Strollerderby : adopted children

Adoption After Having Biological Kids: What's the Big Deal?

JeanneSager — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:28:00 GMT

I got a bit ferklempt watching the recent New York Times video of a May Lee Wong, a NYC principal who just adopted a little girl from Ethiopia after giving birth to three boys. Maybe it was the fact that the little girl, Mebrat, was thought to be three-years-old when she came to the Wong family but was, in fact, a malnourished six-year-old.

More likely? The fact that a family has adopted after having children "of their own."

Because there is still a stigma attached to mixing families of biological and adopted children. There is the inference that the older, biologically-related children will feel cast aside by their parents' decision to adopt. The idea that an adopted child won't feel they can make a home in a family where they are the only ones who don't have a blood connection.

Raised in a family with a mix of biologically-related and adoption-related aunts and uncles, it's an argument I'm familiar with - and one I can tell you holds no water. My family is my family. Just the way mixed families of steps and halves mix together, so do the adopted and the biological.

The criticism is generally lobbed at parents as they make their decisions to adopt, but at the heart they are pointed at kids - that the kids won't adapt. You can't equate the rigidity of adults with children. Because kids are more accepting of change and of other people than adults, even the most liberal-minded adult. There's also a sense of equality among kids that is inherent - something we all too often lose as we grow up and begin to experience slights both real and imagined at work and in the grocery store. For kids, life starts out an equal playing field - it's up to adults to keep it that way.

May Lee Wong's attitude toward adopting Mebrat sounds just right: "It’s not that I didn’t think my family was complete with my three boys, I knew that we had room for one more."

Image: NY Times

"Mother" is Just Another Word: Family, Adoption and Language

Shannon LC Cate — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Guest blogger at the New York Times blog, Motherlode, Jenni Levy, muses on the question of how to feel and what to think when she has to identify her child as "adopted" on a life insurance form:

"Most days I feel good about the way we are together. I have become my child’s mother without denying her heritage, without erasing her origins. So...why can’t I just check “adopted child” and move on?

I can’t choose one because it’s a false dichotomy. My daughter is adopted, and she is my child. Both of those are true. I don’t want to deny any part of our relationship, even if it is just to answer a bureaucrat’s unthinking question."

So when is it appropriate to make the distinction between someone's biological or adopted child, as such? We are always hearing about celebrities and their "adopted" children versus "just" their children, and the labeling is all the more glaring when multiple children come into one family both ways (for anyone out there who just came out of a ten-year coma, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for example).

I am a mother by adoption. In fact, there are so many labels qualifying my family I sometimes don't even know where to start. I am one of three mothers of my children, who have a birth mother and two adopted mothers (my partner and I) each. I am white and my daughters are African American. We have open adoptions, which means we extend our sense of family to include their first mothers and other family members.

Most of the time I don't care whether people say my kids were adopted or not. Checking boxes in situations like the one Levy discusses don't bother me much because I have come to have really low expectations of the respect my family receives from those outside its immediate embrace. The labels people assign to family don't usually fit us, and I stopped expecting them to so long ago I don't remember ever feeling differently. We are who we are to each other, call it what you will. Some of what we are to each other doesn't have a word. I say "my partner" for lack of a better term, though its business connotations are too stiff and distant to define the real substance of my marriage. My children's biological mothers are family to me but there's no adequate word in our culture for the woman who gave birth to the children I'm rearing. And I know three mothers is difficult for many people to comprehend, but for our family it is just our life. When we need to distinguish which mother is which, we use clumsy modifiers (none of which are quite right) to help minimize confusion.

(I once read a persusive ethics essay suggesting that only women who give birth should be called the "mothers" of their children -- even if the mother doesn't rear the child. Other parents -- male biological parents, adoptive parents of either gender -- should be refered to as "parents" but not "mothers." I thought that was a fair distinction. If that kind of language were to become common, I'd have less explaining to do about my own family relationships. Of course, this language shift will not happen any time soon, because of the emotional baggage our culture attaches to the word "mother.")

What does bother me is when people use the "adoptive" modifier to imply that there is something extraordinary about the parent. For some crazy reason, there is a strong myth in our culture that by adopting children, parents rescue them from some terrible fate. For example, upon meeting our first child for the first time, a family friend of my avowed atheist partner commended her on doing such a "Christian" thing by adopting. Another said "thank god she wasn't aborted!" as if our adopting her had anything to do with her mother's decision to carry her pregnancy to term. And then there's Saint Angelina, Patron of Adoption, whom we have all seen grace the covers of the magazines in the grocery line.

But ninety-nine percent of the time there is nothing even slightly rescue-related about adoption (including Angelina's). Frankly (and shamefully), my children's mothers did not have access to abortion should they have wanted it. And our children were hardly languishing in the foster system. They came home to us from the hospital as newborns. Furthermore, if I had not adopted my children, someone else would have. The waiting list for a child is nine months to two years long at our adoption agency. And those waiting lists exist everywhere the adoption of healthy infants is concerned (yes, Angelina had to wait, too). The stark truth is, the world has no shortage of people who want to adopt healthy infants -- and even toddlers -- whatever the race, whatever the country of origin. I am not a hero for adopting my children, I'm just a woman who wanted babies, like women who chart their ovulation and pee on sticks and give birth want babies.

This adoptive-parents-as-heros myth also seems to imply that loving a child not related by blood is more difficult than loving one that sprang from your own loins. This offends me on multiple levels, but most of all because it implies there is something less loveable about my children than about theoretical children that might have been born to me. In fact, my children are, of course, the most loveable children on the planet Earth, and I am lucky beyond lucky that I get to be their parent.

But after five years of reading and writing about adoption, and nearly four years of parenting by adoption, I have all but given up on expecting most people to understand that my family is a family is a family, even with its unusual structure, members without titles or legal ties and its obvious, visible differences from the "norm." I now divide the world into three categories: people who "get" adoption; people who don't get adoption but would like to learn; people who really have no interest in getting it at all. I try only to bother with those who get it or those interested in learning.

You can't teach a form full of boxes much of anything so I will blithely check "adopted child," roll my eyes, and get on with my day.

Biological Father of Madonna's Adopted Son Very Concerned

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yohana Banda, the biological father of Madonna’s adopted son David, is very worried about the boy's happiness. Although Banda and his second wife live simply in a thatched hut in Malawi, he thinks that three-year-old David may be happier living with him than with the most famous woman in the world.

Banda put David up for adoption after his first wife, David’s biological mother, died from complications in childbirth. He hoped that David would have a better life in the U.S., but, he says, “Now I see him in a big bewildering crowd in the street with people pushing and shoving, and many cameras around, and without a mother and father to hold his hand. I’m feeling bad for him.”

Madonna’s divorce from Guy Ritchie has strengthened Banda’s concerns about David’s welfare. “This is a new and terrible thing to happen to him. I am too upset to think clearly,” Banda said.

Although this is clearly a unique case, Banda's concern raises interesting questions about the rights of biological parents to be involved in their children’s lives after adoption. Naturally, Banda cannot know what David’s private family life is really like without personal contact from Madonna. Do you think Madonna has an obligation to reassure Banda of David’s happiness, or are her family’s decisions none of his business?

Photo: Celebpick's Weblog

Strollerderby : adopted children

Adoption After Having Biological Kids: What's the Big Deal?

Vote on Jon and Kate's Divorce Goes Too Far

Hint: We Really Might Know Our Kids Better Than You

Playdate: Does Your Sitter 'Love' Your Kids?

"Mother" is Just Another Word: Family, Adoption and Language

Biological Father of Madonna's Adopted Son Very Concerned

Will Madonna Have a Baby With A-Rod?