was then that I read something that compelled me to comment.
I certainly did not attempt to “argue the validity of bad experience”. I’m well aware of the downside of adoption and what some adoptees go and have gone through and can likely relate to the experience of having had a bad one more genuinely than you, having been adopted myself.
You accuse me of being disingenuous when I say that people who are fine with their experience are dismissed, yet you’re doing it here. The majority of adoption related people who are against it dismiss the positive experience. That it’s not possible, that the adopted person is delusional, deceiving themselves, afraid to say anything against adoption out of fear of appearing ungrateful, driven by the desire to be the “good adoptee”. Perhaps you’re unaware of this.
It’s counterproductive to ostracize an ally because their experience is different. The people who are interested in improving, reforming, redressing adoption need one big loud voice, not many different voices all dismissing what each other is saying if they don’t like the way it’s being said. I don’t like the way everyone relays their experience but I believe it, I empathize with it, and I want to do something to change it so that someone else doesn’t have to go through that. I said right in my comment that I can see where there are big problems with the system and agree with much of what you say yet your reply focuses on chastising me.
The way I look at it, it’s not about me anymore or someone who can’t have kids or someone who’s pregnant and unprepared or unwilling, it’s about the next kid who’s going to be born when they shouldn’t be and what’s going to happen to them. To figure out what’s best we have to look at what works and what doesn’t so I stand by my statement that it’s hard to convince there’s failure and need for redress if the successes are not addressed, believed, and examined.
PG, in my opinion you make some excellent points regarding mothers. I don’t agree though that they belong on a feminist blog somewhere. It’s all related and relevant and necessary, the good and the bad.
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@PG: Duly noted. I based my original disclaimer on what I had seen on adult adoptee blogs, which was usually AP’s coming in all a-flutter to shit on the forums. I realize now there’s a lot more shitting going on.
I also note your point about birth mothers. Though I agree with you that their perspectives — wherever they fall on the continuum — are generally pathologized, I’m still not willing to truck with having those perspectives expressed here in an attempt to dismiss the badness of adoption, so that’s not going to change. However, like I’ve said multiple times here already, while I feel that not wanting to raise a child is a legitimate, valid reason to place a child for adoption, I still firmly believe that becoming accidentally pregnant and having few other options for support, thus leading to adoption, is a horror. People should be able to choose to place their children for adoption because they don’t want to raise a child, but making that choice because raising them isn’t a financial or socially-sanctioned option is a horror that shouldn’t be.
Will make some disclaimers later when I’ve got some editing downtime.
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: I admit that I’m doing that here. This is a space for people with bad experiences to talk without being shut down. This is a space for the ordinarily underprivileged to get to be in the center of the conversation instead of the margin. You have the rest of the internet to talk about good experiences; you don’t need this space, too. I firmly believe this is a discussion about privilege, and I firmly believe that when people who are used to having the ability to be mainstream and acceptable in any social space are suddenly denied one, they get apoplectic. In my opinion, that’s what you’re doing here.
As PG pointed out, I made a mistake in my disclaimer, which I’ve been rectifying in the comments. But I’ll make it more clear to anybody who hasn’t read the comments.
I did chastise you. I don’t think saying, “I can see there are problems…” is much of a contribution, if you follow it up with, “But also things are awesome.” It’s not much different than saying, “I can see racism still exists…” and then following it up with, “But things are better now!”
I want allies that are willing to jump feet-first into the problems, as shitty and ugly as they are, not ones who are willing to admit that they can see problems exist.
I do not agree that we need one big loud voice. There has never been a movement for social justice that has made headway for all with one big loud voice. There have, however, been movements for social justice that have made headway for some by having one subset of all be louder, more mainstream, and more privileged. And those movements got where they were by telling the other subsets that they need to stop being divisive, stop being so angry, stop arguing, stop bringing up all these other issues, and stop trying to force the mainstream from the limelight.
Adoption doesn’t need to speak with one voice. When only one voice is allowed, any voice that disagrees is shut out of the party. Adoption needs disagreement, in-fighting, and a breaking down of privilege within the movement before it can address the needs of ALL. That’s why I’m not letting up on you, though I’m quite sure that you’re well-intentioned and mean to help. I don’t think you’re helping or looking to help in any way that helps the people who aren’t like you, or don’t think like you, or don’t believe the things you do, so you’re not of any use to me here. I think you’re looking to make the people who aren’t like you more like you, which doesn’t solve any of their problems, but it does make you less uncomfortable with the existence of people with problems. The happy people don’t get to be the center here, the voice, the face, or the mainstream, because they get that everywhere else — the dividers are the mainstream here, and I’m not compromising an inch on that. Anybody willing to be made uncomfortable by that is welcome to stay. Anybody who thinks that’s some kind of patently unfair imbalance is welcome to go back to the patently unfair imbalances they prefer to frequent.
The people with good experiences aren’t in trouble here. They don’t have problems that need to be solved. People with good experiences are doing good. They don’t need my time and space when I’m talking about the people who are doing bad.
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Well said. International Adoption is f-up. Probably always will be.
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[Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case scenario having already come to fruition. From there, you’re working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be. It is that should be that necessitates education, sensitivity, and trigger warnings, because it never goes away.]
It’s amazing (but not surprising) at how many people to ignore this or just don’t want to “learn” it.
When I point out that families are not meant to be broken up, I get the following responses:
A) “So you believe only blood can make a family?”
B) “Do you hate your adoptive parents? I feel so sorry for them.”
C) “So then what constitutes a family? A single mother? A mother whose husband ran out on her? A single mother raising her only son? Divorced parents? What?”
D) “Oh, you must mean the more CONVENTIONAL way to build a family. Well there are more ways to create a family than just egg and sperm.”
And so on.
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I was upset last week when everyone jumped all over Jillian Michaels’ case for saying something ignorant about adoption. Apparently all of them forgot about the stupid crap that was said in their adoption awareness class. I would slap the shit out of myself for being as stupid as I was when I went to my first class seven years ago.
We are in the process of adopting three children we have raised from birth thru foster care. They are now five. If I had a nickel for every person who told me that it’ll be great when “this” is all over because we won’t have to deal with Mama anymore, I’d be able to pay you your five million space dollars. The kids are five, they know who their mama is, she does not cease to exist because their birth certificate no longer bears her name. She is the answer to where they got their color, and their curly hair. I wouldn’t even rather have it another way. Honoring her as their mother does not diminish my role in their lives. I too am their mother. Wishing that she didn’t exist is wishing my children do not exist.
We can’t pick our family. Even when we do.
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To play on Mei Ling’s comment”
When I point out that mothers are not meant to give up their babies, I get the following responses:
A) A baby needs both a mother and a father.
B) All these single mothers are destroying America; their kids will end up as drop-outs, drug addicts, and criminals.
C) There are so many people who want a baby! Isn’t it great that adoption exists to cure infertility?!
D) A young (or single, or unmarried) woman’s life will be ruined by a baby; how we she ever go to college, have a career, or get married?
E) Would you rather she kept the baby and abused it or threw it in a dumpster?
F) And my all-time favorite: well, she shouldn’t have spread her legs.
This list could go on and on, these are just a few things that are thrown at mothers in adopto-land.
The problem being a natural mother ( I try to avoid the term “birth mother” as many of us feel marginalized by this term) is that you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Keeping a baby when young and/or single is bad, adoption will turn the situation into something beautiful. The natural mother is a saint for choosing adoption and giving her baby a better life. Cut to after the adoption is final: the saintly mother morphs into an abandoner who was probably just a drug addict who didn’t want her baby. She has no right to call herself a mother and should get out of the way of the perfect adoptive family. It would be best if she just disappeared and got on with her life.
*My standard disclaimer: no one wants abused children to remain in an unsafe household and yes, there are women who don’t want their babies. My comment is not in reference to either of these situations.
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One more thought: no one wants to recognize the coercion and pressure used by so-called “non-profit” adoption agencies to get mothers to surrender their babies. Society prefers to believe that all surrenders are voluntary.
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: This is why this conversation is always so fucked-up. Because you know, through experience, that you have to issue a disclaimer like that at the end, or somebody will come in and say, “OBVIOUSLY YOU WANT CHILDREN TO BE BEATEN” and/or “OBVIOUSLY YOU WANT TO FORCE WOMEN TO HAVE CHILDREN.”
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E and F drive me CRAZY. And I’m not even a mother.
I always end up putting the disclaimer NO I DO NOT BELIEVE CHILDREN SHOULD STAY WITH AN ABUSIVE MOTHER.
And then I point out “What good does it do to assume a mother WILL be abusive to her child?”
The response? “What, you think every mother in existence loves her child? That’s not true. Plenty of mothers abuse their children!”
… *head desk*
So then I respond with something like “Well, yes, I realize that. Foster care is evidence enough. But I don’t ASSUME the worst of humanity.”
And then some other commenter will inevitably say “Just because you don’t believe in the worst of humanity doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
And at this freaking rehashed point, I want to shout: THAT’S NOT MY POINT. MY POINT IS THAT I DON’T LIKE TO *ASSUME* THE WORST.
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Dear Harriet – I think you are an amazing writer. More than any one discourse on adoption I have ever seen, this sums up adoption with such nuanced expression and thought that I just feel better for having read it.
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I’m the adoptive parent of two kids, one a local and open adoption and one a closed international adoption. I love my kids deeply. Because I an white and have money, my kids have greater resources than they would have if their birth families had not placed them with my family. To many people, this looks like a “win,” and some people have said *to my kids* “oh, aren’t you so lucky you were adopted!” Which makes me feel violent urges towards the speaker.
It’s not win and lose, it’s not lucky or unlucky. It is what it is. In both cases there was a failure on the part of the community, the culture. The fact that we have a happy family now is great, but it doesn’t answer my daughter’s questions as to why her birth mother lied about her identity and traveled to a strange city to place her infant with strangers.
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First of all – AWESOME post. Your ability to name the bullsh-t on at the individual, family and exosystemic/macrosystemics levels involved in adoption is extraodinary! Life, family and people in general are complex and we have to be able to hold the posotives and the negatives simulatanuously. Since I loved 99.9% of it I feel a little silly responding to the .01% that made me cridge…but I guess that’s where I am going.
You said “I would rather this child lived in a world where his biological parents were able to raise him. Compared to that, every other option is crap.” As a queer family, my wife and I, together with a wonderful queer friend, (with his wife…and yes, he self-identifies as queer) created a beautiful little boy who is our son. My partner adopted him as soon as the state would let us. Our son’s “biological parents” are not raising him – but his “first and only” parents are. Our son was conceived while his biological mama was wrapped up in the arms of his other mama (one of who is obviously not biologically related.) His “uncle” is a regular part of his life, along with his “auntie” and two special cousins! We’ve talked to him about his relationship to his uncle since he was born and consider them family.
The majority of adoptions are deviations from what “should of been.” I am fighting for a world that will put 110% into giving every child and family the opportunity and the resources to make all “should of been’s” happen. I am also fighting for the world to recognize that, when planned by all parties, biological connections are not the only “should haves.”
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:
You caught me at a bad time. Any other day/week/month, I would probably be willing to explain to you in detail why obviously this post was not about you, and really your family is awesome (it does sound like it is), and sorry I didn’t address every single possible permutation of family with every single possible disclaimer available. But this post got off the rails with so much derailing fuckery that had to make an even MORE expletive-laden follow-up post, and am now not in the mood to deal with even the most well-intentioned of derail.
So I have to say, if this post is not about you, then don’t make it about you. Or, click to this and scroll down to number 7. This post is so obviously not about intentional, planned families where biological parents aren’t cut out that I’m just in all sorts of “what the fuck i don’t even” that you decided it’s relevant to your intentional, planned family where biological parents aren’t cut out.
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Thank for this post.
It was pointed out to me by my sister who was put up for adoption when my mother had her at 15, and found our family 22 years later. I did not know that she existed growing up, but I am certainly glad I know her now.
I think you provide an excellent voice for the fact that adoption is a complicated issue, with many nuances, and one narrative certainly does not tell the tale of adoption for all (certainly not the “adoption is always a miracle” narrative).
But, isn’t “I would rather this child lived in a world where his biological parents were able to raise him. Compared to that, every other option is crap.” sortof a heterosexist statement? No gay couple can have a family with biological children. For obvious reasons, at least one of the parents must adopt the children. Does a narrative based on the premise that “families must be broken” for adoption to exist mean that all families with same sex parents are inherently broken?
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in DC:
See my response to Karrie.
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[Our son’s “biological parents” are not raising him – but his “first and only” parents are.]
I know this isn’t *personally* about me, but as an adoptee, I’m feeling insulted that yet *another* adoptive parent is trying to declare what her/his own child should be feeling.
[No gay couple can have a family with biological children. For obvious reasons, at least one of the parents must adopt the children.]
I really don’t want to point out the, er, subconscious flaw in the societal standard of what one must do in order to be validated as a parent, but is this a “need” or a “want”?
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@Mei Ling: I’m not sure if this was what you meant, but working in the social services sector of government, I’d say that from a very practical standpoint, this is a “need” and not a “want.” People who don’t have the official, legal documentation of being an official, legal parent are completely without rights if their kid ever ends up even in proximity to a courthouse. In my line of work, this usually pops up two ways.
1) A kid ends up in the system due to child abuse or neglect charges. The kid ends up in a foster home because dad never put his name on the birth certificate, so dad — who has maybe been totally involved in the kid’s life anyway, just wasn’t around when the kid was born, or maybe the mom was pissed at him at that time — isn’t legally considered a parent. He doesn’t get to know where his child lives, what school they’re going to, can’t visit them without supervision, and has absolutely no say in what happens to the kid, doesn’t even get to be in the courtroom when the judge decides. Of course, this can all be cleared up with a paternity test, if he can afford one, but that’s not an option for a homosexual couple. Side note: DADS! GET YOUR NAME ON THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE. It is a fight worth having — the ways your life can explode later are irreversible and full of horror.
2) A kid comes to the courthouse because they need a judicial bypass to get an abortion without informing their parents. At least half these kids come in with their parents, but one or both of the parents don’t have proper documentation that they are legally parents. No legal parents, no legal way to inform or gain consent, so now the parents have to bring their kid down to the courthouse and beg a stranger to allow them to get their child medical care.
There are obviously a million and one more ways that not being considered a legal parent (and having the proper documentation to back that claim up) could fuck things up royally — these are just the two that I see daily. And, of course, homophobia is still rank and rampant enough that a homosexual couple with all the proper documents can still be denied equal rights and services.
This is not to say that “WHAT ABOUT THE GAYZ?” isn’t a complete derailment of unfathomably obtuse proportions in this conversation, but I would have to throw my vote in for “need” on the official, legal parenting status thing.
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I am an adoptive mother of two children adopted internationally 21 years ago, for reasons which are no one else’s business. I want to cry reading this. My children are not statistics, they are unique, beautiful individuals who had a rough start and are making the best of a bad situation. It is part of who they are. The prognosis if my husband and I had not come into the picture was…….not good. The prognosis if they had not come into our lives was not good, either. I am not easy to have as a mom. I have supported their journey to learn about the rest of their family, and hope that they can figure out how to love two moms. I am sure I am racist, privileged, selfish, but they have a better life than they would have had and so do I. I have learned about love from them. It is hard to feel that everything we did was wrong. Say what you will.
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@LMH:
Saying “the international adoption industry is fucked-up” is not the same thing as saying “you are a fucked-up parent.” I never once said that. Saying, “It would be a better world if kids had the option to live safely and happily with their biological parents,” is not the same thing as saying “All adoptive parents are bad people who have stolen children.” I never once said that.
Everything that upset you in this post appears to be something I never said. I’m not going to engage with you about strawman personal attack arguments I never made. Get over yourself. If this post isn’t about you, if nothing here applies to you, don’t make it about you. If nothing here applies to your family, there is no need for you to be upset or come in here demanding I pay attention to your upsetness. This is a big privileged demand for attention based on things that, according to you, are completely non-applicable to yourself or your family. If this post is about you, if everything I said here applies to you and your family, get over yourself and start making changes.
Either this isn’t about you, in which case there’s no reason for you to be upset, or this is about you, and there’s a lot of reason for you to be unhappy about that. There is no third option, no “this isn’t about me at all but I am going to try to get everybody to make it about me because I am not the center of this conversation and need to be.” That’s just option 1 with privilege and entitlement, or option 2 with denial.
I will say what I will. And you can read it however you like, even if your reading comes up with some imaginary shit I never said. And you can say what you will, but not here. Here, you have to stay on-topic, and our topic here isn’t you, nor is it your defense mechanisms.
I normally don’t do this so quickly, but this thread is just a big privileged bane of my existence. Every day there is some kind of bullshit ridiculousness that I am sick to death of dealing with on a blog I usually like. Ultra Mega Death Moderation is enacted for this thread. You are banned, because I can’t see you bringing any conversation I find worth having to this space. There are lots places you can go to talk about this or complain about me and imaginary things I said that upset you very much. This is no longer one of them.
Anybody who can’t deal with that can leave — that’s the kind of place this is.
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Harriet, you wrote in response:
“People who don’t have the official, legal documentation of being an official, legal parent are completely without rights if their kid ever ends up even in proximity to a courthouse.”
I was not referring to a parent who is recognized by law as a legal guardian/custody/parental role. Obviously that’s unquestionable in its importance because minors need to be in legal custody of *someone.* If a child is being raised by a woman and man who are recognized as legal parents, then yes, legal documentation of being the parents by law is essential.
However, I was referring to a woman (or man, or heck, a couple) who has *not* become parent and whom has *not* signed up for the adoption process. Adopting a child isn’t a “need.” It’s a want. A desire to parent.
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@Mei Ling: Ah, okay, I get you now. I wasn’t sure if you had meant the legal thing or not.
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I’m an transracial, international adoptee, and I found this to be a lot less… wanky than Womanist Musing’s Sandra Bullock post. And that Russian adoption scandal DROVE ME CRAZY. That woman was completely in the wrong, there’s no word to adequately describe how wrong she is.
I have no maternal instinct, no desire to get married or have kids. I know it’s because of my childhood, which wasn’t the happiest to say the very least. It had nothing to do with their race, and everything to do with addiction and enabling. I know I’m young and I may change my mind about having children in the distant future, but I know for a fact that I never want to give birth. So, if I have an epiphany and change my mind about having kids, I’d adopt. I don’t think I’d do it internationally though, I’d stick to wherever I’m living.
Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for writing this.
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[Our son’s “biological parents” are not raising him – but his “first and only” parents are.]
I know this isn’t *personally* about me, but as an adoptee, I’m feeling insulted that yet *another* adoptive parent is trying to declare what her/his own child should be feeling.
[No gay couple can have a family with biological children. For obvious reasons, at least one of the parents must adopt the children.]
I really don’t want to point out the, er, subconscious flaw in the societal standard of what one must do in order to be validated as a parent, but is this a “need” or a “want”?
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O..M..G…! Have been reading this thread after coming to this post two or three adoption blogs ago… cannot BELIEVE how patient you have been in your explanations! (if it’s not about you, why are you making it about you?) It is so great that you have been able to maintain this small space where it is NOT about those who have privilege. Seeing the difficulty and effort you had to exert to maintain such a small space… just a posting and a thread…(using language and forcefulness that wouldn’t go over in a work setting) helps me to understand why I get so exhausted encountering this attitude in the professional arena….I’m going to bookmark this post/thread to refer to when I feel like I don’t have the language to rebut this attitude.
Excellent post!
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I am very, very late to find this entry, but I did want to thank you for writing something so incredibly enlightening. I’m not part of the adoption triad, and I’m not closely acquainted with anyone who is (as far as I know–certainly it’s possible that I am and don’t know it), so it helps to get a good dose of information on how I (yes I!) am party to the things that go on in adoptions that may end up disrupting.
That sounded a little sarcastic, but it very much wasn’t. I found this entry fascinating, and it opened my eyes to some of my own behaviour which contributes to the issues discussed.
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A friend just pointed me to this post and I am astounded . . . truly . . . at your ability to flesh out so many of the complexities and difficulties in international adoption. I am an adoptive parent, and I have to echo exactly what you are saying about adoptive parenting. You can read about it, you can go to workshops, but nothing can prepare you for what it is like to parent a child who has spent those formative years in an orphanage. We just adopted a three-year-old, and we are in the thick of it. (And I’ve adopted before. And this is my 4th kid). But living in the attachment stuff is so unlike anything you read about in a book. And yes – the general reaction to how traumatizing this has been for all of us is, “well, you asked for it”. I also think people have a hard time understanding that this beautiful external picture of our son finally “coming home” is, in fact, a hugely traumatizing event for him. People have such a hard time getting that it’s not all puppies and roses when a child enters a new family and leaves everything he knows behind.
Anyways, I really appreciate what you have to say here. I do feel like I am seeing a growing number of adoptive parents who “get it”, and who are refusing to become a part of the money-making side. It is possible, and there are true orphans out there who need homes. They probably aren’t the kids people are lined up for. But I think your assessment of the state of things is pretty accurate.
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I didn’t have the best up-bringing. I wasn’t adopted. I grew up with my mom. Had three step-dad, and between those stepfathers, she had countless boyfriends. Most wanted to be my “friend”, other just were uncomfortable about me. I’ve experienced abuse by their hands, I’ve dealt with addiction, I’ve been kicked out, and sent away. I’ve dealt with a lot of things that I think the majority of people haven’t dealt with at the age I was. I KNOW kids have had it worse than me, and I KNOW it’s rare to find someone who didn’t come from a broken home. Almost impossible to find someone who think they had a good upbringing. My main piont is, is I blame my mom. She did her best, and I still love her, but at the same time I can’t forgive her fully. I feel like I never want to be like her. I never want to fuck someone over so repetitively. I never want to give birth. I feel like I want to adopt in the future. I’m not ready, as you can tell by this message. But, though it’s immpossible to “save” someone, I want to be a haven. I don’t want to adopt a baby. Maybe a six-year old, or a teenager. I want to be someone’s beacon of light, becuase I never had that. Rule of thumb, you want your kids to have a better life than you did. Becuase I’ve been raped, punched, hosed down, run off, sent out of state, ect. I feel like I could identify with these kids. Those who’ve experienced all these things kids shouldn’t even think about. I can’t decide if I’m being selfish or selfless. But, well, your article made me think about all this a little closer and a little sooner than I would have otherwise. Either way it’s far down the road, but thinking about it early, considering everything, is the best thing to do.
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do you know much about surrogacy? Particularly how it affects the child involved? It’s something I really want to do, but I don’t know where to look for information on the effects of it.
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: Sorry, don’t know much about that.
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Thanks for this post. I am so very tired of hearing people bleat about “adoption is the answer” as if it was all so simple, and those involved are 2-d characters without complex emotions- and I have a positive adoption story! I cannot imagine what those with a miserable adoption experience think when they hear this platitude.
I was pretty insensitive to the whole thing until a few years back. I always knew I was adopted (closed, at birth), as was my brother, but never thought much of it. My family was strong, loving and honest. But when I decided to consider having a baby, I wanted to find out more about my other mother. Turns out, she had been looking for me for years, but closed files make it hard to trace for the first mom, but it was easy for me to find her. (Her older kids knew about me, the younger ones did not, but they were all excited to meet me- I was terrified.)
When she told me how awful it was to leave me at the hospital, and her horror at learning that I was still sitting in a nursery alone 10 weeks later, I realized how brutal this had been for her. She didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t have too, I understood it when she said it. Her parents had given her the option of “abort or get the hell out of our house”, plus being actively suicidal and bi polar didn’t help her much either. She had to live with a birth right family, who gave her support and love (they are still close). We both agree that she made the best choice of bad choices, but that doesn’t make it feel any better.
This is where the culture fails, one of the many ways- she told me part of the decision was that wanted me to have a Dad, but the fact that she had no home to go to, no money, no support didn’t help. Many agencies in the US are supportive ONLY if you relinquish, but will not help one bit if you choose to keep your baby. Some are openly coercive and practice highly unethical behavior. International adoptions are more complicated, but the xtian agency system is also very sick.
Worst thing about it is that those people that want to push adoption as “painless, selfless and beautiful” for all, as a “solution” for abortion, are the SAME people that knowingly advocate ineffective abstinence only education and fight hard against building any social safety net for families. They only care that you don’t abort, and if they can’t get you to relinquish, they are more than happy to see you on the street. When the public goes along with their rose colored beliefs, they unwittingly support this sick system. While adoption CAN BE a great option, anyone that thinks adoption is a simple, easy thing for everyone involved, without long term consequences is ignorant to the reality.
And I was one of the ignorant, even as an adoptee- only after these conversations w/her did I realize how amazingly painful this was, that she was still hurting 30 years later. When all goes well with an adoption, these things are not mentioned- the birth mom is “heroic” (if invisible, but reviled and feared if desired), adoptive moms and kids “lucky”. No one is suppose to have any feelings of abandonment, confusion, or loss.
Now, I have a “2nd family”, which has brought out a whole new set of emotions. I can’t shake the feeling of being an outsider, even though they do try to include me (hard to do when I live 3,000 miles away, but they try). My Mom is very much threatened by my first Mom, even though I am 33 now and love her wholly. Let me reiterate- my situation is likely as good as it gets, and it is still complicated and tough at times, and has been excruciatingly miserable for my first mom.
I only posted to say that even the best situations have complicated emotions attached, and people that make it black and white do a disservice to everyone.
Thanks for having this supportive space. You are right that people have opportunity to talk about the good, but no one wants to hear about the bad.
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And I forgot to add- it’s not just international agencies that lie about the babies they place. The Catholic agency did NOT tell my parents that most of my genetic relatives and biomother are bi-polar. They said the family was loud, and had some minor issues, maybe a bit of depression and minor drug use, but they totally left out the bi-polar part! They kept this hidden even though my biomom had tried to commit suicide while pregnant, and was on lots of bi-polar meds that can cause defects!!! Growing up I thought my biomom was a drug user, but she wasn’t- those were psych meds they were talking about. They hadn’t specified…..
My adoptive mom trusted the agency so much she still thinks that they didn’t know! This piece of info could have helped our family avoid several years of difficulty, which may not have played out so well if I had landed in a different family. The agency figured my parents would work through it, but they didn’t stop to think that it was IMPORTANT to know anyway!!!!!!!!!
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: I have definitely seen some shady things with domestic private adoption as well. Public adoption isn’t immune either — pretty much all things in adoption get ugly as soon as money gets involved, and adoption as we currently conceive of it is completely tied up in money, because it’s completely tied up in government and agencies. International agencies make money hand over fist and the abuses there can be very raw and very ugly, because the biofamilies they’re working with are specifically targeted due to their poverty and lack of civil rights (comparable to Americans). If the biofamilies were able to support themselves and had access to government services and protection, well, they wouldn’t be so likely to have children they couldn’t support, so no agency is interested in that. But there are plenty of Americans who are poor as shit and, while technically having civil rights, don’t have the resources to exercise them.
A private domestic adoption can still cost about a college education, or a down payment on a house. And while public adoption is technically “free,” it costs the state much more to be fully supporting a foster child than it does for the state to partially or not at all support an adopted child. Then tie that up with a mixture of people who honestly, in their heart of hearts, want to do the right thing by these kids, and you have employees that just KNOW this kid will be better in another family, and if they have to lie or cheat to get them there, well, it’s the greater good, right? And if that greater good keeps the cash flowing upward, certainly nobody is going to call them on it.
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Talking my language!
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Late comment. Thank you for saying that it always comes from brokenness. I have given birth three times. Legally I have no children. One time it was….well, it was as good a solution as we could get. Like when your tire blows on a lonely road and fortunately your cell gets good reception and you have roadside assistance and you got the car stopped with no injuries and you get on your way an hour late but nothing else wrong. But it still wasn’t the way anyone planned that afternoon to go. Like that.
The other two… They’re teenagers now, and sneak behind their adoptive parents’ backs to see me and their father. They didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to let them go, they know what’s going on, and the man who sired me may still be alive but my father died in 2004. And no, we don’t support families in this country, and that’s why it happened.
And yeah, every time “taking kids out of bad homes” comes up, it is really triggery, and I suspect it will until the younger one ages out and can come back to us, and I cry a lot when no one’s looking.
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I’m really impressed with this post. It says a lot of things I’ve been thinking about adoption.
My mother was adopted. She loved her parents completely and totally. It didn’t change the fact that her entire childhood, she felt unwanted and rejected — and the fact that her parents had actively wanted her enough to seek her out to adopt didn’t help. She loved her parents and she loved her brother and she loved all her myriad cousins, but she always felt like they didn’t understand her.
When she found her birth families — her bio-father’s family and her bio-mother’s family — she felt a strong sense of kinship with siblings and cousins, and she’s always sending me pictures of her biological sisters because they look like us. They don’t replace the parents that raised her, in her heart, but it’s clear she had a hunger to know her biological kin. But her bio-mother had a very hard life and her bio-father has turned out to be a passive aggressive asshole. It really does look as if adoption was the best possible choice for her life, and yet, that does not change the fact that adoption hurt her, a lot.
Like you said. Adoption means something went wrong, and maybe the adoption is the best possible solution, maybe it’s the best way to fix the problem, but fixing a problem can never be as good as “there isn’t a problem in the first place.” You know, like bypass surgery is great after your heart attack, but what would be even better is not having a heart attack in the first place.
It’s not “adoption is bad”. But it *is* “unqualified support for adoption, under all circumstances, coupled with pressure on women to give up their children, is bad.” Because adoption is a strategy for fixing a problem. And sometimes it’s the best possible solution, and sometimes the person who is adopting is a fantastic person and they will give that kid a great life, and sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they are but the kid’s life will suck anyway in ways they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t *needed* to be adopted. People who push adoption as the one true best way for solving the problem of “women who cannot raise their own children” are like dentists who push root canals as the one true best way for solving all your cavity issues. I mean, yeah, maybe you do need a root canal, but maybe the dentist just needs a new pair of shoes, right? Maybe the dentist has bills to pay, and the root canal pays better than giving you a filling?
Pushing “adoption is always good” de-emphasizes helping parents get through rough spots so they can raise their own kids and it comes dangerously close to saying that bypass surgery is a unilateral good, as if people should have heart attacks just so they can get bypass surgery. Adoption hurts people. Sometimes lack of adoption is going to hurt people more. Some people don’t get hurt at all by being involved in adoption. But they’re lucky and they’re not typical. Adoption needs to exist because so many families do fail, or suffer tragedies, and kids need parents to love them, and adoptive parents need as much support as bio-parents and need as much emphasis on the idea that they *are* the parent as possible, precisely because of the whole “if it doesn’t work out you can give them back” thing that’s the antithesis of being a parent. But adoption isn’t an objective good — it’s an objective solution to a problem, and actually preventing the problem is usually a better idea than solving it after the fact.
Thanks for posting this. Adoption’s complicated. It should never be pushed as a perfect thing in and of itself, but where it exists, it should be supported as well as bio-families are supported. And yeah, the notion that the only way to do it is to make the bio family vanish and raise the kid as if they popped into existence, hey presto magic baby!, and they’re not connected to any chain but you… that’s arrogant, and asinine.
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I am very late to this post, but I wanted to say thank you. Even though I’m now sitting here sobbing, because you got it so very right. I also want to say — although it was touched on in comments before mine — that these issues very much extend to US social services adoptions, as I found out the hard way. I had –have– three children. I separated not very amicably from the younger two’s father, and went to NY with the children to stay with a great-aunt I had not previously visited, to let things settle down. She promised babysitting so I could find work, and a place to stay until I could get us an apartment; she intimated the apartment next to hers should be up for rent soon. When we got there, I found that my aunt’s living conditions were not as she’d told me, and there was no space for us there. We bounced around shelters for a little bit, and I can’t even begin to describe how bad that was; we had to go back to social services every morning and wait in the waiting room all day to have beds each night, before that. Jobhunting was impossible; *everything* was impossible.
By the time they found us a place where we could spend more than one night, I was well on the way to a depressive episode. Then we got into the shelter and two of my children caught a bug from one of the other kids, and stress and lack of sleep finished the job. The only way to get help, they told me, was to go into the hospital, and if I did my children would be placed in temporary care. If I didn’t, and I hurt myself, they would still go into care, but it was less likely to be temporary. I went. I was in the hospital for three days. Before I had been in there two days, they had filed paperwork charging me with negligence for going into the hospital when I had no-one nearby to care for the kids. They refused to send them home to my parents, though we hadn’t been in NY even one month, much less the six that would have made us residents of the state and given NY jurisdiction. My oldest son, who is autistic, was separated from his younger siblings. They went to a woman who was obviously and immediately invested in adopting; my three-year-old daughter came to visitation in very expensive dresses and gold jewelry from the very first visit. I was openly pressured to surrender them, told to my face that my children would be better off with “a family who looks like them” (they are multi-racial, with light skin and wavy hair; I am black.) And eventually we discovered that the foster mother was the pastor of the church my children’s law guardian was a member of. We didn’t find that out until too late, though. Guess which way her recommendations always went? Eventually, they terminated my rights, with some help from my ex, to whom they promised visitation if he’d make a false statement against me, after telling him the utter lie that I was planning to leave the country with the kids and he’d never see them again if I got them back. He confessed after figuring out that they had no plans to give them back to him either: he’s never gotten so much as a single visit.
Somewhere in NY, my younger children are going about their lives thinking that their adoptive mother rescued them, that they were abandoned and neglected, and had no family worth speaking of. (Their brother is languishing in a group home; no easy happy adoption for an autistic child who was too old to easily forget his mother. He no longer even gets to visit his siblings.) Over here, I’ve gotten to know more about what goes on behind the scenes in many of these “happy” adoption stories, and it’s enough to turn your stomach. And the thing that keeps me bitter? If I’d actually harmed my children — if they had been anything other than healthy, pretty, affectionate kids — they’d probably be at home right now. Because this is a business, first and foremost, and there’s no market for damaged goods.
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D:
Sometimes people jump into my comment threads pulling quotes and being like, “This should be on a T-shirt!” And that up there? Jesus Christ, you are dead-on, and it’s so painful to hear it summed up that well.
Also? “A family who looks like them”? Christ’s fucking sake, how about a family that is them?
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D again:
Hey, Cindy, if you want to write up something about your experience here, I’d be happy to put it up as a No-Name Blogger post. It wouldn’t have to necessarily be the story of what happened — you might be sick to death of explaining that one over and over again — but you could talk about what it’s been like since, or some of the little things people don’t know about the lives of the parents left behind. Or, you know, whatever the fuck you want. Let me know. My email is on the About This Blog page.
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This is one of the most balanced, insightful posts I’ve ever had the privilege to read. And speaking as an adult, intercountry adopted person (Ireland, 1960), I have been shouting from the rooftops on the subject of listening to the elder statesmen in adoption, i.e., those who have LIVED the experience, particular from an intercountry vantage point. So I hope more of us continue to speak up like this. And I hope every prospective adoptive parent reads it. I’ll definitely be sharing the link. Brava…
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I’ve read this article several times and posted it to facebook and never had the nerve to respond.
Thank you for posting this. I was a “biological” mother (a horribly dismissive term if you ask me – I DO prefer “real” mom). I was bullied, emotionally abused, shamed, and screamed at by my mother to “choose” adoption. When that didn’t work, she had my ob/gyn “talk” to me about it in his office – even his office wasn’t safe! I had my son until he was a year old, I guess you can always abuse and beat somebody into giving in to anything, right? That’s why we waterboard.
The lawyer came to my house, and wouldnt’ allow me to read the papers. My parents didn’t, either. She said she was MY lawyer, NOT the lawyer for the adoptive parents. Because my parents had “chosen” both the parents and the lawyer, I had no choice.
Oh – and I was stoned. She knew that, too. Having your baby stolen from you will traumatize you to that point.
As of right now, I am not speaking to my best friend, who is an adoptee. Apparently I am “heartless” for speaking out after 11 years of holding in my rage and pain over this. Apparently, my job as a “birth” mother is to sit back and let all of the adoptees and adoptive parents talk about how amaaaaazing adoption is, and what a miracle it is, without pointing out the HUGE turd that’s floating in the punch bowl. Ironically enough, the “sensitive” thing for me to do is to listen while they talk heartlessly about birth moms and say things like”oh she was so courageous!” when a) they have no idea, she was probably scared shitless and b) totally minimize any pain or abuse she endured when she made her choice.
Fuck that. I’m sending this article to everybody I know.
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My apologies for skipping so much of your post, but when I saw this:
“I would rather this child lived in a world where his biological parents were able to raise him. Compared to that, every other option is crap.”
I had to stop and tell you THANK YOU, THANK YOU SO MUCH. This is what I’ve been saying ever since I became an adoptive parent, and you would probably not be surprised at how many people do not get this. I love being a parent, and in a world in which all children born were born to people who wanted to and were able to raise them, I would never have gotten to be a parent.
And I would be all right with that. Completely all right.
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As an aunt to an adopted girl who came to be from a rape, I read through this and got mad at how cruel people be. Maybe I’ve tuned it out, maybe I’m a little removed so it doesn’t hurt unbearably, but I can’t even tell you how badly my brother and his wife have been treated. One thing you did make me realize is that no one says anything about her biological father.
Circumstances are not allowing my brother to “legally” adopt his daughter at this time. Because of the trauma the mother went through, she’s having trouble with everything and has gotten everything from “Why didn’t you just get an abortion” to threatening to take her daughter away because they deem her incompetent. Not let the child live with my brother, literally take the child and put him into “the system”. My mother has offered to take her in. I have offered to take her in. But it’s up to the biological mother who is being thumbed at by her family because she is traumatized and desperately trying to be a mother at the same time. If the mother’s family has her way, they will BOTH be put into the system.
My brother has no say in what happens to his daughter and it sickens me. He could very well lose the baby girl that he’s pledged his heart and soul to. He has no rights as he isn’t the “legal father”. As her Aunt (and I consider her my Niece) I would walk over fire for her but I’m legally barred from doing so. My brother isn’t the bio-dad and therefore has no rights to a child who was born from incredibly unfortunate circumstances despite the fact that there’s a huge support network RIGHT HERE that is willing and able to take her in and do whatever we can for my sister-in-law. We don’t care how the child came about. She’s a child and she needs love and support just like any other. The sad part is that she may end up in the system because of legal technicalities, and so may her mother if her family’s motions to gain custody of her as an adult go through.
We are legally barred from so much as visiting her because of the mother’s family. My brother is looking at the possibility of losing his daughter to a rapist because the biological father has legal precedence when it comes to custody. He has to surrender the child before my brother can “legally” adopt her. Before any of this village can step in and help.
There’s a village waiting but the people that run it may put a child that has a support network in place in a place where there is one. There is nothing beautiful and wonderful here except for the fact that the child exists. The birth father is a criminal but also a human being and you can’t ignore the fact that he may well feel emotionally liable to the child despite his crime and that there’s also a possibility that he WON’T want the child and is just holding custody over the mother’s head.
Who gets to decide who is most fit to raise a child? Why can’t all of us play a certain part? I have never even met my Niece but I’m doing all I can for her. Why are there legal bars between a man who loves his wife’s child and is doing everything in his power to HELP her and his wife. Why is he being forced to live apart from them because his wife’s family has deemed themselves more competent than anyone else to take care of their daughter, period.
I hope that was followable. I hope you can see that there are multiple families, multiple generations and multiple connections in this whole mess. That you can see there are privileges that are present that aren’t deserved and ones that are deserved that aren’t being given. I hope you can see that I myself am speaking from privilege; that I simply assume the position of Aunt based on the fact that there was a child born into my family yet I am not a legal Aunt, and that my brother has assumed the position of Father yet is not a father. I hope you can see that the Biological Father is both in and far from a position of privilege.
Most importantly, I hope you can see that LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH when you are dealing with trauma, legal technicalities and money. That LOVE WILL NOT EXPLAIN what is going on to my traumatized sister-in-law and my niece. That LOVE WILL NOT HEAL the hurt that is going through this family, and it is not going to make this all just go away like a soothing balm.
This hurts, and everyone involved is hurt. But you know what? It’s a child. If I turn my back on her because I am a hurting adult, I may as well turn it on every other child in need. Who am I to pick and choose which child is “worth it”?
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while public adoption is technically “free,” it costs the state much more to be fully supporting a foster child than it does for the state to partially or not at all support an adopted child. Then tie that up with a mixture of people who honestly, in their heart of hearts, want to do the right thing by these kids, and you have employees that just KNOW this kid will be better in another family, and if they have to lie or cheat to get them there, well, it’s the greater good, right? And if that greater good keeps the cash flowing upward, certainly nobody is going to call them on it.
This. This. Sorry to be coming to this so late, but when all that was going on in April, my partner and I were reeling from having just disrupted an adoption. Because I am an academic expert on a country which sends many “orphans” (hah) into the transnational adoption system, I knew enough about it to know that I could never bear to support it. The private system here is for people a *lot* richer than us. And so we decided to adopt via the public system.
Our public-system story: We got all the training available, read all the books, thought we knew what we were getting into, carefully asked not to be matched with any child with an attachment-disorder diagnosis. (Yes, we know now that this was unbelievably naive. But we’re Canadian! We expected that civil servants would be truthful! We thought that there would be clear diagnoses that everyone would agree on! Among many other dumb assumptions!) (And yes, of course, we also thought that love would fix everything, just like everyone else.)
So we were matched with a severely traumatized 11-year-old girl who started being physically violent toward me almost immediately after “coming home.” We called up the social workers. They said “what are you doing to her? she’s never done that before!” She told us, no, she had done that before, that’s why her previous adoptions had been disrupted. We said, what previous adoptions? the social workers said, “oh, um, her file is very thick, we must have missed something…”
So one of the problems was that in the public system here, social workers come and go very quickly and there’s not much continuity for a kid in the system. Plus a child available for adoption gets a completely new adoption-specialist social worker who may never speak to previous foster-care social workers who may never speak to previous child-at-risk social workers. Plus social workers specializing in difficult/late adoption placements get paid out of a special grant set up by the Dave Thomas Foundation and that grant money depends on a certain number of adoptions being finalized in the province every year … Of course we didn’t understand any of this until much too late. And maybe we would have done the same thing anyway, maybe we couldn’t understand until it was too late.
Anyway, it ended up after six terrifying months with the child we were trying to adopt back in a group home, and then another group home, where she appears to be doing all right now, or as all right as a child in a group home could be. I think she’s more physically secure, anyway, and maybe less likely to hurt other people. My partner and I are both in not such great shape ourselves. We will always wish that we had the strength to continue to live with this child, despite the violence. We were so full of grief and anger that it nearly ended our marriage. His parents were so angry that we disrupted the adoption – they really, really wanted grandchildren, and were unable to believe that the violence was not my fault somehow – that they are still not speaking to us. My family, meanwhile, were supportive but now puzzled about why we can’t just “put all that behind us.” So a lot of relationships were terribly disrupted by this,not just our relationship with this child.
I don’t know what would have been the best thing under the circumstances for the child we tried to adopt, but clearly we weren’t it. And to live through those weeks when everyone’s water-cooler talk was about this Russian event right after – yeah, that was hard. Anyway, belatedly, *thank you so much* for this blog and this post, and for trying to keep a space open for truthful talk on this difficult subject.
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I am not an adoptive parent, nor was I an adopted child (although I thought I was 100-percent positive I HAD been abducted at birth by the WRONG parents! lol)
Just a little story I would like to share – I don’t think adoptive parents and regular parents struggle with so many differences that they can’t be understood… here’s what I mean:
When I was pregnant with my son, my own mother said (based on a false alpha-feta-protein test that was wrong) “Your child is going to have DOWNS SYNDROME… the doctors said he would! (hence, the false-positive test)…GET AN ABORTION! YOU DO NOT (screaming here) WANT TO RAISE A KID FOR 30 YEARS BECAUSE HE CANT TIE HIS OWN SHOES! I think that was the deepest breath I took before I finally put the phone down, and turned to my husband: “We are keeping this baby,” I said. “Yes, it’s the right thing.” And it was. But yes, I (or any of us that are reading this blog -adoptive parents, natural parents– could have chosen at that time instead to say “Hey, I don’t want all that responsibility. Forget this — take the baby back! I don’t want it!” (so ok, I came real close to that in childbirth…40 hours of labor and I was real close to saying those words! But … I digress) What I’m trying to say is… we (most of us) do stick with something like this for someone we love (our children, whether of origin or of adoption – it really doesn’t matter). And for us parents that had ours the “old-fashioned way” there are still times I don’t understand why my child isn’t somewhat more like me… why we can’t work out certain differences… why he wants to go do something silly like that (???! – whatever “that” happens to be at the time)…
but you know what? He and I have put his differences aside. Even more importantly, he does not have Downs Syndrome, despite 2 doctors’ warnings that he would…
All of you parents out there, no matter “how” you became a parent, keep love in your heart and make time to learn their interests, as well as wanting them to share in yours… you both might learn something (I have learned so much from my son. I HOPE one day he learns something from me! lol)
Keep the faith xo
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So.. I had to stop reading the comments because there are a lot and it is late, etc. Therefore, if this has already been said, I apologize for repedity in advance. That said: I am an adult who was adopted at birth. Honestly I would never have told you adoption was negative at all until about 2 years ago. In fact, I would read books where adoptees talked about pain and such and scoffed at the notion of a “hole in you.” However, I have started to understand the ways adoption facilitated brokenness in me. For one, though an infant can’t remember things consciously long-term, I think there is more understanding than we realize, and subconsciious stuff does get “remembered.” As in, the feeling of abandonment, not feeling good enough, etc. (I think I felt this way but couldn’t put words to it because when the feelings formed it wasn’t with conscous words attached). Hence, I REALLY appreciated your notion that though what IS may or may not be good, it does not negate the incredible, grievable loss of what should be. I do not think (as one commenter pointed out) that “pregnancy just happening” doesn’t mean that it makes adoption not a result of things gone awry. And also, growing up, I think I felt a lot of guilt about my hurts. I felt that to say adoption hurts was to say my parents (adoptive) had done a bad job (though I see now with more open eyes all the ways they did not give me what I needed). Hence, I felt I needed to bury the hurt. I think, though adoption puts children in families, it still is not how things were intended to go, and there is loss there. If someone deals with that loss or does not feel the need to deal with any “supposed” (to them) sense of loss, it is ok. I was there. Now, I’m here. Which is why I appreciate your point that we grow & change. And I love that you point to adult adoptees as those who know. And that you pointed out in a comment that in doing so you took into consideration that experiences are different. Yet it is still an experience that is first hand. I think as I grow I am learning that even though I know adoption first hand, it still does not make me an expert or an authority, or able to make any kind of generalization whatsoever. All I know is my life, the good, the ugly and yada yada.
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: Christ. All right, let’s go.
First, I am offended by phrases like “regular parents” or “natural parents.” That implies that adoptive parents are somehow irregular or unnatural, and that’s a pretty damning thing to hear about your own family. Imagine if I referred to families where a member has Down’s syndrome as “abnormal” or “damaged” families, and referred to all other families as normal. That’s the sting you deliver with those words, to both the parents and the children who have to hear themselves described as unnatural. I can’t tell you what the “appropriate” terminology is, because people in the adoption triad all prefer different things. On this blog, I use the term “adoptive family” and “biological family,” and those are acceptable terms to use here. But I can tell you that people who use the phrases “regular parents” and “natural parents” have just outed themselves as knowing fuck-all about adoption — terminology like that is a dead giveaway that you 1) have not learned enough about adoption, 2) have not made even the barest glimmer of an attempt to learn enough before deciding you are informed enough on this topic to open your fool mouth, and 3) don’t even have enough common sense to realize that what you said is hurtful. I’m sure you would not prefer I call your son retarded or a freak, even if I obviously had the nicest of intentions while doing so, and I’m sure you’d think I was a bit of an insensitive, thoughtless asshole if I did. It wouldn’t matter if I said, “How wonderful your retarded freak of a son is, he really reminds me of my normal son, and it’s wonderful that I can see all the similarities between them,” I would still be an asshole for saying it. It would also be a red flag for you that I know absolutely nothing about Down’s syndrome, and perhaps you’d then prefer I keep my mouth shut about it. That being the case (your case, that is), I suggest you read up on what adoptees, adoptive parents, and biological parents think, feel, and prefer before you decide you have the knowledge or experience to comment upon their lives in any way that isn’t ignorant, offensive, 101, or just plain cruel.
Actually, that kind of goes for the rest of your comment as well. While you might have a lot in common with an adoptive parent who has adopted a special needs child — when discussing special needs — you do not have anything in common with them when it comes to adoption, because you have not adopted. You may have a lot in common when it comes to the basics of parenting, such as what it’s like dealing with homework or tying up shoes, but you do not have anything in common when it comes to parenting an adopted child. There are certainly many ways that adoptive and non-adoptive families are similar, and I agree that we could all do with learning more about this and finding new ways to extend empathy and understanding and tools of support to one another. But that doesn’t mean that a non-adoptive family can know, at all, what life is like for an adoptive family, though as you can see, that doesn’t stop people from making grand assumptions about their own ability to generalize.
If you do not know how your experience and an adoptive family’s experience are different, it’s because you have not bothered to find out. Not knowing, and not taking the time or work necessary to find out, is a privilege you have. You get to decide if it’s a privilege you want to keep, in the rest of the world. On this blog, you do not get to decide, because this is my blog. If you want to comment here again, you are required to do a little more work than thinking about the fact that you sure do love your son. I’m not going to give you an assignment, or tell you how to go about learning about adoption. Part of your work is realizing that it is not anybody else’s job to rectify your ignorance. From your immediate reaction to this post (let’s talk about me! I’m quite sure that’s relevant somehow! These things other people with completely different lives go through? I’m quite sure I know a lot about that!), I’m assuming learning about adoption isn’t high on your priority list — at least, it’s not higher than mouthing off about adoption, and I’ll advise you that those priorities need to be switched around right fast.
While your story is an interesting story and a nice story, it has nothing to do with adoption. The fact that you thought it was relevant to a discussion about adoption is staggeringly arrogant. The fact that you thought your story that does not involve adoption somehow gives you insight into adoption is staggeringly ignorant. Imagine if, after discussing the difficulties and challenges inherent in raising a child with Down’s syndrome — something which may require a certain level of vulnerability from you, and you may expect some kind of sympathy, kindness, or basic affirmation that I have actually even heard anything you have said — I told you that hey, you know, you should really remember that everybody experiences that, because this one time I nursed a sick puppy. Or, if after discussing how difficult pregnancy or the decision to continue pregnancy was for you, I responded that once I had gas, and I had to decide if I wanted to go out to a party that night or stay in, and it was a really hard decision. That would be extraordinarily dismissive of me. This is what you’ve done here today, and it was extraordinarily dismissive of you.
If you are interested in what adoption is like, for all members of the triad, and if you are interested in how you can and cannot relate to that experience, I highly suggest you close your mouth and open your ears, starting here.
And, to cover what I suspect will come next, you can try here, here, and here as well.
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@Eli:
While I don’t share your experience of learning to put words to your feelings about adoption, I think I understand what you mean here. At least, this part spoke to me. It took me so long to realize how damaged my life had become with my abusive ex, because I had never not been abused. I didn’t realize that the feeling people were describing with the word “love” was different from the feeling I was describing with the same word. How would I know? I had to find these things out by having new experiences, but I didn’t even know there were new experiences to be had. I didn’t know that I was missing anything, because I’d never had it long enough to miss. I had to learn these things by talking with others about them, but when we were all using the same words to describe different feelings, I just frequently came away with a sense of alienness and brokenness, because everybody else seemed to be able to deal with the things they called “stress” or “worry” or “anxiety,” and I felt completely crippled.
I remember the day it clicked for me. I was reading a description of a panic attack from a psychology textbook, and I suddenly realized that it was describing, accurately, these feelings I just seemed to keep getting, every day. The only word I’d had to describe that before was “stress,” and I thought that’s what it was. So I thought I was just utterly broken, because other people somehow managed stress by “getting over it,” or talking about it, or just relaxing, or having a glass of wine, or watching a movie, and yet I was just completely incapacitated by “stress”, unable to breathe or walk straight, feeling like I was in a tunnel, seeing yellow bands across my eyes, afraid I would start screaming or yelling or convulsing in public. I thought that’s what everybody felt, and somehow they were just able to handle it. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard of panic attacks before, but the ways people described them, it sounded like something that just completely broke you, made you end up in a hospital. And since I was able to walk and talk through my panic attacks — albeit I was in a complete daze and digging my fingernails into my palms until they bled — obviously I couldn’t be having a panic attack, because I didn’t feel that bad. It didn’t occur to me to think that the way I felt was bad enough, goddammit, but instead I thought it wouldn’t actually be actionable or worth considering until I was tied to a hospital bed.
Anyway, when that all finally clicked for me, it was just this confusing (though often relieving) revelation that I wasn’t unable to handle normal living, because I had never actually experienced it. What I thought was normal was never once the thing other people mean when they talk about a normal life. I was having trouble handling a sincerely fucked-up situation, and people should have trouble handling that — that’s what proved that my brain and body somehow knew that what I was experiencing wasn’t right, wasn’t okay, wasn’t for me. That was my health shining through, the parts of me that screamed “YOU ARE IN PAIN,” and all those years, I thought that was my craziness shining through, and that I had to suppress it at any cost.
This isn’t what you were saying, but it made me think of something. One of the issues I see around adoption is, like you said, the feeling that somehow you are not allowed or able or encouraged to express that loss, because there are also happy things in adoption, and somehow the loss is construed as negating the happy things (instead of coexisting with it, or even being an integral part of the happiness). I think, to some level, this speaks to the idea that loss is not natural, that it is something to “get through” or “get over” or ignore or suppress, and that’s something I see in so many places. But every living thing is assured, just absolutely guaranteed from the moment they draw breath, that they will experience loss at some point in their lives. It may not be “natural,” however you choose to define it, but it’s certainly expected, and normal, and inescapable, so it’s amazing that people still manage to react as if it’s something to be pushed aside so quickly and easily. That’s unnatural.
The things I have lost have made me grab on harder to the things I now know are important, and I wouldn’t know these things were important — wouldn’t consider them so — if not for that loss. The loss is a crucial part of the things that are wonderful; they would not be wonderful without the loss having come first. The seven years I lost in an abusive relationship make me grasp at each day, and feel lucky to have them, and feel lucky to still be young, and it makes me have the backbone (where I never had one before) to put a stop to abusive situations that start to crop up much, much sooner, because I don’t have the time to waste anymore. That’s a proud part of myself. When I decide I am “over” the abuse, that it’s time to stop talking and thinking about it, to stop feeling grief over the years I lost, I start to forget about how it started, how it crept into my life, how it seemed so normal, how easy it was, how hard it is to stop once it’s started. That’s not a worthwhile trade-off for me. My caution and my strength and my mouthiness are parts of me that I respect and love because they were well-fucking-earned, and came from a place of such deep loss that I could never have imagined having caution and strength and a big mouth. I may have rather never been abused and give up those things I earned, but that’s not my life and never will be, so there’s only so much future in that line of thinking.
Anyway, what I’m badly failing to say is, I think loss is a very respectable part of the human experience. That doesn’t make it right or wanted, but it does make it a crucial part of every human being, and what makes their lives unique, and what makes their joys unique. And it’s a deep shame that the loss of adoptees is a subject of contention and dismissal, instead of a necessary part of a very rich story about what makes the goodness in their lives so intense and special — loss is what helped make that goodness happen, and loss is what made everybody think it could never happen, and the existence of survival and thriving in the face of loss is a necessary part of the story that there will always be survival and thriving in the face of loss.
It’s late. I’m rambling. Sorry for hijacking your comment.
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This post may have changed my life.
I was adopted. My adoptive mother went through treatment and failed time and again. She was and is awful; I stopped having regular contact with her in my late 20s on the advice of a psychiatrist I was seeing. She’s never really been able to see the person that I am. I am either a devil or an angel depending upon how much the way I am currently acting looks to her like her image of the daughter she believed she would have.
She doesn’t really even like children; she liked dancing and she liked her work, but she didn’t enjoy living in a house with small kids, yet she had to do it because it was expected of her.
I have been in therapy since I was 16 and I have a huge abandonment issue, but I think that could have been resolved if I had been adopted by someone who was able to acknowledge that I am actually a person with a personality that is all mine. My father and I got on all right. Anyhow…there is all kinds of garbage attached to talking about this. If your parents don’t rape you or beat you until you bleed you are not supposed to cut them off, ever, and if they are saints who took in someone else’s abandoned baby…well.
I found out later on that my biological mother fought the adoption.
I’ve never been to look for her and people think I should; but she was very devout and I’m not sure she’d be any happier by the way I turned out; plus, there is no way in hell that I can feel good about telling her that the people she fought were not good parents.
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Wow, I never did make my point. My point is that I never realised that there were lots of people out there with similar experiences. I always thought that most people who were adopted had the happy experiences the posters above seem so determined to push on the rest of us…and I feel so ridiculous because of course it makes sense that mothers like mine would be, well, like mine. At least since I was born in the days before IVF I am only Plan B, not Plan D? idk, but you know what I mean, I feel sure.
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Harriet –
Thank you for understanding. You found what I meant overall, even if it isn’t what I thought at the time that I meant. (I was, after all, extremely tired at the time of posting).
I really appreciated the bit about brokenness. The bit that you quoted me as, I was actually trying to quote from you.
So, you win. You made me think about adoption in a new way, which is pretty rad. Sometimes I get all “I am the authority on this” at least in my head. 
And I don’t want to be, nor do I (really) think I am.
It is just hard to explain adoption to non-adoptees. Even people who want to adopt kids some day don’t tend to get it. People are particularly confused when they’ve known me long enough to know how hard I used to defend how adoption is great in every way, and how now I don’t. Or am wrestling at least with not feeling that way anymore. Though there is, of course, still guilt attached.
Eventually, i think I’ll be rid of that. I hope!
And yeah, I loved your thoughts on not knowing there was a different way to be. I think a lot of my ways of going about life go back to that central thing. I don’t know what “normal” looks like.
And I liked your take on loss. It’s a good way of looking at it. Going to have to ponder it some more as far as how to get there, but yeah. I like it.
Thank you for honesty and understanding!
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Oh. And I didn’t think you hijacked my comment. If you did, I don’t mind. Nothing to apologize for.
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