What advice does anyone have for dealing with the… ambiguity of adoption? I run into articles and people that just ENRAGE me, so careless of first mothers and their families. Everyone in my area is an adoptive parent, and few in open adoption, and the view is always from that side. I read this: [link redacted -- please see comment below] and the complete lack of compassion just exhausted me. Anyone doing better?
What advice do people have for dealing with public misperceptions of adoption?
– August 16, 2012Posted in: Community Wisdom
I wanted to explain why I removed the link the poster above was referencing. The post is on a personal blog and it’s sharing a very specific and personal experience. It didn’t feel appropriate to link it here since this site isn’t to “call out” bloggers who upset us or who have a point of view that we don’t understand.
In order to understand the context of the question, I’m going to summarize the post it linked to as best I can:
The blog was by an adoptive mother who adopted her child from foster care. The child was abused by his birth parents and had several placements before being placed with her. The adoptive mom has very few pictures of her child’s early years and she was talking about this being one of the indications that he was not well-cared for by his birth family. She recently found her child’s birth mom’s Facebook and discovered he has a younger sibling. She found a very few pictures of her child on his birth grandmother’s Facebook and this enraged her because as far as she knows, the birth grandmother didn’t protect her grandson from the abuse.
The comments on it (so far) are about how lucky the child is to have been adopted by the poster.
Ok, on to the discussion.
Dawn, I’m not sure I understand. The adoptive mother facebook stalked the birth family? Is it an open adoption?
I couldn’t tell if it was an open adoption but it didn’t sound like it. I don’t know if she stalked so much is just put the woman’s name in the searchbar. I should have added that the post was a little bit about feeling so angry at her son’s family for hurting him but then also seeing them IN her son and recognizing that they were the people who hurt him but also the people who MADE him. I really wish I felt comfortable linking — maybe I will write her and let her know about this post in case she wants to join in the conversation.
OK, I let the blogger whose post is being referenced know about this post so she can share the link if she feels comfortable doing so. I am hoping we can have a discussion in general about misperceptions about adoption but I welcome a more specific one if the blogger feels comfortable putting her story here to be discussed.
I’m coming at this as someone who has also adopted from foster care and is currently fostering, and in both cases I have no photos of the girls prior to their entry into care and only a few from their first foster families (and a ton since they’ve been with us). In both cases, pictures may not have been taken because of poverty or may have been taken and then lost in moves (or in one case a house fire) or may have been taken and then not brought with the child because she didn’t get to bring her things when she entered foster care and then her parent wasn’t compliant and wasn’t about to give precious pictures to a caseworker. I don’t presume to know why there are not pictures, but there are no pictures and I do feel sad about that gap that they have, though we have photos of my adopted daughter’s siblings as babies that their grandma gave us and that tells us at least what she must have looked like. But I get sad sometimes when I see a baby and think, “Wow, I’ll never know what Mara looked like when she was that age. SHE will never know.” And yet I had that same Ooh, no feeling when reading that same blog post.
It’s hard to find the right way to be respectful of family who allow children to be hurt, but it’s also easy to demonize them or blow what people could have done out of proportion. Whenever I meet any of Mara’s first mom’s friends or relatives, they tell me that they used to babysit her all the time when she was a baby and they loved her so much and I do sometimes want to say, “Huh, so were you babysitting her when XYZ happened and did you maybe think you or someone should have done something about it?” but I never do because they’re not trying to tell me all the factual details about what happened but rather the explanation of why they care(d) about Mara and why it’s meaningful to them that they can see her thriving now.
I don’t know why people in Mara’s life did what they did when she was young, but I respect the things that they did out of love and stick to my general policy of feeling really sorry for people who are so stressed/depressed/hurt/messed up that they think hurting a child is going to somehow make them feel better. I’m not saying any of this as evidence that I’m “doing better” but I’m doing as well as I can and I try to assume that others (in birth/first or foster or adoptive families) are doing the same.
As the original poster notes, there’s a lot of pressure on foster-adoptive families to disregard the feelings and actions of first families and I think that’s sad and should be pushed against, but I can’t tell any particular person how to understand her own story. I will just say that I’m a big proponent of actual openness, face-to-face rather than facebook snooping, in adoption from foster care. At 4, Mara is seeing how much her first parents love her but also that they don’t always keep their obligations to her, which is helping her understand why they weren’t able to care for her properly. As I said, we have baby pictures of her siblings and we also see them regularly, so I can guess what she’ll look like at 7 or 10 or 16, see where her interests and sense of humor overlap with hers.
(There’s also a whole sidebar conversation to be had about how people present themselves on facebook and how it might have been creepy, too, if the grandma hadn’t acknowledged her little grandson. Even if she was involved in his neglect or abuse, she doesn’t have any moral obligation to publicly humiliate herself because of it. How she presents herself to the facebook world has more to do with how she’s processing the loss of her grandson publicly than how she feels in private. But this is a long comment already, so I’ll stop.)
Okay, I think my first answer was too specific to the actual post on the other blog and especially the comments it got. Given that people in our society tend to support adoptive families, especially in situations where kids have been removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect, these are the strategies I use to try to encourage kindness or gentleness or empathy toward the first family when I’m talking to people about our experiences:
1. I just say “mom” or “dad” when talking about Mara’s or any of the kids who’ve been with us in foster care’s first parents. The person I’m talking to can tell that I’m not talking about myself and so it’s a reminder that this person is a parent and I view this person as a parent, as does the child. (Mara was placed with us when she was 2 and has called me Mommy and my partner Mama from the start, but all other kids have mostly used our first names, which is fine.)
2. I’ve been a little conflicted about this one because the “best practices” answer is supposed to be that you don’t share any of the first parent’s story because it’s not your own, BUT I do it because Mara’s mom’s story could be told as a story about the ways I suspect her mom didn’t take care of her when she was a baby or before she was born or I could start by saying, as I often do, “Her mom had a baby die of SIDS and hasn’t been able to successfully parent since then. I think it must be really emotionally hard for her and I don’t think she’s resolved her grief.” If people have empathy for her, it’s harder for them to demonize her as one of Those People who just keeps having kids when she can’t care for them.
3. I focus on the good ways Mara is like her family members and the good things her relatives have done. One relative who’s raising a sibling took Mara in when she was first removed from her mom, and I’m always clear to say that I respect her for calling the state and saying she couldn’t handle all this without support. I feel an obligation to educate about how, at least in our state, kinship caregivers don’t get the financial or other kinds of support that we as foster parents get. And even people who whine about welfare cheats can somehow see that Mara’s aunt who took in four of Mara’s siblings might then have had a hard time holding down a job while helping the kids adjust, especially if the people I’m talking to have seen how hard and good and rewarding it’s been for me with all my resources to help Mara thrive in our home.
4. Because we’ve only fostered older kids, they’ve all felt love for their families. I honor that when talking to them and talking about them. During a painful abuse trial, our former foster son said under oath that he still loved the parent who abused him and that is part of the story even more than the abuse is, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve made a point of talking about how Mara missed her parents and telling people who don’t have other adoption connections about what Mara gets out of having ongoing connections with them now.
5. I foreground unfair policies whenever I can. I talk about losing access to Mara’s original birth certificate, to the policy that lets only my partner or me but not both of us adopt in our state, to the lack of support for kinship caregivers, to discrimination against the family members with felony convictions, to how hard it is logistically to be poor in this society and try to accomplish everything on a caseplan. There are plenty of things I could (and sometimes do) whine about because it’s hard to deal with the bureaucracy of foster care, but it absolutely pales to being on the other side of the case.
6. I talk about cultural competence, what it means to me to be raising a black girl as a white woman when I want her to be comfortable with her black identity, with code-switching, to avoid the mindset that she was “saved” from poverty when placed in our middle-class home. I don’t just talk to other white people about adoption but talk to black people (including my partner) and people from other economic backgrounds in the church we attend, in her family, in the gay community, in her schools, in the community at large. She sees that I love and care about other black people and they see and talk to me as a transracial parent and we are all learning and loving. This matters to her and it helps me see things differently, know better, do better. I think it’s so important that I have learned to be comfortable in the housing projects where her family members live, because I do want Mara to be accepted there if that’s what she wants someday (and it won’t hurt that she knows it’s not off-limits to her mom and that the people who see her there will know she’s her siblings’ sister, perhaps) and because it’s good for me to put myself in situations where I’m the one stretching outside my comfort zone.
7. I reject the idea that I’m a hero or doing something extraordinary. I’m raising Mara to the best of my ability, just like her aunts are raising her siblings and maybe her mom will be able to raise future siblings someday. I am so incredibly fortunate to have been able to know and love some wonderful young people because I’ve been able to work as a foster parent. I’ve been lucky to find some parts of therapeutic parenting come naturally to me. I have worked really, really hard to make this work, and I absolutely believe others could do the same.
I appreciate what Thorn says as I think the best kind of outreach and education for open adoption is putting it out there for all to see so they have an example of why it is not only okay, but is good.
I have what many would consider a very open adoption with my son and his parents – he’s 2 and we have done visits every two months since his birth. As a birth mom I find the visits with lots of friends and family to be emotionally exhausting honestly – many don’t know what to say, many say sort of stupid things to me, sometimes I feel no one knows what to say to me so they don’t talk to me, other times I feel like everyone knows who I am and sort of stares, and from my point of view I rarely get any meaningful time with my son because he’s super excited that everyone is around. BUT I go every time I’m invited (tree trimmings, birthday parties, beach days, etc) because seeing me, hearing the stories of my life (how I love the water like my son, or how I love books like he does) and how they intersect with who he is becoming, and getting to know me as a real person makes all these people around my son see open adoption as a positive thing. His relatives can ask me questions, talk to me about adoption in general even and suddenly understand so much more.
We have role models in our culture, in real life, for all these other relationships we have in our life – we see what a good mother, good husband, good teacher looks like – maybe on tv, in movies, or in books, but unless you are looking for them, you don’t see role models of what a good open adoption family looks like. So putting it out there helps. I will say for me, the first visit I had with friends and family of my son was his baptism (he was three months old). The last one was his second birthday party in May. The difference in interactions, how I was treated, how I was respected, and even how many different people came up to me and just chatted about my job or my friends was enormous. It wasn’t anything more than familiarity, I became a known presence rather than this unknown entity “the birth mom”.
Tanis has given me permission to link her post: http://www.theredneckmommy.com/2012/08/14/hunny-bunny/
I don’t want to share her whole email but she did tell me some of her son’s abuse history. I’m not sure how much she shares on her blog so I won’t post details here but I will say that this is not a case of an adoptive mom bashing a birth parent because they are a birth parent; this is an adoptive mom struggling to find compassion for people who brutally and continually abused a toddler. This wasn’t an overwhelmed, undersupported parent who lost it either; this was systemic, ongoing and torturous.
It absolutely sucks that stories like this one get used to tar all first parents but it doesn’t negate the truth of stories like this. I think it really speaks to the lack of language we have to speak to the many different experiences of adoption that there are. For those of us who are concerned about adoption reform, the question is how do we demand a more nuanced discussion? How do we honor the truth that some children are better off without their birth parents without letting people fall into the easy lie that therefore all children who are without their birth parents must be better off?
That’s the discussion that I think is important here.
(I’ll add that it was my bad editing that put “misperceptions” in the title here but the original poster did use ambiguity and that really is what we’re talking about here.)
This is my sort of ‘generalized’ two cents on the matter.
I am a first mom, and I placed my son in an open adoption at birth.
Many people who come to know me now, and learn about the fact that I gave birth to a son, seem to be confused as to why I would choose not to parent.
For some reason, the idea of having the means to provide a good life for a child is someone ‘rude’ to mention. Or so it seems to me.
People that I have encountered with negative views on first parents, and families, or even negative views about adoptive families, usually make judgment calls about their personalities and character, and never factor the idea of money into their comments.
I think that people think only of the most simple terms about things that do not directly effect them, so they over-simplify and exaggerate because it is their knee-jerk response to things they know very little about.
As well, the horror stories, even if they be more or less rare, are remembered more than any mediocre story of mild-mannered people in ordinary life.
I have to say, lately I’ve encountered some curious teenagers who wanted to know all about my situation with being a first mom and having on-going contact with his adoptive family. Actually they were really curious about me, besides the whole first mom status(mostly because they heard gossip about me and others who despise me for being hard-working and smart)
When people are genuine in their curiosity, I am willing to tell them everything I can, even though it feels like I’m a big fish they caught and I have to gut myself to give them the spoils of sport that they hunger for.
Other times, people pretend to be curious, but really they just want to dominate me with their own opinions on the matter.
It seems to me that this is what might happen here sometimes.
Someone ‘asks a question’ but really, they just want people to agree that they are right about something. It becomes obvious when the same opinion is stated again and again and any other opinion is marginalized or ignored.
I mean, every story is valid and valuable, and sharing opinions is a good thing.
I just wish that the mediocre, ordinary stories, like mine, would be shared a little more often than the scary ones.
Thank you for the link.
I guess this is what jumps out at me.
“Five pictures of my son. On her mother’s page.
She called him her grandson. Her Hunny Bunny.
And there it was.
Rage.
FURY.”
I don’t read that blog and I didn’t read your email, so maybe there’s backstory that would totally turn me around on this. But a lot of this sounds, in this piece, less like someone who’s concerned about the baby’s abuse and more like someone who wants to establish ‘title’ to him beyond all possible doubt. Someone else has pictures of HER son. She sounds like this is a violation of her relationship, where it sounds to me like a grandmother remembers a baby that she lost. That’s one of the issues with adoption, isn’t it? Even if you change the birth certificates and the names, and move the births out of state, or out of the country, there’s that potential for jealousy, like a blended family. When times are hard, maybe the OTHER part of the family got the good deal. It’s almost more like the sibling dynamic.
This piece made me sad. I can’t write other peoples’ feelings, but I wish she’d seen those pictures and said, “Ah! There are the missing baby pictures. Even if I can’t take them for him, I can tell him that he was ALWAYS someone’s lovable Hunny Bunny.”
Could happen, couldn’t it?
And I took notes on Thorn’s list. Thank you, Thorn.
Brooke, I can tell you that it is likely because someone removed that boy that he isn’t dead. I totally understand what you’re saying but again, it’s because we don’t have back story from the blog post. My understanding of what the blogger is saying is that the grandmother is claiming him still but allowed him to be nearly killed and that’s where the rage comes in.
The piece made me sad, too, and I know from the email that the blog post is actually about her trying to figure out how to reconcile the horrible things that happened to her son with the fact that those horrible things happened at the hands of the people who should have loved him best.
I’m not saying her feelings are right or wrong (feelings can’t be right or wrong anyway — they just ARE) but I sure think they’re understandable and she’s trying to figure them out so that she can mother her son around the issue of his origins. (She’s aware that this is an echo of the struggle he will have, too, to make sense of what his first family and his connection to them will mean to him.)
What is less understandable is how people can read her story and think that has anything to do with, say, my story. Or the story of the anonymous person who posted the community wisdom question. I like Thorn’s list, too, because I think it’s a helpful way to start thinking about how other families who adopted from fostercare can advocate for their children’s families but I can understand why that list may have less to offer someone who adopted a child who nearly died from ongoing abuse. I don’t know if the adoptive parents in those cases should be the ones doing the advocating.
Redneck Mommy’s case is definitely on the extreme end. The issue for us here at Open Adoption Support is not what she ought to be doing but how we can get out from under the public perception that every adoption situation is at that same extreme end.
Yes. “What is less understandable is how people can read her story and think that has anything to do with, say, my story.” THIS is the essence of it, I think.
But people do generalize. It’s one of the ways we organize information. And we judge. I guess only being a short time past the era when all adoption was secret means we haven’t developed many skilled ways to talk about it yet.
*sigh*
I only have a minute to respond, but I’ve seen a million blog posts where someone says “Some kid was mean to my kid on the playground and I wanted to go over and shake that little monster because I was so angry!” And if that’s how angry some people get about little kids, it’s not surprising that someone can get really angry about someone who actually has hurt a child they love or allowed that child to be hurt again and again. I can’t tell you honestly that I love my former foster son’s abusive parents because I just don’t. I feel pity for them and I don’t hate them, but I’m relieved they were found guilty of the abuse and that he’s no longer legally their son or in their care.
To use an example from my current life, last week my foster daughter asked if Justin Bieber would think she’s ugly because of the scar on her face that her parent gave her intentionally, hurt her badly enough that it left a mark. And she is gorgeous and I told her that anyone who loves her can see that and anyone who cares about beauty can see that, but I absolutely thought, “Oh, this beautiful girl! What were you THINKING, parent?” and it made me so, so sad. And if that parent starts making progress, it will be my job to help her get ready to go back to her parent’s care and I know that and have to be okay with it.
I admit I said I was bothered by the post, but it’s because it was clear what kind of comments it would get, the ones that say he belongs with this family and it’s God’s will and all that stuff that makes me uncomfortable. I think the blogger has a right to her feelings and was expressing them and their ambiguities very clearly.
In talking to my partner about something else not related to the original post, I said that if you can switch the response and still be mad about it, you’re probably not mad about the response. If the blogger had gone to the grandma’s facebook page and seen no sign of her son as if he had never existed, that probably would have hurt too. That would suggest to me that her hurt and anger isn’t about the pictures or about the names but about the sad and hurtful things that happened to this little boy she loved. And believe me, I understand that. I always tell our girls that it’s okay to feel however they feel and the problem is that when you blog about those feelings, then that brings in more issues than just whatever you feel. I think that’s kind of what’s going on here.
Oh yeah, this!!! “[T]he problem is that when you blog about those feelings, then that brings in more issues than just whatever you feel. I think that’s kind of what’s going on here..”
Reason #997 why I quit my personal blog.
This was really well said, Thorn. Thanks for coming back to add it!
yes. Not about the pictures.
Getting away from the discussion of this one adoptive mother’s blog for just a second, I’m going to focus on the OP’s question of the “ambiguities of adoption”- and I almost laughed.
Ambiguities indeed. HAH!
(Sidebar- Have any of us not fallen into SOME kind of rage over some part of our adoption at some point? Totally different from ambiguity, but worth thinking about. )
I mean, my husband and I have disagreements about parenting styles (can a toddler have a sip of slurpee? NO! I say- but my husband constantly allows it)- so why not birth family and adoptive family frictions?
When you factor in all the differences from one family to the next, of course there will be ambiguous feelings- today was good. Tomorrow might not be. Tomorrow, our views on whether he should be Catholic or Anglican might again be brought to the forefront (we’ll let him decide- THAT’s what we’ve decided).
But, aside from that aspect, there are the ambiguities about the entire adoption community, and what adoption means to various people. In general, most people have NO clue, so they take their information from crap like daytime soap operas.
I’ve just gotten to a point where, instead of losing my shit when someone says something stupid like, “His birth mother was probably raped. That’s why she couldn’t stand to keep him.” I can say, “No. She wasn’t. She just wasn’t prepared to be a mother full time. She comes to see him every summer instead.”
And I don’t have to jump to defend his father, or his birth mother anymore. I can educate calmly now (I used to get extremely angry and have really rude, obnoxious responses to such idiocy).
I can promote openness, and hopefully change one mind at a time by being a calm supporter and educator.
I’ve already explained openness to numerous friends and co workers. And they see what a difference, and how happy it makes my son. And it’s good to see, all they have to do is ask him, or watch him.
I love what you have said.
It’s great that you promote openness in adoption and are willing to explain things to people!
I often wonder how often an adoptive parent really is willing to explain open adoption in a calm respectful way.
Comments that dismiss or blame first families, or even adoptive parents, are hard to take. To me they always feel like a verbal gut punch that comes out of nowhere.
Responding in a way that isn’t retaliating or primitive is difficult and takes strength and courage.
It’s way to easy to get worked up about people who make wrong assumptions about who I am or what adoption means to me.
Sometimes you just have to know you can’t change everyone’s mind.
Every adoption situation is different and when the general population doesn’t even understand all of the ways in which people can adopt, it certainly makes it hard to change perception (I can’t tell you how many people think my private adoption is actually an illegal ‘purchase’ of a baby). Unfortunately mass-media hasn’t helped. Which I do sincerely hope that changes not only for the sake of the birthfamily and adoptive family, but for especially for the adopted child.
As for advice for changing people’s perception – I would say just stay strong in who you are and be proud of it. Be open to discussions about adoption and your experience. Your openness and confidence will help positively educate others. There is no other way to change perception than through education. Some may be educated through their own personal experiences, and some people may be educated by those people they know. You have become a teacher