Even though I don’t fully agree with everything in it (though most of it, yes, yes, yes), I really like this post. I have been stewing for some time about the idea of motherhood as an economic rather than biological privilege, though I give credit for putting it that way to Harlow’s Monkey.
A few different things have had me thinking about this idea lately. One is that it is almost tax time here in the US. Jasper and I, this year, are not paying any taxes at all because we have large tax credits that offset the costs of our adoption. Next year we will still be reaping the benefits of these tax credits. When I think about why our state and federal governments both want to repay us for these costs, I can’t really figure it out. My daughter was not an American citizen until I adopted her; our governments had no obligation to her. The only reason, then, that I can make sense of as to why the government would have an interest in her being adopted is that there is some implication that parenthood is a right of American citizens.
But of course it can’t fairly be called a right, because not everyone can do it. I am thinking of one of Mavis’ childcare providers, a funny, loving woman who is single, black, overweight, and from what I can tell not exactly wealthy (a guess based on what we pay). She approached me one day last semester to ask about adopting from China. And it was hard to admit that, as we spoke, I basically knew there would be multiple strikes against her trying to adopt. Her weight would disqualify her from China; her income level might also have. Her single status would make it much more difficult; her race might not interfere, so long as she had a decent homestudy agency, but who knows. If she is not heterosexual, there would be another huge barrier. But in every way that matters, she would be a great mother. I leave my own daughter with her three days a week as evidence.
And maybe America provides her other options for adoption. Probably she could adopt some child, somehow. But I am sure that it would be harder for her than it would be for me (even if we share the weight challenge!). At least I am sure that she has fewer options than I do. We who adopt have privileges in America. We who can afford IVF have privileges in America. We who become pregnant and can choose to keep our children have privileges in America. We who can avoid pregnancy by affording safe abortions or reliable contraception have privileges in America.
Motherhood is the most emotionally invested thing I have ever done or will ever do, but its deep sentimental structures are structures; they do work. And they certainly do not overturn the stark economic contrasts that I’ve been increasingly struggling with in recent months. The bottom line is that I did not want to be pregnant (and/or would not have been able to get pregnant—it’s unclear in my case because we never tried) but wanted a child. Someone else’s labor (nevermind, even, someone else’s loss), someone whose story is obscured by law, by rhetoric, and by feeling.
Love obscures lots of things. Which is not, of course, to say that love is irrelevant. It’s deeply so. But it hides as it reveals.
Today I had a strange epiphany while walking in the hall between classes. I realized that my desire to adopt a child was an unusually rooted one. I have wanted to adopt a child—preferring always that to biological parenthood—since I was at least 14 years old. I began actively researching adoption from China in 2001 (mind you, not to decide whether to adopt but to decide which agency or how to go about it), which was a full six years before I adopted my daughter. I was 25 then and had just spent two years studying poetry writing, gazing at my own navel, mostly. But what if I had no children and had decided, now, at my present age, that I wanted to adopt? Would my politics, which have matured considerably since 2001, have allowed me to do it? Would I have been too disturbed by the transnational inequalities that adoption trades on? Could I have said no?
And at first I thought, no. I couldn’t do it now. It would be different. It’s much of the reason I can’t see myself adopting a second time in the same scenario I did with Mavis.
But then I thought about how I arrived at the politics, broadly speaking, that I’ve articulated for myself in the past several years, and I realized that it was, in large part, the process of adoption itself that helped me develop those politics. Sure, it was my graduate study of American culture, the Bush administration, living in a deeply segregated American city, an increasing fear about corporate culture. But the work I did to prepare myself to adopt my daughter—like the things on this excellent list—did more for me than anything else. I had to think in context about one female child’s life and how I would equip her. I had to see differently. I had to abandon some of my own invisibility (not that I’m saying I’m a Chinese American now—blech to that notion!). And in those ways, I really believe that I am smarter because I did—am doing—the hard work that interracial, transnational adoption requires.
I’m not writing this as a kind of excuse. I guess I write in part because of those future parents who gripe when parents who already have their children home voice concerns, as I have, about the ethics of international adoption (in my case, I have especially had my consciousness raised about corruption in adoption from China). Is it hypocritical of me to voice concerns about adoption after I already have my child home? Yes, in some important ways, it is. But also, the process itself gave me insights I simply didn’t have before. In some ways, I should have known—maybe could have known—better. In some ways, perhaps I let myself be blinded. But in other ways, adopting my daughter, one specific girl, allowed me to see the forest through one tree.
I never thought of adoption as my right, but I thought I was doing a good thing. Not a heroic or charitable thing, but a thing that made sense. Kids were without parents and I wanted to be a parent. I thought it—I still do think it, even as I critique it (there is still some part of me that feels hurt, even if it shouldn’t, when I realize that biological children are, for so many people, preferred)—an elegant solution, one more aligned with care for the planet and with loving my neighbor than insisting upon reproducing is. The problem is that this simple equation isn’t quite so elegant when one tries to factor in the lost mother.
Another part of me really struggles with assumptions we make about birth parents, though. My guess is that it’s right that a considerable percentage of birth parents would have preferred to keep their children, and my conviction is that anything that could have equipped those who wanted to raise their children to do so would have been a good thing. But my guess is also that many of them who couldn’t or didn’t want to also would have preferred that their children be placed in economically well-off homes, maybe even countries, even as I strongly agree that wealth does not make one more qualified to be a parent (my own single mother was by no means wealthy). How many of them would have privileged an intact culture over economic security? I’m not sure, but I get nervous about making that assumption. I think sometimes about the fact that in a globalized world, it’s easier for the people whose bellies are full and whose houses are warm to bemoan the changes industrialization brings to “authentic” local cultures whose people are maybe most concerned with filling their bellies and warming their houses. What if we knew our children’s birth mothers—those who decided they could not or would not parent–wanted the very arrangement our children have? Would that change our assumptions? Is it about what their individual choices would be, or are the concerns broader, bigger than any individual woman’s “choices”? (By which I mean, please see comments below. I don’t mean broader concerns as the child’s and birth family’s concerns. I mean sort of international relations, power imbalances, cultural pressures, etc. etc. etc. that might constrain a person’s so-called choice and that it’s difficult to build policy around “choice” in that context).
I don’t have the answers to those questions, but they’re not just rhetorical. They point to my deep concerns and struggles with the word “choice” when it relates to women’s roles as mothers, biological or adoptive, working or not, rich or poor, American or not.
I don’t know how to end these musings in any meaningful way or with any tidy solution except to say this: Maybe it takes an adoption to really appreciate, to really confront, the complexity of adoption.
