Inhale. The Class Where We Discussed Trans-Racial Adoption. Exhale.

Ohhhh, I should not be blogging about this. This is the class where our social worker showed a video of several adoptees who were now adults and had grown up with the experience of being the only one of their race in their family because of trans-racial adoption. It left us tossing and turning. And let’s be honest about the most common scenario that we discussed: statistically-white parents adopting children of other races. Believe me when I say that people were doing this before Angelina Jolie made it cool.

The video was upsetting because it was several young adults, complaining about their white adoptive parents. Who raised them. And loved them.

The whole thing stunk of the ungratefulness and narcissism that every child harbors if nobody whittles it out of them. These kids just had a very socially acceptable complaint.

Please understand that I have actually taken the time to research and understand the real issues that come with trans-racial adoption. I think that if we adopt a child of another race, we have to be prepared for the fact that we are then setting our family up for a lifetime of spotlight. We will no longer blend in. Our family will scream, “WE ADOPTED!! WE ARE DIFFERENT!!” I hope that there will be so much joy and overwhelming love in our family that we won’t give a flying flip what anyone else thinks, but I’m not dumb enough to think it won’t be hard on a child. Being different is hard!

Here’s what else I think: If everything else is equal, kids obviously do better when they get to grow up in families that look just like them-the same race and culture. That’s the best thing for them, as long as they are being loved and cared for. The cold hard fact is that that’s just not life. There aren’t enough families waiting at just the right time to adopt these kids so that they can all grow up in families that look just like them and the next best thing-the VERY MOST IMPORTANT THING- is that they get to grow up in families who love them like crazy.

What got me about the video is that these kids, one girl and guy in particular, were so…extreme. I hope. I don’t know. If it’s not, if there are tons of adopted children out there that resent their parents to this extent, then I don’t know if I want to know. I was waiting for them to give me the story, like, here’s the horrible thing my parents did to scar me and make me so angry (so I would know what NOT to do!). It never came. They admitted that they were well-loved by their white parents. And yet this girl sat and talked about white people adopting black babies and essentially said that ‘white people get to do it because they have the money, so they can just have the next baby in line’. Like we’re here to pick up a puppy. What a slap in the face. To me? Sure. But how about to her mother? I really hurt for her. I know there are people who believe that. But this girl, who came from a loving family? I’m sorry, but she was angry about something and I just don’t know if it had anything to do with her adoption, exactly. Maybe she’s mad and hurt about race for some reason. But adoption… I don’t know.

I get that some people are worried that we are doing it to look cool. I know that our social worker wants us to see the worse case scenarios of every aspect of adoption to make us aware of what to expect. The video ended with the guy, who is African-American, looking straight into the camera, telling us that if we adopted trans-racially, we needed to be prepared to explain to our son or daughter why we chose to adopt him or her. “Because he’ll ask”, he said.

I exhaled, and thought that I knew exactly what my answer would be, but I waited until we got in the car to ask Stu. I had already decided that that one thought-provoking question was possibly the only useful thing that had come from the whole video.

Me-“So, when your (for the sake of argument) African-American son asks you one day, ‘Dad, why did you choose to adopt me?’, what will you tell him, Stu?”

Stu-“I’ll tell him that God put him right where he belonged. I didn’t choose to adopt an African-American boy. Your birth mother chose me, I got the opportunity to adopt you. We listed no preference. I did not choose any race. That is in God’s hands, but any child that He places in my family will then be my blood. Forever.”

YES. That’s my man. That was my answer. I love him.

…On the other hand (continued)

As you can see from the last post, the speaker who came and discussed surrendering her adopted baby back to his birth mother ignited anger and fear in me. And I placed most of that on the birth mother because of her right to change her mind. How dare she do that to me? I seriously spent many nights laying awake, thinking about that. About myself. About how this affects me and mine. I know. We can be so amazingly selfish sometimes.

A few nights later, our social worker, that sneaky evil genius who knew what I had been stewing about, arranged for a birth mother to come out and speak at training. Annoyingly, I fell in love with her, too. She didn’t fit into my stereotypical mold. She had made a plan for her baby in her late 20’s, because her and her boyfriend had gotten pregnant out-of-wedlock, had no plans to marry and wanted their baby to grow up with 2 happily married parents. She had a good career and was financially stable. She was very strong in her convictions and sure about her decision, but explained that, even in the Christian community, the pressure to just get rid of the problem was strong. Some people did not understand why she would go to so much trouble to make an adoption plan and carry this pregnancy through. This really brought to the surface, the painful and obvious reminder that this is not just hard for me. And this wasn’t a brand new realization! I already knew this. But I did need to be reminded that these precious women were not out to hurt me. In fact, they were on their own very painful journey and that my face would always be quite painful to them.

The social worker once said that the birth mother may not want to meet me because I am the person who will be doing what she can’t do. I remember thinking that she’s doing what I can’t do, too. We need each other. The difference is, her choice can stop everything. She is doing the hardest thing. Without her, we all have nothing. How amazing she is. How dare I judge her?

As Christians, we preach about choosing life to these women, but choosing life is HARD. Adoption is hard. Of course, the dirty secret is that abortion is hard too. It’s just that there are no more decisions to be made, so people think that the band-aid has been ripped off and that the problem has been solved. It’s just that the pain and suffering is on the inside, so the illusion is that everything is fine. The thing is that if we want women to choose life, someone has to be there, supporting them, loving them, telling them that they are worthwhile and beautiful and amazing. Especially once it’s over. Because they are alone. And they are hurting. The truth is simply that once women are there, pregnant, in a difficult place, there is most likely no easy solution. But I think birth mothers will tell you that knowing their babies are thriving, alive and happy brings them peace. The peace this woman spoke of was overwhelming-and the joy it brought her to see her son grow up in a happy family because of her choice!

And my frustration melted away when I listened to this women talk about the boy that she wished she knew better. I think up until then there had been some sort of divide in my subconscious between me: the married mom, and the birth mom: the one who couldn’t parent. Who did I think I was? I knew that but for the grace of God, that could have been me in her chair. What I screw up I’ve been in the past. I don’t deserve the life I have. I cried for her just like I cried for the mom before. It’s no wonder I’ve had a headache for weeks. Oh, all the crying. I love these women.

One of the exercises we were asked to do was to write a letter to our baby as the birth mother. I didn’t do well. I didn’t even grasp the exercise until it was over, which is funny, because, I like to write. I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t think like that. One guy in the class related it to trying to write a last will as testament. I thought that was terribly sad, but it brought to light what was really happening for these parents. What a supreme sacrifice. To bring a child into the world, and give him or her to someone else, hoping for better. How much love there must be in a person’s heart to do that. It is the absolute most in putting your own feelings and self aside.

So how can I be mad? Of course I still think that 30 days is ridiculous. But is it her fault? No. It’s the most important thing she’ll ever decide in her life. And once she signs the rights to her baby away, it’s over. That precious life becomes ours to raise and cherish. And I will cherish that life. On that day I will cry for her and our child, who will one day mourn her, no matter how loved he or she is.

Adoption is so very bittersweet. More sweet that bitter, I think.

If you want to read more from the perspective of a birthmother, I’m certainly not the one to learn from. I love this woman and her blog. What an amazing love story. If you go back to the beginning and start there, it’s just…well, read it.

Adoption Training: Surrender

Several weeks ago we walked in, pretty late, to training while our speaker was being introduced along with her 2 adopted children. She also has 3 biological kids who were much older (teens) by the time her and her husband pursued adoption. She was there to speak about her first adoption, which was disrupted. This means that she chose to take an “at risk” placement (taking the baby right away-while the birth mother still had not completely relinquished her rights). In Maryland, the birth mother has 30 days after placement before she completely signs her rights away, and in those 30 days, she can change her mind. As you may have seen in my last post, this law strikes terror in my heart. This causes my emotions about the birth mother to swing like a pendulum to such extremes that I have trouble describing, so before I go any further on our speaker’s presentation, I’m going to digress and try to dissect them for you:

On the one hand, and my initial gut reaction, was that 30 days is WAY. TOO. LONG. It is. I think it may be the longest of any state in the country, although I haven’t researched it thoroughly and I have a hunch that California is similar? Texas is something like 2, some states are 10, 3, 14. But 30?! And don’t even get me started on how long it can be if they are trying to track down an unknown birth father. We are talking months. Seriously. And my feelings over these 30 days of my life has made me fear the birth mother over something that is absolutely not her fault and completely out of her control. However, the reality is that birth mothers do change their minds. One statistic was brought up in class: that from start to finish of the adoption process, 50% of birth mothers change their minds and decide to parent.  Of course that statistic is heavily skewed by the amount of women who change their minds while they are still pregnant, and this is lumping all of them into one category, including the ones who ask to have their babies back after they have been placed in adoptive homes (and that number is much smaller). Because of this statistic, this unknown, the agency encourages adoptive parents to utilize an option they call “interim care”. It’s like the idea of foster care, but they are private families working through the agency, who take care of the babies until they are completely free for adoption (risk free!!). You are still able to see your baby, visit and bond with him or her, but the baby does not stay in your home. I’ll be honest with you (and hope that my social worker never sees this blog). I hate this idea. I hate the 30 days. Maryland and its stupid laws can suck an egg for doing this to me emotionally. I do not want interim care. I want to take my baby home. I find myself still feeling very angry at the birth mother for even having the option to do this to me.

And before I get to the other hand (please, please read the other hand before you judge me too harshly), let me tell you that the speaker who came to us on this night looked us in the eye and told me all about my adoption nightmare and how it happened to her. Their family adopted a little boy, had him for 10 precious days, and the birth mother called and asked to have him back after 10 days. I believe they gave the family a last 48 hours with him. She told us about going to church as a family one last time together. She shared with us how each of her children had given him one gift to take with him to his new home. I could hardly see through my tears when she shared that her eldest son led a communion service and prayed over him and his parents, taking the lead for the family at a time when his mother and father were too inconsolable to do so themselves. She said that she later knew that the only reason she held it together on that last night with her precious boy was because her church family was fasting and praying for her while she stayed up and held him. She even wrote a note to his mother, so that she knew that they were not angry, and that they loved him, and her. There’s so much more to her story, but I certainly can’t do it justice here. My point is that she has peace, and she still went on to adopt the family that God had for her. I think they wanted us to see her and for it to give us great pause about taking a child in an “at risk” placement. And I think her story meant different things for all of us. She said something interesting, though. She said that maybe that baby was always meant to be with his mother. Maybe his mother needed those 10 days, and it was her family’s ministry to care for him while his mother came to that realization and pulled herself together enough to be a mother to him. What makes it so interesting is that Stu has been saying the exact same thing about surrendering a baby. When I’ve asked him if he could bond, he’s said, without a doubt. It would be his ministry to give his heart to a baby completely.

All of this makes it sound like we’ve made a decision about interim care, and I thought we had too. It’s one thing to put our own hearts “at risk”, I’m willing to at a moment’s notice. But what about our son? What about him? I can’t decide that for him.  It’s a ridiculous amount of time to have to think about. So, I get angry all over again. And do you know what people do when they are angry? They want to blame someone. And I keep blaming the birth mother, because, in that time she can change her mind. Traumatize us all. So that’s that one hand. But on the other hand…

…to be continued