Growing Family

Blogging, Causes, Spouses, Partners

For the last week or two The Captain and I have spent our nights together in the living room, each immersed in reading. I'm trying to catch up and keep up with blogs, he just started Infidel. I began to feel disconnected, each in our own separate spheres, bobbing in the living room.

It was only last night that I realized I am venturing deeper and deeper into the ideas of anti-racism and adoption reform, only to look by my side for my trusted partner, to find myself alone. I confronted The Captain, standing over him accusingly as he struggled to read in peace. "Don't you care about the racism in our country (for it is his country too now)? We're raising a child who belongs to a race that is routinely discriminated against!" I struggled against his calm.

He told me "whatever chip that you have that sees racism and wants to attack it, I don't have that chip. I'm just not wired that way." My instinct was to accuse him of not caring, of swimming in white privilege that gives him the ability to not care. But, upon a moment's reflection, I know that is not true. Something else is at play here.

The Captain is European. Dutch. He went to college in Amsterdam. He grew up in an international family, doing international things. He is not saddled with the history of our country. Though he has become a citizen, our roots, so compromised with corruption, aren't his roots. I guess he could worry about whether or not his ancestors were part of the slave trade, but he doesn't. That's not who he is.

He has an indomitable optimism. A clear eye for beauty and truth. I'm glad that as I'm raking around in this muck he is standing tall, breathing in the wind, and holding my hand tightly.

I'd really like to know what it is like for all you other bloggers (who are all women on my blogroll, incidentally)? Does the person that you share your life with share your passion for the cause you blog about? If not, how do they relate to your passion? Does it alienate you from each other?

I'm heading off for a long weekend of bathing in lakes, playing in dappled woods, and laughing with my children and several generations of my people. The freckled Irish and dark-eyed french that brought me to where I am.

A Couple Thoughts

Trying to communicate Laura Brigg's piece at 10:00 at night took a lot out of me. It was too much to try to put my thoughts in with it.

For the record, I don't think that taking away the Adoption Tax Credit will really help poor minority families. It is true that in a budget you cut funding here and apply it there so maybe originally funding was cut from welfare programs and that money was directed to the Adoption Tax Credit. But at this point, it's not like cutting the Adoption Tax Credit would make the money flow backward to where it came from.

And just because most adoptive parents are enjoying the benefits of white privilege (including education opportunities and better paying jobs), it doesn't mean that most adoptive parents have the kind of out-of-pocket cash to finance an adoption.

And for all my inner turmoil, right now I'm not anti-adoption. I'm actually pro-adoption, but right now I'm more pro-adoption-reform.

All that to say, I'm not saying we should eliminate the Adoption Tax Credit and that would help preserve first families. If we as a nation really valued families, and people of color, and "the poor", the funding would be there. The problem is, we don't. We absolutely don't.

The thing that was most important to me in sharing that article was to educate us on the formation of our current system. Let's take a look at how we got into the mess we're in. The reason we have so many children in foster care, the reason why minority children are disproportionately represented in the system, the reason why we're stuck in a rut and not finding our way out. The reason is that we have, across party lines, systematically dis-empowered and deconstructed families in poverty and families of color. And somehow, in that whole mess, adoptive parents came out with a big fat tax break.

I care about this because I'm an adoptive parent. I care about this because my son is a minority in a culture of white power. I care about this because I worked as a child abuse investigator and I've seen, up close, the devastating effects of poverty and oppression. No, taking away the Adoption Tax Credit won't change all that, but acknowledging the mess we're in, and how we got here, is an important step towards change.

Providence and Toast

The most bizarre turn of events occurred in Louisville this weekend. After a successful day of examinations, x-rays and blood and urine samples we walked around downtown Louisville before heading back to our amazing hotel. We put the kids to bed and then sat huddled in the light of the bathroom door, eventually deciding to go to sleep at 9:30 for fear of waking the kids.

Saturday morning we decided to skip the science museum, find a nice breakfast spot, and head home. I had read a review of a place called Toast that sounded right up our alley but I had no idea where it was. Then, as were were driving aimlessly through an interesting antiques/galleries/homeless shelter district I saw a crowd of people outside a cafe. The sign outside declared that it was, indeed, Toast!

We decided to brave the 40 minute wait rather than risk driving around only to find somewhere with a less fabulous menu and another potentially long wait. And standing outside, waiting to be seated is when a pleasant but fairly ordinary experience turned bizarre.

A woman walked up wearing a child strapped to her back. That in itself caught my attention. Not many people wear their babies and very few Americans wear them in the style carrier she had. Then, when she got closer I realized that the child she was wearing was a different ethnicity than she. The adoption wheels began spinning in my head and my assumptions were confirmed when the father approached. It was in that same moment that I realized this family looked familiar.

Impulsively I asked the mom if she posted at a online forum I sometimes frequent. She looked at me with what I assume was suspicion? trepidation? I recognized her from her avatar and yes indeed, she was who I thought she was. She recognized Small Sun from his prize winning picture in a magazine photo contest.

It gets even more strange.

After standing and chatting for some time it comes up that the husband went to high school with one of my best friends. And these people don't even live in Louisville! They were there for a wedding and stepped out to get some breakfast. We were there for these doctor's visits and stopped for breakfast before leaving.

The last twist? They've considered a job-related move to Australia and we'll be driving past their town later this week when we're on our way to our family 4th of July gathering.

I tell you what, they call it the world wide web but it really just makes space feel smaller.

Outsiders Within 2nd Edition

This book is so chock full of amazing insights and new perspectives that I can hardly get through a chapter without my brain beginning to numb at the implications. In this post I want to share with you a piece that I think EVERY person interested in welfare, children's rights, adoption and foster care should read. When I came across this piece I flipped back to the writer's bios, hoping that Laura Briggs, the author, is an academic who I can go study under. She is an academic and I hope that one day I will be able to be her student.

The piece is called Orphaning the Children of Welfare: "Crack Babies", Race, and Adoption Reform. In it, Laura Briggs gives a detailed history of the foster care system, the public policy that dictates welfare systems, and the theories and perspectives, shaped by politically invested individuals that are the roots beneath the much decayed tree of our current day welfare models. Bear with me, this is dense stuff. I'll try to break it down.

Okay, Briggs says

In the 1960s liberal concepts like the "culture of poverty" and Democratic policy papers like the Moynihan Report identified the cause of poverty as family and childrearing, rather than unemployment or wages...[Get that? The responsibility is removed from society giving the poor equal opportunity and the blame for being impoverished is placed on the individuals, typically male individuals in the ethnic minority.]

...In the 1970s child welfare workers were given vast new powers to remove children from families if they suspected abuse or neglect-with neglect definable as poverty-without a legal case or even having to offer evidence of their suspicions... [Emphasis added. So the government says "it's your own fault for being poor and since you're poor, we can take your children.]

...In the 1980s the War on Drugs identified (implicitly Black) "crack babies" as a new "bio-underclass," destined from birth to be ineducable and unemployable; liberals endeavored to put the children in foster care, while conservatives worked to put their mothers in jail...

...In the 1990s...conservatives and Democrats worked simultaneously to end income supports for impoverished mothers and to move their children not just into foster care but out again, into adoptive families. In 1996 and 1997, the adoption tax credit and the Interethnic Placement Provisions...did just that.

Okay. I love how Briggs starts by giving us a time line. So what happened here? First we begin to believe that there is a "culture of poverty". This paradigm originated with Oscar Lewis. He said (and I quote Laura Briggs, quoting Lewis):

In anthropological usage, [culture] implies, essentially, a design for living which is passed down from generation to generation. in applying this concept of culture to the understanding of poverty, I want to draw attention to the fact that poverty in modern nations is not only a state of economic deprivation, of disorganization, or the absence of something. It is also something positive in the sense that is has a structure, a rationale, and defense mechanisms without with the poor could hardly carry on. In short, it is a way of life, remarkable stable and persistent, passed down from generation to generation along family lines.

Essentially, if you're from a poor family, you can't help but become a poor individual yourself. Briggs points out that the transmission of this culture of poverty happens in the family, making the poor family unit a "doomed" unity.

Enter the concept of the "crack baby". Did you know that the "typical user of both cocaine and crack was a young white male"? Yet what image in conjured by the term "crack baby" (thanks to the racialized media frenzy)? Briggs says that

Between 1985 and 2000, more than 200 women faced criminal prosecution for using cocaine and other drugs during pregnancy, and tens of thousands lost their children to foster care. [emphasis added]

Do you want to know what is sickeningly? It just wasn't true. There was no epidemic. There were no "crack babies". Laura Briggs quotes the Journal of the American Medical Association:

...there was no consistent negative association between prenatal cocaine exposure and physical growth, developmental test scores, or receptive or expressive language.

Briggs writes: "most of the effects once attributed to cocaine turn out to be the effect of things like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or environment--including homelessness or domestic violence."

WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAA???????????? No crack babies?

And yet,it was just this "epidemic" that paved the way for our current day child welfare system. Briggs says"

The "crack baby" epidemic produced the contemporary foster care and child welfare system. Between 1985 and 1988, the number of children in out-of-home placement--foster care, psychiatric institutions, and the juvenile justice system--increased by 25 percent.

25%! It was during this time that the movie Losing Isaiah came out... Anyway. Now you've got all these children flooding the foster care system, with little to no hope of being reunited with their parents because of the intense bias against their mothers. A "solution" is necessary. I know, ADOPTION! Briggs says:

...welfare reform and adoption reform were coupled...

Meanwhile Briggs says that neoconservatives were pushing the agenda that providing financial support only to single mothers "caused fatherlessness...hence...introducing a ...disincentive to marry. Fatherlessness, in turn, caused every horror and moral failing known to humans. So welfare causes social pathology."

So you can't help this single mothers financially because that will encourage single motherhood and single motherhood continues the "culture of poverty". Can you see that we're getting in a bind? So the children that are in foster care can't go back to their mothers because their mothers aren't fit to raise them. They can't stay in the foster care system because it is ill-prepared to handle such a load. Briggs says:

The legislation that ultimately came to embody Newt Gingrich's goal of putting the children of welfare mothers in orphanages was the adoption tax credit and a major subsequent piece of legislation...calling for the "Removal of Barriers to Interethnic Adoption."...This linkage made explicit what had been implicit in much of the previous debate; notwithstanding who actually received AFDC, "welfare mother" referred to Black, Latina, and Indian...women, and the placements being sought (after their children were moved to orphanages or group homes) were with white families.

Get this:

Even as welfare reform all but eliminated federal transfer payments to help working-class women raise their own children, the 1996 adoption reform provided a $6000 tax break to (implicitly white) middle-class families who adopted "special needs" children--with nonwhite a subcategory of the definition of special needs. Combined with the 1980 federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act that provided subsidies to middle-and upper-class families adopting from foster care, the adoption tax credit meant that the federal government would provide upwards of a $13,000 bonus for middle-class white people to raise the same children taken from families for poverty-related neglect that it wouldn't pay to alleviate. [emphasis added]

Now if that's not institutionalized racism, I don't know what is!

Okay, I know that is a lot to take in. I also think that it is EXTREMELY important that we adoptive parents know where this nice tax credit is coming from. This tax credit that makes our adoptions more "affordable". I've heard Nicole at Paragraphein talk about the adoption tax credit before but it didn't really make sense until I read this.

Recently an email alert arrived from the agency we used when we adopted Small Sun. It was about a possible reduction in the adoption tax credit and a plea to oppose the reduction. Even before reading this article I didn't feel comfortable pushing for more financial assistance for a category of people who (systematically if not in actuality) already have the upper hand. Then, reading this essay really brought it home for me. Again, I know this is a bit more academic than what you typically find here at my blog (because I'm quoting an academic), but for those of you who read through to the end, thank you!

PS- I still stand in the fear and trembling instilled in me in college, of violating copyright law when quoting other authors. Please, you professional writers who read, please let me know if I'm in danger of violations! I just want to share this amazing piece, not steal anything from the author who I so greatly admire.

Another Step in the Journey

Tomorrow we take another step towards gaining a visa to Australia. We have already submitted our application but after that we are still required to submit FBI background checks, and extensive health screenings performed by a Australian-government approved physician. We did the background checks a while ago and tomorrow we head to Louisville to see the special doctor.

That's right, Louisville (say Lewvul). Our appointments were actually for two weeks ago but when the Captain called to confirm (just because he's so organized) they said "that doctor is half way around the world." The Captain insisted "I had an appointment and a hotel reservation and the day off of work, there must be some mistake." The disinterested and unhelpful secretary said "the doctor is in India. Bye."

So, two weeks and some hassle later, I'm packing up kid stuff for a road trip. We decided to stay over night at 21c museum hotel which looks really cool. What is it doing in Louisville? Then I think we'll go to the science museum on Saturday before heading home.

The only problem is that The Sprout is sick and the rest of us are drinking Airborne like gangbusters, teetering on the brink of sickness. Poor Sprouty is rubbing her eyes and smearing snot all over her face.

I learned an important lesson today: If you're feeding a baby and they've sneezed twice, and you think they're done, wait for it. You may end up with pureed squash in a fan splatter pattern for a three foot radius.

It's been a hard day, and a hard week. Here's to a long weekend with good travels, healthy children, and one less thing standing between us and Bondi Beach.

An Adoptive Dad Becomes an Advocate for Expectant Mothers in Korea

If you're into adoption, please go read this article. This is what I'm talking about!

A father who adopted his daughter from Korea 20 years ago, and helped to fund international adoptions, visited South Korea and his perspective was totally changed. There he met capable, loving Korean women who were sending their children overseas for adoptions because of the social stigma against single parenthood, and the lack of resources to single women parents. The article says that about 70% of unwed women in South Korea relinquish their children!!!

This article just backs up the need for adoption reform across the board! I love that an adoptive parent got fired up and decided to do something. We are not alone in our responsibility to promote change, but as the money that speaks to the industry, we've got a huge role to play. Go read it and tell me what you think.

Sunday Garden Tour

Here are some highlights in the garden right now. Thanks, cloudscome  for inviting me to join the Sunday Garden Tour.

Playschool (Again)

This week was our first week back at play school. Small Sun attends once a week. When I signed him up last year I chose my day of the week to correspond with the enrollment of other children of color in the class. During the summer, the schedule changes.

It wasn't until I went to pick Small Sun up at the end of the day, the Sprout and an auntie and her boyfriend in tow, that I had a moment of slow-motion style clarity. There was my sweet boy, one so-small-boy, surrounded in a sea of white faces. In one moment I felt so sad, and like such a failure as a mother. This is not what I want for my son.

Right now my failings in that particular arena are piling up on my head. Church friends: white, play school: white, playgroup: white, the Captain and my friends: white. We are stuck in a monochromatic world and we don't know how to change that.

This week I read a post at Anti Racist Parent titled Antiracist Black Family Seeks Antiracist White Families for Friendship, Camaraderie and Fun (race unimportant). The piece is about a family moving from one state to another, and hoping that they will be able to find a diverse community in their new city. The title of the piece gave me an idea.

Here in Nashville we have several different city papers that list groups that meet around a topic. So I'm thinking about starting an antiracist parenting/playgroup. I lead a branch of a playgroup now. I've run groups with different purposes in the past. I feel like I'm fairly good at connecting people and acting as a moderator. So maybe I'll do it. I'm thinking about it.

So far we're just spinning our wheels in making connections with families of color or mixed race families. I have searched and searched and searched for a mixed race play school that also meets our other criteria (good program, one day a week enrollment accepted, early exit possible with notice). We're just stuck in our bubble (and we love everyone in our bubble, oh we love you dear people!), and we need to grow. Ideas?

Sunshine on My Children Makes me Happy

I am not a Seller

So, I decided that our stroller is just not going to cut it. After reviewing different models FOR DAYS and spending way too much time shopping on line, I think I'm going to keep it simple and go for the Maclaren Techno, which is pretty much what our stroller was a knock off of.

In order to fund this more expensive stroller I've been trying to sell stuff. On eBay, on Craigslist... And wow, this selling thing is just not for me. Not only did I manage to get kicked off and permanently banned from eBay (unless I make my case to them, substantiated by loads of paperwork and hours of grovelling), for a reason I still don't understand, I have also been on the run around with these Craigslist people.

I did manage to sell my current double stroller today and I'm on my second person interested in a lot of cloth diapers. But for the time and energy it has taken to try to sell stuff, I'd just as soon give it away - if I didn't feel obligated to try to scare up some money for this new stroller.

Sheesh.

My girlfriend sells on eBay all the time and she just sold a car, here in town. She is the selling whiz! Whenever I'm on the hunt for something (which is often), she finds it on eBay and mails me the links. Shopping I can do, but selling is a whole other ballgame.

Which brings me to thankfulness.

I was nursing the Sprout last week and having flashbacks from mental images I conjured while reading One Thousand Chestnut Trees. Part of the story depicts the exodus of Koreans to the South before the country was divided. The author tells of mothers drowning their babies in holes in the frozen river because they were dying of starvation and they didn't want to let them continue to suffer. When I read that I dropped the book and shook with sobs.

I was nursing the Sprout and waves of gratitude and thankfulness overcame me. For a rare moment I was connected with the pain and the suffering that are so close around us, yet so far from me. I looked at my fat baby, warm and cozy, and wept again.

If ever I knew how to take communion, how to have a thankful heart, it was that moment.

Here I am, buying a (in my opinion) hugely expensive stroller, to put in the back of my safe and comfortable car, in which I carry my well fed and healthy children. I have the luxury to declare myself "not a seller" because, ultimately, I don't need to be. And I really am thankful for that.