"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.

Dialing Down the Negativity

Amy Kuras — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:33:00 GMT

We've all been guilty of this – or okay, maybe it's just me – saying something negative in your child's hearing. "She is such a three-year-old, I am losing my mind today." "It's okay. I didn't like school either." "Clowns are terrifying."

Turns out? Not such a good idea. When your kid hears you assigning certain traits to them or reinforcing a fear or negative feeling they have, it sticks in their head as truth. Sucks to be so influential, doesn't it?

Now I don’t agree with this columnist's assertion, that if you ask other parents for help with a problem you're having with your child in their hearing, that you give them the idea you don’t know what you're doing. Of course, I am only the parent of a three-year-old, who still thinks I can conjure up Pirate's Booty and new episodes of Dora out of thin air because I am just that cool.

I am realizing that I need to work harder on dialing down even more neutral labels, like calling her my Wild Child in front of people. Something I read about siblinghood, and if I didn’t have nine months pregnant mush brain right now I'd link it for you, said that labeling one kid with either positive or negative traits means the other child(ren) in the family feel they can't express that trait too. With #2 on the way, it's something I worry about a lot. Short of coming up with code words with your partner (done it) what do you do?

Strollerderby : labeling

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

Dialing Down the Negativity