For the Fun of It (pp. 12-13)

[T]o make a long story short, I started with great skepticism. Prove it, I said to one adoption advocate backstage. Prove to me that there really are more black babies than homes, prove the need is there. And he did. I was convinced that, yes, there were black babies available for adoption, babies who were headed into foster care.

My first two kids were growing up, and I could see the end of my active parenting years approaching, all too quickly. Hesch, my husband, and I hadn't planned on having any more children. Like many couples of our generation, we first thought "just one," and then "went for the second."...We had a complete, lovely family. And we loved it. We loved raising our kids, being an active child-rearing couple. But we knew all about world overpopulation, and besides, kids are expensive and time-consuming, and we shouldn't just be doing this for the fun of it. The idea that there might be a good reason to have another child was enormously appealing.

I am interested in this, that Rothman and her husband were so happy to have an excuse to have another child. I hear that three-child families are on the rise in America, and read analysis that claim it’s a status symbol, because raising a kid is about the most expensive thing you can do. But I like to think that people have more kids for the same reason I did: for the sheer joy of it.

What gave them permission to have their third child was the conviction that they could do good by it, that they would be making a home for a child who needed one.

People often seem to assume that our motivation was similar. “That’s a good thing you’re doing,” people have said to me. And it is true that Yehva’s birthmother was a drug addict; she showed up high to the hospital to deliver Yehva. And her birthfather was young, poor, inarticulate, semi-literate; he’d never held a job. So, yes, I would agree that she is better off here than there. But I did not adopt Yehva out of altruism. I did it out of selfishness, greed, and an excess of maternal love. I wanted more than what I had, plain and simple. I liked the two children I already had so much that I couldn’t imagine anything better than having one more. If Yehva’s birthmother had been a professional with a stable relationship, a stable home, and as many children, already, as she wanted, I’d have taken the baby just as gladly. I would not have turned away to look for one who needed me more.

Rothman’s concerns went beyond her own feeling that it was somehow wrong to have a third biological child—she was concerned about racism in the adoption process. A colleague of hers, an African-American woman, had been turned down as an adoptive parent because she wasn’t married, and Rothman didn’t want to take a baby who could have been in a black home. She did extensive research to reassure herself that there really were more black babies than black homes for them (and we’re going to go deep, deep with her later on about the forces that make this true, the inequality that underlies the entire adoption industry in this country, so fear not! We’ll get there. It’s a challenging stretch of the book, and, in the sense of that great old Christian word, convicting.)

I’ve been asked how I feel about adopting a black baby into a white family, into a community that is, while not entirely white, overwhelmingly so, and where the black people we know tend to be in mixed-race families themselves, and more like “us” than different when it comes to class, profession, and culture. (This could be argued with…maybe I’ll write more later about the ways this seems both true and not-true to me). My answer is: Do you think that if there had been a black family available, the birthmother wouldn’t have picked them? in an ideal world, sure, she’d have gone to a stable black family, or been born into a community which was overall stable and functional so that she could have been cared for within her extended family if her mother wasn’t able.

We don’t live in that ideal world. Do I think we are the best possible family for Yehva? No. But I think we were the best available family for her. I think we are a more-than-good-enough family for her. And I think it’s OK to want a third baby just for the fun of it, for the joy of watching a small person unfold and grow. When people credit me with more altruism than I felt, or was motivated by, I correct them. If I have done a good deed by adopting Yehva (and that’s arguable), it was accidental, and I was more than repaid the first time I held her in my arms.

I like that previous sentence as an ending, but re-reading, I think I need to point out how problematic it is that adoption today is driven to such a great extent by the desires of adoptive parents, especially newborn adoption and some international adoptions. One of the fears you have as an adoptive parent is that the birthmother was somehow coerced to place her baby, and stories out of Cambodia and other places about babies being taken against their mothers’ will don’t help [Added later: at the library the other day I came across an article about coercive practices among pro-life Christian adoption agencies here in the US. Very disturbing if true.]. It is heavy on my heart that, as of this spring when she spoke to a case worker at our adoption agency, Yehva’s birthmother had not stopped regretting placing her for adoption and feeling she’d made a mistake. Never mind that it is completely unreasonable for her to think that, if she had not made an adoption plan, she’d have been free to leave the hospital with Yehva. Never mind that she has two older children who are not in her care any longer. She may be an unfit mother but that does not change the fact that she is a woman with a broken heart.

You have to wonder, too—and Rothman gets to this later, quite deeply, as I mentioned before—to what extent the system, the culture, itself is coercive. Friends have heard me say this before, but when I look at Yehva, who is the happiest little person I know, who is graceful, strong-willed, and smart, I have to assume that her birthparents were the same. The conditions of her environment took young K., probably just as beautiful, smart, and graceful, and so diminished her opportunities that she had, it seems to me, little chance to become many things other than a drug addict, a woman whose tragedy is that she wants to be a mother to her children and can’t. At the same time that I am glad—so glad—Yehva is in a place where her gifts are nurtured, I look at her and cannot help but imagine K. at the same age, much the same but with little hope or opportunity.

Meanwhile, I am a woman—a white woman—who has been so accustomed all my life to getting what I want that, when I decided I wanted a third child, it never seriously occurred to me not to have one. The only question was how we would go about it. I wasn’t even pushed to adoption by infertility; I chose adoption over having a third biological child. I am in the habit of making choices; I am accustomed to having options.

Maybe there was no direct coercion between me and K.—we never even met, and the $1500 in birthmother expenses we paid is probably not enough to wrest a baby away from a woman who wanted to keep it (though C, Yehva’s birthfather, asserted repeatedly during a deposition that K. had “sold” the baby to us for $1500, so maybe it is). But given our relative social positions, I didn’t have to exert direct pressure on K. for her to become the producer, the manufacturer, the provider of my heart’s desire.

I do not feel guilty for having Yehva in my life. It is not wrong that I am her mother. But it is not entirely right, either. Being adopted was by any measure better for Yehva than staying in her birth family, and that tips the scales of this story to “good.” But there is a broken heart somewhere in every adoption; it’s one of the ingredients. In all my joy at being Yehva’s mother, I can still never forget that K.’s loss is precisely the shape and size and heft of my gain.

I really want to dig into this more, and Rothman is about to do it for me, in a great passage I may have to quote extensively and then leave to create its own ferment. Next post: Twelve Swedish Women.