Other Adoptions: Lulu’s Story July 15, 2008

The alternate and much longer title for this post is “Why I thought being adopted would make me a better adoptive parent, and how wrong I probably was…”  I debated about whether this post was even relevant to the blog, but Coco convinced me to hit publish, so here I go!

I was adopted at four months, having spent some time in foster care with a “tight right hip.” I’m sure it would be handled differently today, but anyway, that was the deal. I was the second daughter adopted by my parents, and my older sister was about 2-1/2 when I joined the family.

Both my sister and I always knew we were adopted, although I don’t remember specifically being told. It was just always there. This sounds obvious, but it wasn’t always the case in the 1960s with same-race domestic adoptions. I never felt particularly stigmatized about being adopted; in fact, I generally thought it was pretty “cool.” I was a little dramatic as a child, and anything that drew mostly positive attention to me was a plus in my book. And almost exclusively, the attention I got was positive.

Now I could write a book about my experience with adoption, but luckily for you, I’m not going to do that (although you know my posts border on book-length, right?). I thought I would post a few comments about my own experience and how it relates to my current experience as an adoptive parent.

1. I now understand that I really cannot compare my situation to Elsie’s. Yes, I understand what it is to wonder about birth parents, struggle with family tree projects at school, and deal with questions about my “real” parents. But as a white child adopted into a white family, I got to choose when I told people I was adopted. I looked like a child my parents might have had biologically. I didn’t have to deal with race issues, or loss of birth culture.
2. My own experience with adoption was such a combination of positive and neutral (i.e. a non-event) that I was initially lulled into thinking that my experience was the norm. It certainly didn’t take many visits to adult adoptee blogs to get over that notion, but I still have to really remind myself that this is not necessarily the ideal way to form a family, no matter how many shiny, happy a-parent blogs will try to tell you otherwise. Adoption starts with loss, separation, a broken bond, and often much worse. And to say that it was the way God wanted you to become a family starts to sound pretty twisted when your child’s journey in this world started with being abandoned.
3. Becoming a parent has given me a new appreciation for the losses involved in adoption. Until I started parenting my amazing daughter, I had no concept of what a tragedy it is for a parent and child to be separated. I’m not saying every parent is fit to raise their biological child, and I definitely find that most children who are adopted join wonderful families. But what if I had given birth to Elsie, and then been forced to give her up? How do you live with that? Especially in the case of poverty, family pressures, or political situations that keep you from parenting your child to adulthood (as opposed to the fairly conscious choice not to parent a child that my own biological mother says she made). Really, how does a parent live with that, and how do the children live with the fact that external realities kept them from living their lives with their biological families?
4. Specifically becoming an adoptive parent has shown me two things that I’m really struggling with. The first is that I think I have been just shy of a complete shit to my own biological mother (father too I guess, what the hell, since I’ve made no effort to contact him despite having all the info to do so). About nine years ago, I received a letter out of the blue that medical information had been added to my social services adoption files. When I accessed the info, there was also a note in the file that my biological mother would be open to contact if I was interested. There it was, no effort required. At 35 years old, I had never made much effort to search for her — Louise, my biological mother, that is. So I got her contact info and wrote her a very noble and high-minded sounding letter, thanking her for making the choice she did so many years before. That I had a great family, and had a wonderful life with plenty of opportunity. Just what she wanted, right? In retrospect, it seems more like a backhanded slam now. Thank you for not parenting me — I really was better off without you, right?! Nice, Lulu, very nice. And we exchanged a few letters, met once in person, and I kept it all very standoffish. Now Louise wasn’t exactly a wellspring of emotion either, but still, the woman is my MOTHER, right? She gave BIRTH to me, right? I could have been so much kinder and more open to a relationship, but I wasn’t. And I cannot decide if I need to go back and fix that.
5. Which brings me to the other thing I’m struggling with. The main reason I was very standoffish to my bio mom was due to the attitudes my adoptive mom raised me with. Now I know in 1965 there wasn’t any education around adoption or raising adopted kids, so I don’t really blame my mother for this — I honestly think she thought it was better for me in the long run to not look back. But my mom always raised me with the idea that she was the “real” mom. She sat by my bed when I was sick, taught me to drive when I was a snotty teenager, sent me to college, etc. Heck, I still see some of this today in a-parent blogs — as if parenting is a contest and they win the “real parent” title. But in some warped way for my mom, it did become a contest. When I expressed interest as a teen and young adult in my bio parents, she took it personally and made it mostly about her (i.e. rejection). When my sister found her biological mother, my mom seemed quite relieved that their contact was limited and did not last (she was even a tad, oh I don’t know, smug that my sister’s bio mother was in trailer in Arizona living off disability). And once I had contact with my bio mom, my own mother became very possessive and negative about Louise. Somehow, Louise was going to steal me away from my “real” mother.

NOTE: Before anyone blasts my mother, this did happen very shortly after my father passed away, and right around the time I was getting married. She and I had completely leaned on each other after my father’s death, and she was feeling very lonely and vulnerable. This has given her a huge amount of slack in my book.

Slack notwithstanding, both in my youth and as an adult, my mother made it clear that I had beenfortunate to be adopted, that my life was so much better than it would have been with Louise. I won’t go quite so far as to say she thinks I am lucky, really, but I know she feels that Elsie is far better off in her life here with us than she would have been in China. Any contact I have had with Louise and my bio family she has taken like a flesh wound to her heart. Even if I had wanted a relationship with Louise, I knew it would break my mother’s heart, and I couldn’t do that. What a horrible position to put your child in.

That’s a huge lesson for me, although I like to think I would not have followed my mother’s path regardless. I hurt so much for Elsie’s mother sometimes, and I really do think of her as her mother, her birth mother, her bio mother, her first mother, and painfully, sometimes even her real mother (and no, in my mind, this doesn’t make me any less her mother). I would support any contact Elsie and her birth mother might be able to have, even though I know the chances are remote. And yes, it would possibly hurt me like hell. But you know what? It cannot be about me. And my mother made it mostly about her. I promise Elsie that I won’t do that.

Based on what I hear and read about the China IA program, even if Elsie did find information about her birth parents, it might not be as simple as a mother or couple feeling forced to abandon their child due to the one-child policy. There might be something more nefarious behind the story. But based on what little we know, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And when I look down at my sleeping daughter’s face, I cannot help but wonder about this journey of adoption. What a twisted road it can take.

Honestly, I’m still not sure where it is going to take me and Louise…

Diversity, Not About Diversity July 12, 2008

Here are a couple more books that I’ve since remembered that feature nonwhite characters but aren’t explicitly about diversity.

The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats (and many others by him as well)

Zoo, by Suzy Lee (and some of her others as well)

My Cat Copies Me, by Yoon D. Kwon

Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mo Willems (the white main character makes best friends with a girl of color, though at first they are enemies because they have the same stuffed bunny)

We should try to keep this list going; it’s true that these kinds of books are indeed hard to find. Please comment below if you can think of more!

Other Adoptions July 7, 2008

Okay, I’ll go.

A while back, Lulu, Fifi, and I discovered that each of us has in our families of origin an adoption experience.  Lulu is an adoptee; Fifi’s sister was adopted.  My family also had an adoption story–though we never called it that, really–before we adopted Mavis.  I thought it might be interesting to reflect on how those relationships influenced our daughters’ adoptions.

My brother, Beauregard (ooh, I have fun making up these names!), was brought into my family when he was 7 years old.  It was the summer before I left for college.  I am ten years older than he is.  For comparison, I’m three years older than my sister and thirteen years older than my youngest brother.

Beauregard was part of our extended family, but I had never met him before the day he moved in with us.  The death of his previous guardian necessitated his move in with us. Technically, Beauregard was never adopted, for a host of complicated legal reasons I won’t go into now.  But his move in was permanent, and we knew it would be, and we have considered one another siblings all this time.  In all the ways of the heart, he was adopted into our family for good.

I have never not considered Beauregard my brother.  We’ve never really argued, partly because we have such an age difference and little history over which to squabble.  For a long time, I just thought of him as my little brother.  And the same for him.  In almost every way, it’s clear that the patience my mother showed him, the understanding of his grief, the immediacy with which she understood him as her own son, paid off for him.  Beauregard is happily engaged to a beautiful and wealthy fiancee (though I got official word only through Facebook–grr), with whom he travels the world, and he is very successful in his chosen field.  I think he’s happy.

But I’ll be honest: the relationship I have with him is not the same as it is with my other siblings.  For one thing, I never lived in the same house with him for more than a few months: that’s probably the biggest barrier.  And his intelligence and talents (which are many) are of a different kind than those of my biological siblings and me.   He’s also a much more outgoing, naive but bighearted, less sarcastic, more gullible and yet more giving person, in some ways, than my other siblings or I.

But the biggest reason is that in recent years, Beauregard has separated himself more and more from our family.  He is charming as hell with the rest of the world but aloof and distant at times with us.  Even as we exhort him to join us, he sulks in the corner on Christmas morning–that is, if he’s there at all.  And if he is, it will be late, with a gift chosen at a convenience store for my mom and seldom anything for anyone else.  My cousins sometimes mention some big thing Beauregard is doing, and I startle because he had never shared that with me. When he does ask for my or my sister’s help on something, he never thanks us, and he doesn’t contact us unless he does need something.  My mother had to implore him, a few weeks after Mavis’ referral, to send me an email of congratulations. The world finds him to be utterly charming, but our family, lately, finds him to be increasingly selfish and unthinking.  (And, of course, when I perceive him like this, I’m less likely to reach out to him, which of course is a vicious cycle.  So I’m not blameless either.  But my sister and I try.)

Does it sound familiar?  Of course.  Beauregard clearly has attachment issues.  He has sprung from girlfriend to girlfriend, afraid to go without; now he’s engaged young.  His many charms–lapped up by teachers and community leaders–end, though, when he walks through our doors.  And I don’t blame him, really.  At seven he lost his previous guardian, whom he had loved, as well as the extended family in the state where he had lived until he moved in with us.  Still, that family had been tough on him–picked on him, just because–and he had lost his birth family, too, of course.  A few years after he moved in with my family, my parents divorced, and he effectively lost his adoptive father as well.   Not to mention the few times I heard my mother, in anger and hurt, utter some of the truly meanest words I’ve ever heard her speak: to him.  She was very good to him–very good–except for a few terrible times when she, well, simply wasn’t.   And I wouldn’t be surprised if those words are the ones that landed hardest on his heart.

I always think of Beauregard when I read books about attachment.  It’s clear that Beauregard’s attachment was never fully secure.  Probably my mother could have done better; I know she didn’t stay up reading books about adopting the hurt child.  If she had, though, would she have been frightened by what she read in them?  Would the picture of Beauregard, in the abstract–distant, often rude, often two-faced, even–have seemed like the picture of failed parenting?  Would it have seemed worth it?  I think adoptive parents worry this way a lot.  The other day a friend of mine, a bio parent only (but a kind person, really, one of the kindest I know), bristled at the notion of adopting an older child–”it’s so hard,” she said.  “I know a family who are raising their adopted child’s children now.”  The family had adopted the child at an older age.  She said this like it was an obvious reason to say no, I couldn’t do that.  I wouldn’t.

But I was thinking to myself, you know, yes.  I bet it was very hard for this family.  It breaks my mom’s heart, too, sometimes, when Beauregard is in town and doesn’t even stop by to see her.  But you know, if you think parenting is about navigating a narrow strait that has only one or two acceptable outcomes, maybe the road isn’t for you.  I bet the grandparents of those children love them up one side and down the other.  I know my mother loves Beauregard, has a special tenderness for him that she doesn’t have for her biological children.  She doesn’t regret it.

What I admire most about my mother now is that she doesn’t blame herself for Beauregard’s withdrawal from us.  Sure, I think she sees now that there were some ways she could have done better.  But when he acts like a jerk now, as an adult, for the most part, she does a good job of not taking it to heart. She can see that he is smart and successful and competent in lots of ways.  That’s one success, and she knows she’s a huge part of that.  (I always think about those clearly competent, articulate, sophisticated, powerful, professional, funny, engaged, and so-called “angry” adult adoptees whose blogs so panic adoptive parents, and I think: if having a flawless relationship with one’s parents is the only measure of success in life, then how many of us are successful, anyway?  Those adoptees look like successful citizens to me.  We should listen to them, closely, but we don’t need to think of them as horror stories.) My mom can also see that if he can be smart and successful and competent in those ways, it’s within his power to decide to reach out to the family that has, really, kept its arms extended to him.  She says now it’s his choice.  He’s an adult, a successful adult, and he can choose when he wants to. He knows she is there.  If it isn’t now, maybe it will be later.   She’s patient.  She’s his mother.  She knows that as truly as she knows anything.

I admire that about my mother.  I think, when Mavis first yells “you’re not my real mother” at me, it will hurt, yes.  But it won’t hurt the way it would for someone who fears that adoption really doesn’t make it so.  I’m 100% sure I’m her mother.  I’m also 100% sure that I always will be (and no, I don’t mean I’m her only mother), and it’s not conditional on how she treats me, in that argument or in any. Of course I’m going to work as hard as I can to secure her attachment so that these issues are as minimally intrusive as possible when she’s an adult. I’ll always be there, patient, doing my best but knowing that ultimately it’s her own course that she charts as she grows.  Her story isn’t mine, and only she gets to decide what it means.