Growing Family

Responding to Heather

I think Heather's comment on Choosing Your Audience brought up some very interesting points to consider when you start thinking about adoption reform. I'd like to use it as a starting point to discuss what I'm often talking about here, without ever actually defining. I read so many adoption blogs that are pro-reform, I often forget that some people who read here aren't in that world.

Sometimes in the adoption world we talk about the painful irony that women who "should" place their children for adoption typically don't, while the women who place could typically be very good parents. I really believe that we should fight to keep a mother and child together, but not at any cost. Especially if keeping them together is damaging to the child, with no change for the better in sight. Let me tell you what I mean.

Heather discusses her experience working with parents who may be dealing with drug addiction, incarceration, and poverty. These parents are at risk from having their children removed from their custody. It is less common for parents living in these types of cyclical crisis to voluntarily place their children for adoption. They may have their children removed and their parental rights terminated.

I think that our society, as a whole, is sustaining racism that contributes to these kinds of situations. Statistically, (how cheap is it that I'm not going to look up the statistics!) African Americans are overrepresented in the prison system, in school drop out rates, in poverty, etc, etc. So I think there is the need for reform in our society so that everyone has more of a fighting chance for education and economic stability. I know of some cases where women that are in the ethnic minority, and also are impoverished, make adoption plans for their children because they can't survive financially with their existing children, if they add the expense of another child. That's just wrong. No one in the Western World (or anywhere else) should have to give up a child that they love and want because they can't afford to keep them. I also think that we should start providing better health care and birth control options so that fewer women have to separate themselves from a wanted child by an untimely pregnancy in the first place...but you've heard me talk about that before.

From my experience, the more common scenario that ends in a woman placing a child for adoption is this: a woman in between 18-30 years old, with some college education or with college plans in process, gets pregnant and does not feel that she can sufficiently provide for the baby. I don't mean the difference between living on the street or not, I mean providing things like private school education, family vacations, extracurriculars, and the like. While the mother might not have much in the way of finances at the time the child is born, she is often financially stable within a couple years.

An attitude that I saw and heard for years but didn't find alarming till recently is that, for a Christian girl, placing her child for adoption is a way to undo the wrong choice of premarital sex. Through the saintly act of blessing a childless couple with the baby they've always wanted, she is absolved of the guilt of promiscuity. I've heard it in memoirs written by Christian birthmothers, and I've heard is stated by Christian birthmothers. I also hear it a lot from random people I meet. The sentiment is "placing a child for adoption allows a woman to make amends for her mistakes, and get a fresh start on life." That may seem nice in theory, but tell a woman who has lost a baby through miscarriage or infant death "well this just lets you get a fresh start on all the things you wanted to do with your life." Placing a child for adoption IS LOSING that child. Open adoption helps to maintain a relationship, but a woman is losing the opportunity to be her child's mother.

Placing a child for adoption is a permanently life-altering experience. It is a loss you may grieve and learn to live with, but it is not something you "bounce back" from. It would make sense that women should be thoroughly prepared for this decision, and have ongoing support and counseling after they place a child. That is really the exception rather than the norm. For one thing, many adoptions are facilitated by attorneys and counseling for the mother considering adoption is sometimes non-existent. Then, in adoptions being facilitated by agencies, the mother is typically counseled by the agency staff. This is often a conflict of interest, a glaring conflict of interest in the case of for-profit agencies whose revenues increase with their number of placements. Also, many adoption counseling positions require a Bachelor's degree or less, while the type of experience and insight necessary to help a woman navigate a placement decision is something gained through lots of experience and or education.

Most women making voluntary placements do so through an attorney or agency (seldom through the state) but the adoptive families are the ones with the money, paying into the system. It makes sense that many (if not most) attorneys and agencies are biased towards the adoptive families and women making adoption plans get the short end of the deal. The life-long counseling resources they were promised might not materialize, they might have been told that they'd have a hard year and then a better life, only to struggle with extreme depression and suicidal thoughts, they might be promised an open adoption, only to have the door slammed in their face with no legal recourse.

That's why I care about reform. The girl at the barbecue I mentioned had a very clear delineation between us (the mothers that care and want our children) and them (the irresponsible girls who will abort if they can't give their child away). That line is really non-existent. The women making voluntary placements are our sisters, our nieces, our friends.

My Fragile Faith

My earlier post is only a couple hours old but I'm already back here seeking to clarify that I'm not dogging evangelicals. Heck, I am an evangelical...or was...or something. I'm not even exactly sure what an evangelical is. Some of our friends gather for an annual book and wine exchange when everyone is in town for Christmas or New Years. This year someone gave a subscription to geez magazine and one of the articles featured a breakdown of all the evangelical subcategories, complete with the authors that represent common views and the favorite songs sung by each group! We were laughing so hard, and trying to put each other in the right categories. It was a hoot. And no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't define what it means, exactly, to be an evangelical Christian.

But we live in a society where the Christian right is becoming a powerful player in U.S. politics and policy and I feel a need to define myself in relation to them. That's the real problem: right now my faith (rather my status as a Christian, which seems worlds away from my faith) is being defined as it relates to political standpoints and cultural Christianity. In the process I feel that I'm losing my own personal Jesus.

I'm really struggling with how I fit into the  church, and into my own church. For the record I think that my church is pretty incredible, and gets to the heart of Jesus' teachings most of the time, leaving the application up to the individual (i.e. lots of thought given to the state of one's heart in relation to God, not much discussion on what a Christian should or should not do). But that disclaimer aside, how do I fit into a larger religious culture that oftentimes denies the existence of racism, subjugates women, marginalizes people without resources, alienates homosexuals, ignores our responsibility to the planet, and in general forces a heavy hand instead of extending an open one?

I am so repelled by much of Christian culture that I find myself distanced from Jesus. I think that's really a pity. As I write this tears well in my eyes. I am in a time of great searching and inner turmoil. I feel like I'm closing my eyes and holding my breath and jumping into the dark water of questioning the Christianity I was raised in. I am just praying that I find Jesus' hand in the storm.

So, I'm not trying to be snarky to evangelicals. That's really common and only cheap thrills. But right wing conservatives are really poking me, and I'd like to poke back. Not because I absolutely disagree with some of their fundamental perspectives, but because the way they are applied so often sacrifices people at the alter of principles. I didn't see Jesus doing that.

I leave my faith unmentioned most of the time, but this struggle is a really big part of my current experience. It's like Over the Rhine so painfully put it "I'm not letting go of God, I'm just losing my grip."

Choosing Your Audience

Talking about the need for adoption reform isn't really popular in the evangelical world. Actually, I don't know that for sure, but that's the impression I got at a back yard barbecue I attended Monday.

I didn't know anyone there except the hosts and one other friend. I think everyone else was life-long friends who had grown up in a local conservative evangelical church.

My friends asked me the inevitable question that leads to an internal cascade of questions. "So how many children do you want to have?" I told them that I didn't have a simple answer. That I used to want to adopt a lot of children, and birth one or two, but now I have a lot of questions about the ethics of adoption and it will take me awhile to rebuild my confidence enough to venture back into an adoption.

What need for reform? they ask. And then we're off, like a racehorse starting from the gate I'm trying to summarize the injustices that take place daily, in my country and around the world, when children are separated from their families and find their way to adoptive parents. I'm getting better at answering this question. I've got it down to a succinct 3-5 minutes for people who understand realities like economic disadvantage, human rights violations, socio-cultural-politically perpetuated oppression, and the misuse of religious pressure. If I have to explain these things, it can take an hour or more. Or, like a horse stumbling during the race, we can just wipe out altogether and I take a moment to stare "blink blink" and try to decide what to say next.

Enter unknown to me-conservative-evangelical-girl: But what if you don't let them adopt and they just start aborting all the babies? We wouldn't want that!

Me: blink. blink. blink. Ahhh, I'm not saying adoption should be illegal, just that it should be done differently so that if someone really wants to parent but doesn't have the resources, they should be able to connect with the resources, and if someone is undecided, they shouldn't be pressured through any means, to place a child.

That's the hard thing. I can track with people who have no experience with adoption and have never even heard of the need for reform. I can run really move with people who get the big picture about inequality. I just can't do them both at the same time.

Unfortunately the girl with no frame of reference for what I was talking about just moved on to another group of people, seemingly intimidated or offended by our conversation. I didn't want that. I just didn't know how to slow down to include her, when my other friends were so many steps ahead in understanding the need for reform.

My sister-in-law said that investigating the need for reform in any work that is seeking to help people (i.e. help orphaned children, or babies being placed for adoption) is like peeling an infinite onion. Each time you think you've gotten to the core of the matter, you find another layer, eventually coming full circle to where you started, only to peel some more. My brother and sister-in-law had some interesting insights in the snatches of conversation we were able to develop between kid interventions. I'll try to write about those soon.

Getting Honest Here

Every time I leave Nashville I experience some culture shock upon my return. This trip has been no different. And to be honest, when I come back, I get pretty lonely.

In Holland I popped into the little bubble we live in there where our friends are aware of current world events, and have opinions about said events. All our friends and family are multi-lingual. Everyone cares about the environment.

I'm sure that my friends here in Nashville care about issues but for the most part, my communication with the people I know centers around children and family. And that's really important. I don't want to belittle that at all.

But I miss being challenged by people who know more than I do about so many things. Who care about causes more than I do. I miss my girl in Connecticut who's always readying interesting stuff and asking me about it. I miss my brother and his wife (soon to migrate to Notre Dame) and their views from the trenches of human rights and aid work. I miss my girl in China who is doing everything she wants. I only have a handful of people here in Nashville who are interested in the issues I care about, and one of them is moving away on Friday.

So for one thing, I've been on another continent for a week and there's the normal process of reconnecting with my life and reestablishing my routine. But beyond that, I often find myself feeling lonely amongst my friends. Maybe if we had the time to connect outside of playgroup I would learn that they share some of my passions, but that rarely happens.

And each time I re-enter Nashville I feel like I'm squeezing into a smaller place. Recently the Captain wanted to move the Sprout from the bassinet to the pack n play because he was afraid the small sleeping space was stunting her growth, like a goldfish in a bowl too small. That's how I feel: every time I am moving towards something I feel my nose bump against the glass.

My Growing Sprout

My daughter is growing faster than I can cope with. I used to nurse her lying down, with her toes tickling my belly. Now her knees nestle against my hip bones. She uses my horizontal lap as a trampoline, pushing herself up, yanking my breast with her. I am simultaneously a source of nutrition and a piece of exercise equipment.

My daughter has two bottom teeth. The pediatrician wants her to be trying solids but I am putting that off. My daughter is growing faster than I can cope with. My dutch family, in the direct way that typifies their culture, observe her teeth and say "oh, so are you done nursing? Is she hurting your breast?" I can't bring myself to let her eat something else, teeth or not. I need to hold on to being the center of her universe as long as I can.

With Small Sun I was rejoicing with every new development, in awe of the rapidity with which it occurs. This second time around I am squeezing the Sprout tight, like I did during the turbulence on the plane. It is all going too fast, and I can't cope. The first time I didn't realize how much I would long for those little baby things, once they were gone.

The Language Explosion

Cloudscome said she was interested in Small Sun's language acquisition so I thought I'd write a little something about that.

In our house I speak English nearly all the time with the kids. The Captain speaks ONLY Dutch with them. Our family often speaks Dutch when we are out in public because it gives privacy to our conversations, and it makes me look really cool in front of my friends. Ha.

The week before we went to Holland Small Sun was gaining a lot of new words. He also started putting some words together, which he hadn't really done before.

In Holland he was hearing a lot of new words and he was repeating everything over and over. Of course our family was excited that he could say things in Dutch so they kept encouraging him, which made him use Dutch words even more. By the end of the week he was using sentences like "Oma, auto, bye bye" which described Grandma getting in her car and us saying "bye bye" and waving.

In school (I studied child development) we learned that children raised in bilingual households "code mix" when they are learning to speak. That is, they use words from both languages, sometimes in the same sentence. Children as young as two years old begin to understand that the two languages are separate, at which point they "code switch", speaking the appropriate language to the appropriate parent, for example.

Small Sun has been behind his peers in language acquisition and I've long thought that our bilingual household might have something to do with it. He is learning two words for everything, and hearing two different languages, each with a unique set of rules. First I saw a leap ahead in his English language acquisition, and then a rocket ahead with his Dutch. He is still code mixing most of the time, but at least once he asked me first "auto?" and then repeated "car?".

I am always amazed when the Captain is carrying on a conversation with Small Sun in Dutch, using vocabulary that I don't know. I am amazed at how rapidly vocabulary is gained. Small Sun is getting in weeks what I have worked years to gain.

Out of Bounds

I have a couple rules on my blog. I don't write about my extended family because I think family issues should stay in the family; I don't write details about the circumstances surrounding my son's adoption or our relationship with his birth family because that is his story. So what I'm about to write about is out of bounds, but I need to work some of my thoughts out.

We live in a different state than our son's first family. Our original agreement concerning openness did not include contact, until our son is older. Recently I discovered that Small Sun's first family might like to have a visit after all.

I'm still processing a lot of the details of the situation, which I'll have to do in my own head, and with the Captain. But, I felt that it wasn't a violation of privacy to ask for advice on increasing contact.

Have any of you started out without visits, and then begun them? Does anyone have any wisdom to share? I would love to have more contact than we do now, but that doesn't mean that I know how to go about it.

20 Hours of Travel, 2 New Teeth, and a Bilingual Language Explosion Later

We're home. And I'm so happy.

We had a wonderful time in Holland and now I'm up to my neck in the post-vacation laundry ordeal.

I've had a lot on my mind and I think I have a lot to say. I've been reading some great stuff lately but just don't have enough time to comment on it all.

So, in the moments between jet-lag induced tantrums, I hope to catch up with you all. And with myself.

Ah, I almost forgot to announce, Small Sun is two!

Checking In

I've been out at my mom's for the last week while The Captain was in San Francisco, nerding it up. They have a super slow net connection so I didn't even try to get my mail or blog.

Here at home I'm sliding down the learning curve making the transition from a pc to a mac. Wow. They say that macs are so easy and simple for visual/artistic people. I can't find a thing!

One more day till we get on the jet plane! I've got a lot of work ahead of me unloading this week's suitcases to pack for next week. Washing the Captain's laundry when he gets home in the morning just to turn around and stuff it back in the suitcase.

Travelling with two children, for one week, in another country requires A LOT of planning and packing. I'm tired just thinking about it.

The big news: The Sprout has her first tooth!

The Textures of Love

When you have a child by birth and a child through adoption it's not uncommon for people to wonder if you love them both "the same", or if you love them equally. I never really wondered that. I wanted to adopt long before I wanted to birth a child. In fact, I wanted to adopt more than I wanted to birth a child. Now that I've carried and delivered a baby, I am shocked by my feelings.

I love the Sprout with a ferocity that takes me by surprise. I love Small Sun with the same intensity. But when Small Sun was the same age as the Sprout, that ferocity hadn't taken hold yet. I did love him, certainly I did. But not the way I do now.

I spent the first year of Small Sun's life grieving his loss of his first mother. She was in all my thoughts. I parented Small Sun as if she was looking over my shoulder, always trying to do enough, to be enough, to be everything that she wanted for him, and imagined was embodied in me. I felt guilty that she felt she had to let him go, and I got to parent him. I doubted her choice. I floundered in anti-adoption rhetoric.

It wasn't until Small Sun's finalization in court that I began to come out of that haze. When the judge looked at me and asked me if I was going to provide and care for Small Sun, as if he had been born to me, for the rest of his life, I had one of those experiences where you're watching the scene like a movie. I looked around the courtroom. There was no one else but us. No first mother, no biological father present. I'm not saying that they should have been there, it's just that it was in that moment that it became clear to me that I wasn't holding back any other people from parenting Small Sun, I was holding back myself.

That was the turning point. I felt like I rolled up my sleeves and said "okay kiddo, I guess I'm really your mom." I had taken impeccable care of Small Sun before that. I'd invested all my focus into bonding with him, and encouraging his attachment to me. But in my heart there was reservation. Somehow I was afraid that if I sailed in, all love and kisses, that I was being disrespectful of his loss. I was afraid to claim him as mine, in case he would be taken away. In case my owning him as my child would alienate him from his first mother.

I don't think I'll make that mistake again. I'd read about the importance of adoptive parents feeling entitlement to parent their children. It didn't make any sense to me then. It does now.

Some people seem to knee jerk when I talk about Small Sun belonging with us, or him being ours. I don't see those statements as indicating that he doesn't also belong with his first mom or him being hers. I also recognize that he is an individual and that no one owns him. These days I feel the deepest love and pride for him. Every day I regale his father with the triumphs of his day. We are both so in love.

We plan on adopting again in the future. Each situation is unique. I know that future children will bring more opportunities to grieve their losses. I hope that in the future I can mourn my children's losses while opening my heart to them, with no reservations. I don't want to lose another moment of this fierce love.