Adoptive parents are endlessly pushing back against the public's assumption that the strength of their bonds with their children are less real or permanent. Ask about an adopted child's "real mother" and watch them recoil, or ask a family with adopted and birth children if they love all their children the same and you are likely to get cold silence or an earful. We are used to people questioning the strength of our relationship so we defend it with the intensity any parent would.
I find though, that from one adoptive mother to another, the conversations go somewhat differently. In like company, our fears and vulnerabilities surface. So right now I'm going to speak to you as if you were another adoptive mother, and skip the mother lion routine.
I think that the adoptive relationship has the potential to be inherently insecure. When people ask if I can love the son I adopted in the same way I love the daughter I bore, (and they don't really ask that) I can ask them if they love the spouse they married as much as they love their children. The relationship has power because of a mutual choice. Couples fall in love and make commitments. The analogy might work for the way I feel about the son I don't share blood with, but he will have to decide if he feels the same.
Not right now, of course. Right now he is insanely in love with me and I am the core around which his little life orbits. In the future is when he will have to come to terms with the fact that his presence in our family was decided by adults and was out of his power.
That's been on my mind as I think about adopting again. As the choosers in adoption, we have so much power. We pick everything. Maybe our choices are limited by circumstances like which programs we qualify for, but we are still making choices that result in a child joining our family. In cooperation with agencies, social workers, and governments, we bring a child into our family that has no say, whatsoever in the matter.
Personally, I think that's messed up.
I don't know how it could be any different. That's the way of the world: people with power make choices they think will benefit the vulnerable.
I'm not saying that children won't be benefited by being adopted, especially children who will grow up in institutions if they are not adopted. I'm just saying that when a child gets old enough to understand that they were vulnerable and other people decided what would happen in their lives, that's got to be hard to deal with.
I've been thinking of this specifically in regard to choosing a country program, or another U.S. adoption of a black child.
We were at the park this week and my kids were playing with an Asian girl. There is a massive Asian population in Sydney that includes primarily people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pacific Islander, and Vietnamese heritage, as well as a large Indian population. The area where we live and the places where we travel seem almost 50/50 Anglo/Asian or Indian. Anyway, at the park I was imagining how I would feel if I was parenting an Asian child and was at the park with this other mother.
I realized that I felt intimidated to parent a child of another ethnicity, right under the noses of people of that ethnicity, in a culture where adoption is uncommon. Back in Nashville I was interacting with the black community all the time (on surface levels), but adoption is not uncommon there. Here it feels like my child's community (if they were Asian or Indian) could really scorn me if I wasn't up to snuff as the parent of a child of their community.
As a white woman raising a (biracial) black son in the South, I think I was pretty isolated from criticism because of my white privilege.
Suddenly India (which was the more serious consideration) wasn't seeming to attractive and I started to think about Africa some more. That's when it dawned on me, how much power I have and how vulnerable children are. If I don't want my child's community peering over my shoulder as I parent, I can just adopt a child in complete isolation from their culture. That's a choice I can make.
I've always said that raising a child in close proximity to their cultural heritage is what I'm striving for, yet I find myself afraid of adopting a child from another country and being criticized and rejected by that community. I'm feeling the cushion of my power as a white woman in a highly racialist city deflated, and coming to realize how much it was there. I'm feeling myself accountable to the way I raise another culture's child. Before, cushioned by my whiteness in a white/black hierarchy, it was my aspiration and goal to raise my son to be connected and proud of his black heritage, but no one could hold me to it.
So there it is, my nitty gritty dirty confession, talking to you like my closest adoptive mom girl friend who I know will listen with an open heart and help me find the high road. I'm talking to you like it's only Amie listening. Go easy on me, I'm trying to be woman enough to fess up to my own prejudices, even though I've seen others get flamed for it.
...She managed to make real connections with her children's (Korean) community. I think she is a true inspiration and role model in this area.