Gifts for Winter Solstice

We’ve managed to extricate ourselves from the gift-insanity this year, after several years of family prep-work. It feels a little strange not to be buying anything extra at this time of year–as I have every other year of my life. But we don’t need anything–and neither does anyone in our families. The kids received wool long-underwear and old school Sesame Street DVDs from one side of the family, and movies and books from the other side of the family–and these gifts were opened and used upon arrival. (Even useful gifts feel extravagent some days, especially when reading about the Brodie family.) We’re figuring out what food and treats to put in the kids’ stockings. And each of our four children will be receiving one gift this holiday season.

I asked each of the children, “If you could have one new special thing, what would you like to have?” Gretel wants a baby doll (and I copied that request for Teri). Jaja wants a doll with a wedding dress, a long veil, high heels, and a bouquet of flowers–and blue jammies to change into. (Where do some girls get this wedding thing? I got married in an above-the-knee sundress purchased from a head shop, socks and buckle shoes, and a hair ribbon grabbed off one of the wedding gifts. Rico and Jaja look at our photos and chide their dad for not wearing a tie at his own wedding.)

Then there’s Rico’s gift request: a motorcycle, with two small dolls/people. The motorcycle is supposed to be green, and really roll, and have handlebars, and 2 exhaust pipes. And the people? One is a boy with brown skin wearing a green motorcycle outfit and a mohawk hairstyle; the other is a girl with tan skin wearing a purple motorcycle outfit and short hair (or long hair or a mohawk–it keeps changing). Both people are supposed to have (1) helmets, (2) motorcycle boots, and (3) elbow and knee pads–and all the clothes are supposed to be able to come off because . . . The two people also need jammies (green for the boy and purple for the girl). At this point I stopped him. “I’ll make up the rest,” I said.

Did I mention that these are gifts my husband and I are making? I have Teri and Gretel’s dolls done. (The second one was a lot faster.) The kids and I went downtown today and bought a shirt almost exactly the same color as Jaja’s skin. (She wanted a doll the same color as her. Let me tell you–after weeks of looking–medium brown tones are hard to find and to match.) So Jaja’s doll with the ‘bride’ outfit is next. Then I’ll get to work on the two little wire frame motorcycle riders. All that leaves is the motorcycle itself, somehow created from bits of wood and wire and fabric. I have a few more days.

 

** The two dolls pictured here are Waldorf-style, made from cotton knit fabric and wool yarn hair, stuffed full of wool we carded from a friend’s sheep, with a little bit of sand in their bums for weight. I used a book and internet directions for the making the heads, and made my own pattern for the bodies from a doll I like online. Their clothes I sewed from old baby clothes.

Life Links 10

• James Watson (the award-winning DNA scientist who recently embarrassed himself and ended his career by saying that White people are inherently more intelligent than Black people) is 16% Black–which is 16 times more Black ancestry than most people of European descent.

• Culpability–a new blog/forum discussing ethics in adoption, especially international adoption. 

• Are values race-based? Or are we asking the wrong set of questions? White May Be Might, But It’s Not Always Right, from the Washington Post.

• ‘Special Needs’ Children need extraordinary parents, on older child adoption and adoption disruption from Harlow’s Monkey.

• Dawn at This Woman’s Work thinks outloud (and writes it all down) about adoption reform–twice. 

• Not Because We HAD to, on adoption as a first choice from Paula at Heart, Mind, and Seoul.

• Ever page through a contemporary fashion magazine and wonder Where Are All The Black Models? Maghag gives the count of models Black models in nine top magazines. And here she counts out all the models of color in December 2007 magazine issues.

• Process, the blog of a child-and-family-services social worker, often about foster care.

• A new blog find–Mixed Race America–on the mixing of races in the U.S. of A.

• Old news, but still worth mentioning–the mother of Zahara Jolie speaks out. (Zahara is also daughter of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.) 

On Adoption as a First Choice

I always knew I would adopt children. I was less committed to giving birth to children, however pregnancy and homebirth have been parts of my mothering experience as well. I don’t remember the moment I decided I wanted to be a parent–it was in me from the very beginning. I also don’t remember deciding my future family would include both adopted and biological children, I just always knew it would. Maybe it was because my first friend was adopted. I don’t remember life before him; he is just three days younger than me.

As a young child, I took care of my many dolls and dressed up (for several years in a row) as a ‘mother’ for Halloween. I spent a good portion of my early pre-parenting life taking care of other people’s children. I have a brother who is ten years younger than me. I babysat a lot. I ran a summer ‘day camp’ for neighborhood kids. I nannied for children with cerebral palsy and autism, as well as their siblings. I worked with toddlers in a daycare center. I was a substitute teacher.

In my later professional life, I worked with adults with schizophrenia, OCD, and bipolar disorder. I worked with social workers and police investigating child sexual abuse and serious physical abuse. I’ve known many children, and I’ve known many struggling adults who are still dealing with their difficult childhoods.

I have always felt a real responsibility to be of use (as Homer Larch says), to constantly assess my life and myself to see if I am doing all I can. My thoughts and purpose have directed me to be of use to people in need: real, basic need. I completely believe that we are all one world, one people, but I also believe I must first address what is right here in my own back yard: the needs and inequities in my own country.

When we went through our first adoption process, I was not thinking about the ethics of adoption or about the policies (and the ‘values’ behind them) that financially reward women for placing their children with adoptive families–but don’t provide these same women the opportunity to parent their children. I was just thinking about children who needed a family. We knew what we were comfortable with, and we had a fabulous agency, and we ended up with a fully open adoption. Our second adoption was (serendipitously) with a different agency, and again was a completely ethical placement. (Although sometimes it seems like luck that both our adoptions worked out that way. In hindsight, I see so many potential pitfalls that just didn’t materialize.)

Our coming to adoption by choice instead of by way of infertility has caused a lot of confusion for others–for family members, for the general public, and for other adoptive parents. It is an unusual choice, especially with our combining adoption with biological children in such close concert. (Hard-core preferential adopters do not have any biological children, and many adoptive-bio mixed families have a few older bio kids and then a few younger adopted kids–almost like two separate families.)

So, why adopt when we are able to have (and not philosophically opposed to bearing) biological children?

For me, the answer lies deep inside me: every child is my responsibility. As with all things, If not me, then who? This is true in the abstract and in the very concrete (as in, we have the resources and the space, we should be open to another child in our family if a child needs us). The way this deeply held belief has played out in my adult life is a bit more complicated.

I have a life partner and best friend I have been with for almost 14 years. His ideas and plans are not necessarily the same as mine. I now have four children who (through some amazing blessing) are all multiply-gifted. They are healthy, they are beautiful, they are (mostly) well-behaved. They are intellectual and athletic super-stars (yes, I know, this is their mother bragging here). Thus, the thought of adding extremely needy children–I’m talking older child adoption here–to our family at this point in time (our kids range in age from 6 down to 2) gives me pause for the first time in my life. What would that mean for the children we have now? What would our family feel like for a child who has not had most of the advantages our kids have?

I am not traditionally religious at this point in my life, but I do love the writings of the Sufi master Jelaluddin Rumi. In a piece entitled The Real Work, Rumi says:

There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

Parts of me want to be a writer, a painter, a small-time homesteading farmer, an antiracist activist and organizer, an educator about multiracial families and individuals, an adoption reformer, an open adoption advocate. But when I dig deep down to my core, my internal compass always points the same way. My true purpose and drive is to provide a family and a home for children who need one.

One place this gets tricky with adoption is in turning down a specific situation because it is unethical: because the child’s parents are not being treated fairly, because you are being asked to do something–or pay for something–that is (at best) a very grey area. If you (as a potential adoptive parent) stick to your ethical values and say no to the situation, it feels like what you are really doing is saying no to the child: No, I’m sorry, you or your mother are involved with an unethical social worker (or facilitator or agency) and so you can’t become a member of our family. But I could not live with myself with even the hint of having ‘bought’ a child, or parenting a child whose first family truly intended to keep and parent them.

I carry all those children–and their mothers– around with me still, the children who joined other families, the children who are still waiting. I carry the sibling group of three Black brothers waiting in foster care, children who require more care (and fewer siblings) than our family can provide. I carry every face from every photolisting, every mistreated pregnant or parenting mother, every statistic about children living in poverty or parents dying of AIDS, alongside the pain in the faces of the mothers on T.V. during hurricane Katrina, the stories of children from Guatemala and Ethiopia stolen away to families overseas. Every mother hurting because of her child’s pain or the loss of her child; every child hurting because they have no parents–I carry them all inside me. I always have.

I constantly ask myself, would I be more effective working on policy issues instead of parenting a house full of stair-step children? But to me that feels like I’d be saying, I’m willing to donate money to the cause because that abnegates me from going to the people and being a part of the work myself. Donating money is important, don’t get me wrong, but it is also neater, less personal, in many ways–easier. Who is responsible for doing the actual hands-on work?

Along a similar line, and one that is with me almost as often: The financial privilege of the world’s middle and upper class has translated into ridiculous–yet seemingly mundane–expenses. Even when we have the money, I struggle to buy myself anything because the thought of what that $40 (the cost of a new striped turtleneck) would buy for a mother struggling to feed her children . . . you know, I’m pretty content in my thrift-store finds and my mother-in-law’s hand-me-downs.

We’re not wealthy, but we do more than get by. My partner and I have been blessed with good health, able bodies, the opportunity to complete college degrees, steady jobs, health insurance, and some very supportive family members. To most people who know us IRL (and probably the rest who don’t), our consideration of adopting another child–or two–into our hopping and popping family, well, they think we’re a little crazy. “Your life’s so perfect,” one relative always says, “Why risk wrecking it? Who knows what another child will do to your family balance?”

To that relative, and to everyone else, I say only this: There are children who need families. I think we have a pretty great family, with a lot to offer another son or daughter, brother or sister. And I love being a mother.

Caught Off-Guard

I took Jaja, Rico, and Gretel to a children’s play. I knew little about it, just that our babysitter was helping out backstage. We sat in the center of one of the front rows. As the lights dimmed, I glanced at the program Jaja was holding and noticed more than half the cast was listed under the title ‘Orphans’. I shifted in my seat, took a better look at the program, and found no additional information about the storyline. The play was titled ‘The Christmas Bus’. I mentally kicked myself for not researching the play more (at least looking it up online) before we agreed to attend.

The play began, and my heart started to pound. There was an orphanage (in the U.S.) full of orphans. The orphans were described–repeatedly–as ‘hooligans’, and the point was driven home that the orphans were both messy and out of control. The fictional town was named ‘Peaceful Valley’ but it was not actually peaceful because of the orphanage and the orphans (the orphanage is continually referred to as ‘a madhouse’). It is said the town sheriff spends the majority of his time ‘dealing’ with the orphans. Loud, dirty, and in trouble with the law; we were not off to a good start.

I realized I was going to have to vacate our front row seats when they began to ‘introduce’ the orphans, and we met (in a casual, off-handed, semi-comical manner) the teenager who had arrived as a baby, but no family had ever wanted him, and then the child who carried a potted plant around with him all the time because there had been a fire in his family home and the plant was the only thing (besides him) that had lived. My kids weren’t phased (they were more concerned with how much make-up the young actors were wearing) but I was about to cry.

I went to the play, leaving wiggly and noisy Teri at home with Dad, hoping to have a relaxing time with my older kids. I was looking to get away from the intensity of the past ten days, all of which have included thoughts and tears and endless discussions about older child adoption. The relaxing evening was not to be.

I started a post a month ago entitled ‘Haven’t Gone There Yet’ about a major subject we haven’t broached with the kids. You guessed it–the subject was orphans and orphanages. We’ve managed to avoid Annie, although the kids have seen the animated versions of Oliver and the original Rescuers. (Really–what is it with Hollywood and orphaned kids?)

In a back row, I regrouped, and then at the first break explained to my kids what an orphan was in the context of this play: a child who is not living with their birthparents–some of them because their birthparents have died–and who also does not have adoptive parents. The orphanage is the place where orphans live, with adults who take care of them, but these adults are not their parents. I clarified that there are no longer orphanages in the United States, but that there are still orphanages in other countries. I added that in the United States, kids who cannot live with their birthfamilies (and have not been adopted) live with foster parents. We have talked about foster families before. I had maybe 30 seconds to come up with and deliver these important facts, and it went okay under the circumstances. I would have liked a bit more time.

The play, unfortunately, did not get better. The town’s people looked down on the orphans and their care provider, viewing them only as a problem. The orphans talked about all the foster families they had been ‘through’ (they each counted off how many they had been in), how as a foster child you just knew you didn’t belong, and things foster families dislike. One actor actually said, “They don’t like it when you wet the bed.”

The focus of the play was the orphanage director’s idea to farm each of the kids out to a different town family for Christmas Eve dinner, an overnight stay, and presents. (We never met any member of the receiving town families.) Then the next day, the kids all returned to the orphanage. There was a side character who suddenly at the end of the play became wealthy and decided to give each of the orphans a college education (and we heard what each of the main-character orphans goes on to be/do). One of the narrated ending lines was that each of the college-educated orphans goes on to be ‘a productive member of society’.

I found myself at an almost total loss for words trying to answer my kid’s questions on the brief car-ride home. Why, they wanted to know, were the town’s people mean to the kids (the orphans)? Why did people call them names?

How do you explain to children that some people (erroneously) believe that kids/people who are separated from their birthparents (through death or adoptive placement) are less valuable than people who grow up in their birthfamilies? How do you say to any child (especially your own child) that some people will think there must be something inherently wrong with them because their birthfamily was not able to raise them? This is a totally foreign concept to my kids. It is a totally foreign concept to me.

Then Gretel got hung-up on kids who don’t have parents. “No Mommy and no Daddy?” she kept saying. She understood that the children we saw tonight–the actors–all have parents here in our town. But the idea that there are real children out there who do not have a family . . . Rico put his sister’s crumpled face into words, “That makes me very sad,” he said. “Me too,” I replied.

We also talked about some of the kids’ friends who were adopted internationally who did live in orphanages before they joined their adoptive parents.

During intermission we ran into friends who told me there are several adopted kids in the cast, at least one who came through foster care and another through international adoption. My first thought was, Are their parents clueless? Or maybe they didn’t know the scope of the whole play because their kid just sings Christmas carols in the chorus–and the parents were as surprised as I was when they came to opening night? Or the parents think orphans as entertainment–regardless of their own child’s experience–is par for the (American) course?

I do not find anything amusing or entertaining about orphans. As my partner sarcastically said, “You don’t see the humor in a kid’s birthfamily burning up in a house fire?” (The orphan with the potted plant really bothered me.) I understand the plot device–kill off a child’s parents so they are free to have adventures the other parented children could only dream of. But there was no adventure in this play, just orphans used as the backdrop.

Why is it acceptable to keep carting out negative stereotypes and calling them entertainment? (There were several ridiculous female stereotypes in this play as well, including a gold-digging woman who even had the parents in front of me raising their eyebrows.) This children’s holiday play was a great opportunity, for the cast and the audience, to enlighten and educate while entertaining. Instead of spreading positive, beneficial ideas, this play reinforced old, false, damaging stereotypes.

A child who has been relinquished by their birthparents (or whose birthparents have died) has no control over their parental situation. They are not more or less valuable as a person because of this life circumstance. As I said to my kids tonight, and they all three nodded in solemn agreement, Every child deserves and needs a family.

And there is no reason anyone should be insensitive to children–or adults–who do not have a family to call their own.