Tag: adoption

Transracial Adoption, Research, and Me

Published on by Pam9 Comments

So, I’m on the downhill side of this mental health counseling degree I started three years ago. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel—but before I can emerge victorious from the darkness, I must complete a handful of tasks:

  • First, I must accumulate three hundred hours of direct counseling experience. I am about a quarter of the way there.
  • Then, I must amass a dozen or so hours of direct observation of my counseling skills. I’ve got that covered—no sweat.
  • I must also acquire many hours of supervision, which I am working on and should have little trouble accomplishing.
  • Simultaneously, I need to add about 20 credits to my credit total, six of which will come from the two remaining required classes I must take, Intro to Research and Tests & Measures, eight of which will come from my remaining Case Consult classes, and the rest of which will have to come from a couple of electives.

I am taking Intro to Research now, right this very quarter, and it has me flummoxed. I should not have put it off this long. I should not have waited until I was in internship to take it. I should not have dropped it all those previous quarters when I registered for it. Nope. Bad decisions have come back to bite me in the ass, here Dear Reader. I have no room in my little pea brain for academic articles. I am up to my armpits in counseling clients who have many serious mental health needs, and I am having difficulty wrapping my head around how researching and writing a paper is going to help me be a more effective counselor. It seems an exercise for its own sake, a tuition-generating requirement, if nothing else.

So, while I could not give less of a fuck about this paper in general, I am quite interested in the specific topic I have chosen, which makes me reluctant to simply blow it off. I have decided to research Trauma and Transracial Adoption (TRA). It’s a topic that is near and dear to me, a topic that I neglected to address 27 years ago when I first adopted my oldest daughter, a topic that I am now ashamed to admit that I gave no serious consideration to until just recently.

cropped-me_nala_t_halloween941.jpgIt makes sense to me that if adoption is a traumatic experience, that transracial adoption would be even more so. I mean, think about it. How in the world can white people adequately prepare children of color to navigate our racist culture? I know now that our optimism when we adopted our girls was misplaced and the result of white privilege. We didn’t have a clue how steeped in white privilege we were. Of course, when the social workers asked if I would be willing to make sure my kids received information about their cultural heritage, I promised to provide it. Of course, I said. Of course. I will read them books. I will tell them about Martin Luther King, Jr. I will hang pictures of Rosa Parks and celebrate Black History Month. But I had no idea how, 27 years later, my ignorance would affect my girls.

I had no idea. I was so naïve, my friends. So very naïve. I did not imagine all those years ago that race relations would be WORSE in 2017 than they were in 1990. Who among us would have predicted? I had no idea raising two black children in our lovely little liberal bubble Bellingham would not prepare my daughters to live in the greater world as women of color, would not adequately prepare them for future encounters with racists, with white supremacists, with law enforcement officers who would just as soon shoot them dead as ask questions.

I should have known. I should have tried harder. I should have. I should have. I should have. And so now, here I am, trying to figure out what I wish I had known then, what I wish someone had slapped me upside the head with all those years ago: how will being raised in a white family impact an African American child? What will they learn? Who will teach them how to navigate this racist world? How did I contribute, willingly or not, to their marginalization? This is perhaps the toughest question: what was my culpability? Did I collude? Can I admit it?

Admittedly, getting to the place where I can acknowledge my culpability has been tough. When my ex-partner and I adopted our kids, we just wanted children. We did not think beyond our desire to have a baby. She wanted kids, and I was along for the ride. Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughters. I would not trade them for anything. But that love doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets about the way in which we went about the adoption process. I should have steeped myself in Black culture. I should have moved to a city more inhabited by Black people. I should have made an effort to connect my kids to their heritage. I didn’t. I admit it. I took the easy path. I surrendered my responsibilities.

And now, as a sort of atonement, I am writing this research paper. It is not enough, but it is a start.anna and taylor xmas

 

Becoming a Warrior of the Light & Discovering the Sacred: A Spiritual Autobiography of Sorts

Published on by Pam4 Comments

Last week I had to write my Spiritual Autobiography for the Spirituality and Counseling class I’m taking this quarter. This particular assignment scared me a bit. More than a bit. In fact, just thinking about this assignment made me itch. By its very nature, the assignment implied that not only am I in possession of some sort of spirituality, but that I have been for most of my life. I’ve discovered over the past 15 years or so that the word “spiritual” conjures up positive happy feelings for a lot of people, yet there was nothing positive about my early spiritual development. In fact, I did not have a positive spiritual experience until just two years ago at the tender age of 51. Everything spiritual in my life up to that point came from either my parents pushing their religion on me or me trying to accommodate their wishes, or me fleeing from any and everything that even hinted of religion, spirit, or the supernatural. That’s what I have to work with: my own fear and dread regarding spirituality. 

IMG_1478
My Spiritual Autobiography Art Project

Sometimes, we get stuck in our stories, so I decided it was time to change the story. Below is what I ended up turning in as well as an art project I created to go with my paper.

It is time to change the narrative that has been my spiritual autobiography. It is time to rewrite my history from a power stance, from a strength perspective, from the view of a survivor rather than a victim. While my parents filled my formative years (ages 5-22) with radical fundamentalist christianity, and while those tenets and precepts haunted and dogged me for most of my life, I somehow found the courage to follow my own inner voice and at the age of 22 began shedding what held me back. I started to develop an ethos to call my own. I used to say that I spent the years between 22 and 51 avoiding all things that had even the faintest whiff of religious/spiritual energy, but in my reframe, I must say that I spent those years searching for a spirituality that worked for me. And, truth be told, I am still searching. Only in the past two years have I discovered the merest thread of a spirituality that may work, but when I look back, I can now identify the many sacred elements of my life that have been there all along. I just didn’t know that I could shift my definition of sacred to fit my needs. What I once thought to be profane is actually sacred, and much of what I learned early on to be sacred is, in fact, profane.

The bible served as my early foundation, and I learned god was angry, vengeful, wrathful, and to be feared. Scripture seemed to mock my most deeply held personal beliefs—equality, justice, fairness, and the right to love who I wanted. I grew up with a sense that no matter what I did, I would probably end up in hell anyway: if I took communion without all of my sins being forgiven, if I had premarital sex, if I even thought about someone with lust in my heart. If I took the lord’s name in vain. If I read “secular humanism.” If I listened to non-christian music. The world became a place not to be embraced but to be feared, a land fraught with temptation and danger. I couldn’t even love to be in nature because if I loved anything more than I loved god, I was committing an act of idolatry.

Somehow, I managed to hang onto myself just enough so that the summer before I started graduate school (the first time, when I was 22), I began to seek out other perspectives. I started reading those dangerous books and making friends with non-believers, and listening to the still small voice inside that urged me to stand up for what I actually believed, not what I’d been told to believe. I stood at my kitchen sink one morning, washing the dishes and decided in that moment that I could no longer be both true to myself and remain a christian. Christianity had to go. Thus began the journey in which I started collecting my own sacred experiences.

pam_baby anna
Baby Anna and Mommy Pammie

I started dating women. Sacred. I met and had a commitment ceremony with my first long-term partner. Sacred (and a little profane, but that’s another story). We adopted Anna. So sacred. I started therapy and exploring my feelings, wants, needs, and desires. Sacred. I learned I was depressed and began taking a new wonder drug that lifted my fog and allowed me to enjoy the world. We adopted Taylor. Sacred. I learned to stand up for myself and my needs. Sacred. And painful. When my ex had our daughters baptized without my permission after our divorce, I returned to church (I opted for the Unitarians) for the first time in ten years in order to provide my children with an alternative to mainstream religion. Sacred, though I didn’t end up staying long.

I bought a house and set about making it a home for my girls and me, an act that I now see as a step on my path to a personal spirituality. I met and married another woman and we lived and laughed and loved for fifteen years. When same sex marriage became legal, we got married with my children as our witnesses. Our love had finally been recognized and validated as sacred. Much of what we shared was sacred—some of it was struggle, and when it ended, we left each other intact, emotionally, having developed a stronger sense of what was sacred in the other.

Announcing Taylor's adoption
Announcing Taylor’s adoption

During those fifteen years, I did not spend much time thinking about my spirituality or my soul or the sacred. From my vantage point now, I can see that I did continue to cultivate and sharpen my own sense of sacredness, however. I spent eight of those years working with for a Catholic elementary school, and I came to understand, perhaps for the first time, that not all who are religious are judgmental and/or narrow-minded. At Sacred Heart, I learned that the individuals in a religion could hold different values than the institution itself, and that community more than religion or dogma is what compelled most people to attend that church.

Also while working for the Catholics, I realized that I needed to start taking my body more seriously, that it was in fact sacred, and necessary to a healthy long life. I started working out, and found a connection with others, sacred bonds of friendship, which, for me, represented the spiritual connections with others I craved. Eventually, after I left the Catholics, I started running and found whole new worlds of spirituality open up. More connections and new friends, time in nature, the dawning awareness that my body really is a miracle in its own right. I started my runs (especially the more challenging runs) with a meditation: “I am thankful for my feet. I am thankful for my legs. I am thankful for my lungs and my heart. I am grateful for the time to run and for the money I have to buy shoes and running clothes. I am thankful I live here where I can run on trails instead of sidewalks.” By the time I got through my meditation, I forgot that running hurts.

Before I started running, I generally felt as if I were living two lives, and I often said in therapy that I needed to pull my circles into alignment. One circle represented the me I wanted others to see, and the other circle represented what I did that I wouldn’t want others to see, probably the real me. As running became paramount in my life, I began treating my running time as sacred, inviolate. Pargament (our text book author) writes that when we discover the sacred, our sense of fragmentation dissipates and the sacred becomes a passion and a priority.

As running began taking over my life, I began to wonder if it might not be time to stop taking the Wonder Drug, if it wasn’t maybe masking my (normal) responses to a difficult world. I found the new clarity to be sacred, and I redoubled my efforts in therapy to seek enlightenment, a search which led me to body work: massage, acupuncture, breath work. And on the massage table I had what can truly be described as my first encounter with The Divine. My massage therapist always finished our sessions with a blessing, her hands on my head, channeling love and oneness (that’s what she said, I just figured it was a nice way to signal the end of my session). This time, however, she stood at the head of the table, her hands hovering over my hair, and I could feel a new and different energy fill me up, a surge and a tingling from my scalp to my toes. She stood there for a good ten to fifteen minutes while something or some being left her and entered me.

Once I dressed and asked her what had happened, she just laughed and said, “You’ll have to ask Spirit.”

I wrote a haiku (that’s another sacred thing in my life: writing) to commemorate the event:

She laid hands on me
Channeled a Divine spirit–
Broke through to my Soul

That encounter with Spirit (or whatever/whomever) on the massage table served as a breakthrough of sorts, or at least it opened me up to the possibility of a spirituality absent of religion and a sense of The Divine unattached to the particular form of god on which I was raised. I felt pure love. And though my skepticism wasn’t completely eradicated, that experience gave me permission to explore my spirituality in ways I didn’t ever think I would want to. I now attend what I call Not Church, the local Bellingham Center for Spiritual Living, on a somewhat regular basis. They offer a 9:30 a.m. service in which there is no music and no singing, no “meet and greet your neighbor,” all things from traditional church services that tend to make me anxious. We end with a 10-15 minute meditation.

I’ve dabbled in meditation and mindfulness. Both sacred experience, and in the process, I’ve sort of fallen in love with Buddhism—the sacredness in not grasping, in letting go, in silence, in pausing. I feel as if these past two years have made up for a lifetime of ignoring my spiritual life, and if I were to describe myself spiritually, I would have to say that I am becoming a Warrior of the Light, as described by Paulo Coelho:Warrior of the Light

F is for FOO

Published on by Pam4 Comments

 

FWe would-be counselors all must take FOO (Family of Origin) before we take any other coursework in my graduate program. This class is the one in which we must sort through all of our personal Family Issues before we move on to counsel others. The idea, I suppose, is that we get our own stuff out of the way, but I’m not convinced we can do much with our FOO issues in 10 weeks. However, at 52, I definitely had an advantage over most of my younger classmates. I’d been working on FOO issues for decades.

Sitting in FOO for three hours every week was like attending group therapy—everybody cried, and I felt like I had one of the least traumatic childhoods of all. Some people had seriously mentally ill parents; others were abused by siblings, and still others grew up in remote, poverty stricken areas and no services for hundreds of miles. My heart ached for many of my classmates who still struggled mightily with their families.

Obviously, our parents leave a lasting impact on us, but one of the more fascinating aspects of FOO was how the same behavioral patterns played out over generations. Even when each generation may not even know much about previous generations. In one family, every generation included a pregnant 16 year old. How does that happen? How do we inherit such specific behaviors from our ancestors?gabor mate

Epigenetics. The research is fascinating. We inherit memories, behaviors, trauma. A 2013 article from the online Discover Magazine explains it thusly: According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics, traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with them more than just memories.

Wild, yes? I find it all so fascinating. As the adoptive parent of two children, as the child of a mother who was adopted, and the sister of an adopted brother, I am well aware that more is at work in our development than simply what we experience. We are  complex beings, bundles of history and experiences that are not even our own. We are more than half mom and half dad, but carry in our very essence not just the physical traits of our foremothers and forefathers, but their memories, traumas, victories, and defeats.

I guess that’s one thing about becoming a therapist that I so look forward to—exploring with clients how they came to these difficult places in life and working with them to make positive changes. Not only will they change their own lives, but they have the power to make life better for future generations.

Makeup Beauty Doll and Other Problems with White Privilege

Published on by Pam1 Comment

Reposting, again. It’s been two years since I last posted this and many years since I wrote it. It’s still relevant.

Pamela Helberg

Many years ago, flummoxed by the joys and perils of raising two non-white children in our predominantly white culture, I wrote an essay expressing my doubts and fears, and (surprising to me now) my certainties (you will recognize them when you see them). Some of what I wrote makes sense and some of it clearly needs rethinking. Yesterday on the day we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., my eldest daughter, now 23, texted me (this is how we communicate these days). She was wondering if I thought it odd that the company for which she now works didn’t celebrate the national holiday. I do find it odd, odd that only governments and banks shut down on this Monday when the world grinds to a halt, more or less, for other national holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, the 4th of July.

My initial response to her was yes, MLK day…

View original post 1,182 more words

A Christmas Blog, Re-gifted

Published on by Pam11 Comments

I originally published this piece on my blog in December 2012. I thought it was worth re-posting, given that it’s that time of year again and my holiday anxiety is ramping up. 

Christmas Eve always provokes anxiety in me.  For all of the 1960s and well into the 70s, I was the sole granddaughter amongst many grandsons and as such the only target for girly gifts from my well-meaning Mema: dolls, dresses, and purses.  While my cousins and younger brother gleefully tore through the wrapping paper to discover footballs, cowboy hats, cap pistols, and baseball gloves, I opened my gifts cautiously, always hopeful that my true wishes would be granted, that my grandmother would see me for the tomboy I was, not as the girly girl she wanted me to be.  As the Barbies, ballet slippers, tea sets, and girly frou-frou piled up over the years, I knew better than to be expressively disappointed. Growing up in a conservative Christian household, I learned early that it is better to give than to receive, to be thankful for what I had, and to put others ahead of myself, so I pasted on a smile and gave my thanks with as much authenticity as I could muster.

That's me on the right, checking out my cousins' presents
That’s me on the right, checking to see if my cousins, Jimmy, TJ, and Billy, got better presents than I did.

As the years wore on and the family expanded, my girl cousins finally came along, gleeful recipients of all things sugar and spice and everything nice, and I could ignore my gifts and slip away to play with my boy cousins and their superior toys.  They would share their bounty with me, and for many happy hours I wore the cowboy hat and shot the cap guns, threw the footballs around the basement.   Still, an uneasiness always settled over me as the holidays drew near, and as much as I looked forward to Christmas Eve at Mema’s, a genuinely fun and spirited occasion where the alcohol flowed freely and everyone sang and acted out a verse in The Twelve Days of Christmas, where we all wore colored paper hats from the Christmas crackers, I dreaded going because I didn’t feel like I belonged.

A sense of Other became my Christmas cloak:  fundamentalist Christian amongst fun loving Catholics; country bumpkin cousin among my sophisticated Seattle cousins; and something deeper that I sensed about myself, something I knew set me apart in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years.

So, no surprise then that those familiar pangs rushed back as I navigated our red late-model Volvo into Mema’s driveway for Christmas Eve in 1994.  Even though I was 31 and had a family, the anxiety dogged me.  I let out the breath I’d been holding during our hour and a half drive south from where I lived with my partner and our two daughters.  I pulled on my wide-brimmed purple felt hat that matched my paisley purple dress and smiled through the rear view mirror at the girls, Anna four and a half, and Taylor six months old.  They were ready to be sprung from their car seats, their holiday dresses hidden beneath their matching Christmas coats from Nordstrom.  I squeezed Sweetie’s hand, both for comfort and for strength, and admired her stylish red wool coat and her fine black leather gloves.  I allowed a small satisfaction and confidence to creep upon me.  We looked so normal that no one could possibly know from first glance that we were lesbians with two children.  I drew comfort from our appearance as we wrested the girls out of the car and arranged ourselves into presentability—straightening rumpled tights, buckling Mary Janes, wiping the spit up from Taylor’s chin and removing her bib, making sure Anna had a firm grasp on Blankie.  We each carried a child and marched to the front door to ring the bell.

Christmas 1997
Anna and Taylor, Christmas 1997

We knew better than to wait for someone to answer before letting ourselves in.  The bell served only to announce our presence before we walked into the sounds and smells of Christmas tradition:  cracked crab, singed spaghetti sauce, bourbon, scotch, laughter and conversation, the burble of children’s voices and laughter.  Aunts and uncles yelled out greetings or raised their glasses to us as we entered.  My mother came to coo over her granddaughters.  We collected hugs and kisses as we waded deeper into the gathering, and because we were women, we all finally came to a stop in the kitchen.

“Merry Christmas!” My aunt Betsy said, “You guys look great.  I love your dress Pam.”

“Where did you get that hat?” Mema sipped her vodka, the ice tinkling.  “I love it!”

“Sweetie!” Uncle David stepped towards us, a glass of red wine in his hand.  “Merry Christmas!”  He gave her a sideways hug and a peck on the cheek.  “How are the girls?”

“Hey David,” Sweetie matched his enthusiasm. “They are great.  Thanks for asking! Your girls must be getting big, too!”

I began unbundling the girls, removing their coats, checking Taylor’s diapers for any obvious odors.  They both looked amazing, their brown skin glowing against the red velvet dresses, their white tights gleaming, their Mary Janes shiny.  Anna’s eyes took on the pensiveness of being in a strange situation, and Taylor’s eyes grew wide, her Surprise Baby look we called it.  Since we’d only just adopted her in May, many of my relatives had yet to meet her.

“She’s so tiny! How old is she, again?”

“She’s so dark!”

“Well, yes, she’s African American,” I explained.  “She’s just a bit over seven months old.”

“Anna, you’ve gotten so big!”

“Anna!  How do you like being a big sister?”

Anna buries her face in the pleats of Sweetie’s red skirt.

“She’s still adjusting,” I say.

“Hey, Pamalamala!” My uncle Mike approaches, the funny guy in the family. “What can I get you to drink? You’re still drinking, right?” He nods at Taylor in my arms. “You’re not nursing are you?”

“Scotch on the rocks sounds fabulous,” I say, happy at that moment to be an adoptive parent, no breastfeeding required.

Anna peaks inquisitively from Sweetie’s skirt.  “Pamalamala?” She laughs.  “That’s funny Mommy!”

“That’s what I called myself when I was your age,” I explain.  “I couldn’t say Pamela, so I said Pamalamala whenever someone wanted to know my name.”

Anna’s brown eyes light up, and some of the anxiety disappears.  I want nothing more than for her to be free of the anxiety.  Mike hands me my scotch and I relax, happy to be among family on this holiday, grateful for the acceptance from nearly everyone, and even thankful for the forbearance of those who might still disapprove.  I am aware they might be masking their disdain with holiday cheer and copious amounts of alcohol.  I don’t mind.

Before long, the girls and their cousins hear the prancing of reindeer feet on the roof and the ringing of sleigh bells.  The little ones who are old enough to walk, rush to the window hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa.  I hold Taylor as she wiggles and babbles excitedly and points to her big sister, eyes wide with anticipation.

“HO! HO! HO!”  Santa opens the front door, a pillowcase bursting with presents slung over his shoulder.  “I hear there are children here who have been very good this year!

“Sit over here, Santa,” one of my younger cousins points to a wing-backed chair between the fireplace and the lavishly decorated tree.  Over the course of the next hour, each child under 18 sits on Santa’s lap and assures him they’ve been nice and not at all naughty during the year.  Santa digs in his bag and presents each child with a present, and as they unwrap their gifts, they hold them up as cameras snap and flash.  The adults grin conspiratorially at one another, remembering Christmases not that long ago when they did the same.  I’ve chosen Anna and Taylor’s gifts carefully, the sting of disappointment still fresh on me.

Once the spaghetti and crab have been devoured, once the platters of cookies have been depleted, once the children have succumbed to the rush of sugar and the excitement of Santa and fallen asleep about the living room, once the adults have exchanged gifts, and had a final glass of holiday cheer, we begin to gather our newly acquired belongings, our coats, the diaper bag, Anna’s Blankie.  We whisper our good-byes and carry our sleeping babies to the car and tuck them in to their car seats.  After several more forays between house and car, more hugs and kisses, I put the Volvo in reverse and head north, letting out the breath I’d been holding the past several hours.

We had navigated through a family Christmas Eve, our little family of four breaking new ground, the four of us presenting as just another family in spite of our differences.  No one else in my extended family had ventured quite this far outside of the norm:  being a “married” lesbian mother of adopted multi-ethnic children broke some new family ground and gained not just tolerance, but acceptance.  Still, my anxiety and self doubt colored my experience and I believed that the love and welcomes came because we worked so hard to be a normal family, we wore dresses and feminine shoes; we bought thoughtful and not inexpensive gifts; we were fortunate to have beautiful children and dressed them in dresses and lace.  We drove a Volvo.  I believed that acceptance required stringent adherence to heterosexual norms.  I thought that if we were going to be a successful lesbian family, we were going to have to be as non-threatening and as normal as possible.

I was so busy hiding who I was, I didn’t even try to be myself.  It didn’t occur to me that my family would love me anyway.

A is for Adoption

Published on by Pam10 Comments

As I’ve written and rewritten this blog post, I’ve become hyper aware that mine may be a controversial stance and that I harbor very, very personal opinions on this topic. What is right for one family may not be right for another. I get that. I also need to disclose up front that I am the adoptive parent of two children who were born here in the United States. Both of my girls were adopted as infants through open adoptions. Both girls’ birth mothers chose my former partner and me to be the adoptive parents. Both of my children have reconnected with their biological families. In both cases, the birth fathers were out of the picture, though one of my children has a relationship currently with her biological father.

Also worth noting as relevant—my mother was adopted when she was three years old, and my parents adopted my little brother when he was an infant. Both of these adoptions were closed adoptions, meaning the records were sealed at the time of the adoptions and remain closed still.

Given my history with adoption, the fact that my families—both my family of origin and the family I later created with my former partner—would not exist without adoption, I have some strong feelings on the topic. To whit, whenever I hear about a couple’s struggle with infertility and how they are spending gazillions of dollars on in vitro and fertility treatments because they don’t want to consider adoption, my heart breaks a little. In my experience, people’s reasons for pursuing IVF vary, but generally fall into two camps: I want my own biological children and I’m afraid of losing my adopted child.

As a woman who never quite heard her own biological clock ticking, I’m the first to admit mine is not a very sympathetic response. As a mother who came to parenthood slantwise, my point of view is likely uncommon and perhaps unpopular. But, as a parent who, over the years, has worked very consciously to be a parent and to remain a parent in the face of some very daunting challenges, I think I have something valuable to add to the conversation.

First of all, having kids is a crapshoot. It doesn’t matter how they come into our lives. I think the single most important thing potential parents don’t realize is just how little control they will have once that child is conceived and/or born, bundled and placed in their arms. All bets are off. Who gets sick, who lives, who dies, who has disabilities, hidden or otherwise—there is no biological magic bullet that will protect you.

Second of all, children are not possessions with which we are to adorn our lives. Your dreams will not be their dreams; their achievements will not be yours. Their lives are their own. It doesn’t matter if they spring from your loins or from someone else’s—kids are individuals with every right to grow into themselves, whatever they may be, without unrealistic or narcissistic parental expectations, adopted or biological.

We seem to be smack in the midst of a sort of cult of childhood—our culture demands that we dote on our kids, lavish them with opportunities and options in ways our parents never dreamed of. I’m not sure where this urge comes from, but I suspect it springs from our own needs to be seen and doted upon. If our kids look like us, so much the better—it’s that much easier for us to infuse them with our own dreams and ambitions.

I’m not saying that adoptive parents don’t engage in this behavior, but I believe that some people may choose not to adopt because they can’t imagine investing themselves like that in a child that is not biologically theirs. And the world has plenty of children who need families, so it’s unfortunate, I think, that they are overlooked.

As for this notion that adoption is a process fraught with boogeymen who will at any moment demand the return of an adopted child, let me just say this—it’s not that common. In spite of the occasional heart wrenching media report (and very real heartbreak on the parts of all parents involved), the rise of open adoption in the past two and a half decades has gone a long way to deter adoption going off the rails.

I’ve also always been puzzled by adoptive parents who choose to go overseas to adopt. And one of the biggest reasons these folks give is that the chances of the birth parents coming for the kids is slimmer with international adoptions. Given that numbers of kids in this country who need homes, my bias is that we should start here, with our own kids first. And besides, if a birth parent changes his or her mind about placing their child for adoption, shouldn’t they have that right within a particular time frame? Don’t the birth parents deserve the dignity of an open adoption and ongoing communication with the adoptive family?

I have so much more to say on this topic, but it is going to be a long month of blog posts and I’m going to try to keep these things under 1000 words. The A to Z Challenge folks recommend 100-300 words, but I’m just not that good.

If you are considering adoption or want more info, check out these sites:

The Children’s Bureau

Administration for Children and Families

Open Adoption and Family Services

Makeup Beauty Doll and Other Problems with White Privilege

Published on by Pam11 Comments

Many years ago, flummoxed by the joys and perils of raising two non-white children in our predominantly white culture, I wrote an essay expressing my doubts and fears, and (surprising to me now) my certainties (you will recognize them when you see them). Some of what I wrote makes sense and some of it clearly needs rethinking. Yesterday on the day we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., my eldest daughter, now 23, texted me (this is how we communicate these days). She was wondering if I thought it odd that the company for which she now works didn’t celebrate the national holiday. I do find it odd, odd that only governments and banks shut down on this Monday when the world grinds to a halt, more or less, for other national holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, the 4th of July.

My initial response to her was yes, MLK day is like Veterans’ Day or Presidents’ Day—national holidays that go unobserved by most businesses in the name of productivity and profit. She replied that businesses should do more to honor a man who inspired the policies so many companies tout when they brag about being diverse and multicultural. I agreed.

I dug up that essay and I emailed it to my daughter yesterday. We had an enlightening and informative (for me at least—I can’t speak for her) email exchange about White Privilege after she read this. She asked if I’d ever blogged about the subject. I haven’t. I’ve been fairly quiet about it over the years. Why? Fear. Fear of offending someone, fear that I didn’t know enough about the “issues,” that I hadn’t read enough, studied enough, experienced enough. I thought overnight about this fear and I’ve decided that if someone is offended by me writing about my experience, then they are missing my point. I also decided I haven’t talked or written enough about race, in spite of the fact that I helped raise two African-American children. (Point of clarification—Anna, my eldest is mixed race—Native American, African-American, white; Taylor is African-American). Maybe it’s not too late. So, I am posting my long ago essay publicly for the first time—I’ve revised it some for clarity but mostly this is as I wrote it 18 years ago. Here it is:

Last week my daughter’s preschool teacher asked me if I’d talked with her about discrimination. I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. What do you call the adopted multiracial child of white lesbians? I don’t know, but I’m sure as the years pass us by we’ll learn more than we care to know. I told the teacher that our family had discussed variations in skin color and the many other ways in which people are different and alike. How to explain discrimination based on skin color to a five-year old?Halloween 1994

Our oldest daughter carries an acute awareness of her skin color. She knows that her skin is much darker than ours. She also knows that her little sister’s skin is darker than her own. “I have browner skin than you, but Taylor has the darkest skin, right?” She’s been known to ask this question on more than one occasion. And when we brought her baby sister home, Anna unwrapped her, peered beneath the baby blanket and with some relief announced, “Oh good, she has brown skin, just like me.” She knows which kids in her daycare have brown skin, though ethnicity is an elusive concept. For her, the world is comprised of people with varying shades of brown skin—from very dark brown (like her sister) to not brown at all except for little brown spots (freckled, like mine)—and people with porcelain white skin and long blonde hair.

I had no idea how deeply children internalize societal messages until we began dealing with what, in our house, has become “the hair thing.” Anna’s hair is a crop of silky brown ringlets, which we have, until recently, kept short for the sake of simplicity. Imagine my surprise when, after we agreed to let her grow it out, she expressed her delight at the prospect of finally having straight hair. She was shocked to learn that her hair might grow long, it would not grow straight.

I’ve read The Bluest Eye. I know the world bombards our children with images of white babies, white Barbie Dolls, white Make Up Beauty dolls, and I know that I too eagerly try to overcompensate at times, for this deluge. This year for the first time, Anna knew early and consistently what she wanted for Christmas:  a pogo stick, a computer, and a Makeup Beauty Doll (which really is just a head with hair). Being the sensitive, aware, and hip parents that we are, we bought her the African-American version of Makeup Beauty, basically the white doll painted brown with straight brown hair instead of straight blonde hair. These details were not lost on Anna. Her face lit up as Santa handed her a box just the right shape for the coveted Makeup Beauty, but the excitement faded quickly into disappointment when she pulled the brown doll from the box. Anna suffers our political correctness with a sigh and a roll of her eyes, but she knows that Makeup Beauty is supposed to be white. After all, she told us, the make up only shows up on white skin. She has a veritable rainbow selection of Barbies residing with her African-American Cabbage Patch Doll, her Black Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, but she only plays with the white ones.

So, how do we talk with her about discrimination? There’s color awareness, and there is discrimination or prejudice based on difference. How does the five-year-old mind wrap itself around that one? Is Anna being excluded at school because of her skin color? Are teachers, parents, workers excluding her or making decisions based on stereotypes? Anna’s teacher gave me a book for kids about discrimination, Black Like Kyra, White Like Me, that is full of stereotypes. Kyra lives in a violent section of the city. She meets her white friend at the Youth Center. To escape the violence, Kyra’s parents move to a predominantly white section of town and encounter nothing but resistance, violence, and harassment. The message, it seems, is that people of color live in places that need escaping from, but the white people don’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon in the desirable neighborhoods. And I should share this information with my five-year old? Where is the line between preparing a child to meet challenges and adversity and raising a child to expect conflict and harassment?

Right or wrong, the one feature by which my children will always be judged in this country is their skin color. Before strangers know Anna and Taylor have two moms, before anyone knows their socioeconomic status, their spiritual convictions, their occupations, my children will be judged as other than white. The content of their characters will come later. The question is, do I teach them to expect this judgment as inevitable? Do I read them books in which people of color are run out of white neighborhoods? Do I tell them that one day they may not be invited over to play at a friend’s house because they are African-American, Native American, multi-racial, obviously different?

Or do I teach them about respect, about the value of difference and diversity, about some people’s narrow mindedness. Do I teach them to expect acceptance if that is what they offer? And if I teach them these things, what will I say the first time one of them encounters a racial slur or rejection simply because of their skin color? A great gulf exists between my experiences and what my children will encounter. I cannot be naïve and pretend it won’t happen, because it already has. I expect discrimination and prejudice will continue to find their ways into our lives in more potent measure than they have thus far.

A Pivotal Moment: Memoir is Made of These

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Twenty years ago I spent a long weekend at a workshop/retreat that fundamentally changed my life, or at least served as a pivot point in my journey. I had one incredibly emotional moment that weekend—a moment that has stayed with me all these years, through tremendous changes and ups and downs in my life.

One of my favorite parts of this retreat was that it was silent, a fact the participants did not know going in.  We could talk only during the workshop sessions, and not with each other, but to the group as a whole. The food was intentionally less than optimal for those few days as well. And every morning we had to run a mile.

But, I digress.  One evening, the retreat facilitator led us through some guided imagery and we were to be constructing our future home.  What would it look like? Where would it be? Who would be there?

And here’s the part where I burst into tears:  My future home was warm, with dark wood and candles, and inviting comfortable furniture, and it was full of many, many children, children that looked like my children.

At this point, the imagery had taken over and I was just a recipient of this vision.  I wept for probably a good fifteen minutes, maybe more (it’s been twenty years—details are fuzzy), but I know for sure that tears and snot rolled down my face uncontrollably.

I did not understand then why I had that vision nor why I reacted so emotionally to it. The tears were neither sad nor joyous, just bursting with raw and uncontrollable feeling. Looking back now, I understand I was weeping because my vision was so radically, radically different from my reality.  I wept for the pains and joys I had yet to experience on my path to my vision.

Writing my memoir these past 18 months has prompted all manner of self-reflection (the cynics among us might say navel-gazing—there’s a whole other blog), and I’m finding much of that reflecting to be awkward, if not downright painful. So, I was sort of happy when recent events coincided to prompt me to remember this image.

My youngest daughter’s biological brother (both of my kids are adopted) recently moved to our home state and last weekend came to have dinner with us—he and his wife and their four children.  This was the first time I’d met her brother, though she had spent time with her biological family (including her birth parents) over the past few years.

 As the day of their visit drew closer, I grew calmer—which is not really my MO. Usually I ramp up into a bit of a frenzy before such events. There were going to be ten of us, including four children, going out to dinner. I remained calm, grounded even. Even as the day grew closer and we had to redo the plans, I rolled with it, strangely confident that dinner would be what it needed to be.

 And it was. I was home, surrounded by children that looked just like my daughters, surrounded by family new and old and new again.

So Far From the Tree

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I just finished reading Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree. I managed to get through the 700 pages in a couple of weeks and right up to the last chapter, I found it engrossing and revelatory. As the parent of two adopted children, the sister of an adopted brother, and the daughter of a mother who herself was adopted, I know a bit about horizontal relationships in parenting. As a lesbian, too, I know a bit about falling far from the tree.

That said, I have some serious issues with what seems to be his bias toward creating a family biologically rather than via adoption, as well as the notion that it is better to breed than to adopt, even when biology is clearly flawed. On page 678, he writes that “the right to reproduce should be among the inalienable ones,” and later laments with one mother who didn’t consider adoption because it would be heartbreaking not to be pregnant or give birth (even though she would have a handicapped child).

As he continues on with his own quest for a perfect bio baby, I fail to understand how one person’s desire to be pregnant and birth a biological child, even though the chances of said child being profoundly handicapped, trumps creating a family through adoption. As a gay man, Solomon should know the value of creating a family of choice. I find the selfishness and narcissism rampant in his final chapter sufficient to render the preceding chapters nearly meaningless.

My mother was placed in a children’s home when she was about a year old by a single mother who couldn’t both work and support an infant. The people who became my grandparents adopted her when she was three years old, even though her birth mother came to visit her regularly.

My little brother (my only brother, my only sibling) arrived with only a week’s notice the year I was four, right around Thanksgiving. One day the phone rang and my mom asked me (rhetorically, I’m pretty sure) if I wanted a little brother. Seven days later, I’m at the hospital with my parents picking him up. I cannot imagine life without him.

Nor can I fathom the possibility of life without my daughters, children born into and then given into impossibly complex circumstances. I may have once been ambivalent about motherhood, but their arrivals in my life eradicated any indifference I may have ever had about being a parent.

I wasn’t one of those women who felt incomplete without children, or maybe I should say I wasn’t a young woman who felt that my life wouldn’t be complete should I not ever have children. I just didn’t think about it that much given that I was a lesbian. I figured that kids just weren’t in my future, and this realization did not cause me any angst.

Then I met and fell in love with a woman for whom having children was critically important, an imperative, even. Myself, I didn’t really understand how much I valued my role as a mother until I faced losing my children when my relationship with my co-parent went south. At the point where I could choose to remain a parent or walk away, I decided to stay. I guess in this way, I am like some of the parents in Solomon’s book.

My eldest daughter came to live with us three days after she was born. Her birth mother had decided to place her for adoption and had chosen my partner at the time as the person she wanted to raise her as yet unborn child. Given the times (1990, pre-Will and Grace, pre-Rosie, pre-Ellen, pre-gay marriage, even pre-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), it made sense for my partner to adopt as a single parent. I was a willing, if somewhat ambivalent, participant in this process, until I held Anna. Once that baby was in my arms, any uncertainty melted away.

One of my greatest pleasures is wearing a sweatshirt my daughter Anna got for me one year for Mother’s weekend at her university—the sweatshirt has a large pink apple tree on it and says The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree. I love the irony. I take certain pride in the fact that Anna is more like me than I ever could have imagined. But I didn’t adopt her so she would reflect myself back to me. I adopted her because I fell in love with her. I parented her because I loved her, from the moment I first held her.

Taylor, my youngest, found her way to us from Philadelphia. At the very moment I got the phone call as I was sitting at my desk at work, she became my precious and beloved child. When I first saw her tiny (and she was very, very tiny—a full term 4 lb. baby) little person, I had no doubts that I would love her with all of my heart and soul. She couldn’t be more different from me, and I love her fiercely. Taylor’s adoption got all kinds of complicated before it became final, but she was as much my child before the birth certificate arrived as she was after.

The paperwork is a formality—it doesn’t make my love or support for Taylor and Anna any more real. In that way, adoption is a bit like gay marriage—the paperwork grants us privileges under the law, but we are already a family without the judge’s decree.

I suppose Solomon is to be admired for not hiding his fears and feelings in the final chapter of his book, but I find his quest for the perfect child completely antithetical to the notion of parenting. As his book so profoundly shows us, there is no guarantee that our actual children will even remotely reflect our ideal child. And I would go so far as to say that the greater our expectations are that our children will arrive and fulfill our dreams for us, the greater our disappointment and the greater damage we as parents will inflict upon them.

Becoming a parent is a crapshoot any way it happens, but I do believe the children we need find their way to the families they need. May we all be able to accept these gifts with grace.