That Time of Year Has Rolled Around Again

The Tiny Tornado's birthday is coming up, and that means it's time for me to write the annual letter to his birthmother. This is often a challenge for me; sometimes old feelings about the lies and the drama and the custody fight and the drugs come up. Some years, I feel charitable, generous, and loving; some years, I feel put-upon, like having this ethical obligation when K. has no reciprocal obligation is just not fair.

This year, I just don't know how to write an honest letter. Since I wrote to her last year (a very nice letter in which I included an SASE in case she wanted to write to the Tiny Tornado), the Tiny Tornado has chosen to live as a boy. I am not comfortable telling K. about this, for a variety of reasons. One is that I have no reason to believe she has any goodwill towards us, and I don't choose to tell her anything that she might, in some way, use against us. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense--she couldn't possibly gain custody, for instance. But she could conceivably cause us some kind of trouble if she chose to.

On the other hand, I'm not comfortable writing a letter with female pronouns, either. And when I have tried to write mini-drafts in my head without using pronouns at all, it gets a little weird.

I have been thinking some about the agreement I made. We were asked to commit to writing a letter every year for 18 years, but I wasn't willing to make that commitment. I had heard from other adoptive parents that their children sometimes came to feel that letters to birthparents who were not otherwise in touch--not writing back, for instance--were an invasion of privacy. So I said, "I will commit to writing an annual letter until and unless the baby decides he doesn't want us to anymore."

This isn't exactly that circumstance, though I suspect that if I asked the Tiny Tornado, he would not want me to write to K. He doesn't like to talk about her, and last year when I asked him to help me think about what to tell her and what pictures to include, he vehemently declined to participate.

There's no legal obligation to write her. But I'm thinking about what my ethical obligation is, and how to weigh that against what seems best for my family.

I won't simply not write; but I might write a letter saying that the Tiny Tornado is doing well but I can't go into details this year. And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that there is a place in the Tiny Tornado's baby book for her picture, and that the Tiny Tornado would probably love to have one, or to hear from her. I'll enclose an SASE again. Maybe one of these years she'll use it.

And I'll tell her, like I do every year, that we are praying for her, and for the Tiny Tornado's half-siblings. Because we are. I do hope to hear from K. sometime. I hope to hear that she is doing well.

An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline

I just read Stickin' To, Watchin' Over, and Gettin' With: An African American Parent's Guide to Discipline. (There's no hyphen in African American here because there isn't one on the cover of the book.) I read it with great interest and a little nagging feeling of guilty voyeurism. Because I am not an African American parent.

And one of the interesting things about the book it that it was not written for me. I usually read books that I am part of the target audience for; even "generic" parenting books. Reading a book written by Black professionals for Black parents made the ways that other books tend to assume whiteness really stand out. I also found it kind of fun when the authors talked about Black people's stereotypes and perceptions of white parenting (that our children are out of control little apes--if I recall correctly, the word "apes" was actually used--and we are pushovers). Sometimes it hit a little close to home.

As the white mother of an African American child, I found the material about dealing with the different stages of a child's life, and figuring out developmentally appropriate ways to talk to them about racism very useful. Including the different standards of behavior that they might have to hold themselves to in order to avoid trouble ("I don't care if all your friends are doing it, if the police see a Black kid doing it they are not going to give you a second chance to explain"). There's a chapter on dealing with pre-teens, and then a chapter on navigating the challenges of letting kids become more responsible for themselves as they move into their teen years. All parents and their children have to figure out how to cope with increasing independence, but for Black parents and children, the stakes can be very high.

I also liked that the book addressed something most parenting books don't: figuring out how to productively address your own childhood baggage and the trauma you may carry so that your reactions to your children are healthy. "Many people should read this," I thought. There was a useful sidebar on ways to know if you're reacting from your own past baggage ("You get instantly furious about something and you don't know why; You find that you are willing to fight to the death over a small issue like which way the toilet paper should roll; You tell childhood stories way too much."). And there were some good ideas for how to get over that.

The book did a good job, I thought, of honoring the reasons why Black parents tend to parent differently than the mainstream middle-class white model, while at the same time asking Black parents to think about the ways they might use physical discipline (or choose not to). There's none of the blanket "spanking is bad and you are a bad person if you do it" kind of thing that other parenting books I've read tend toward, but there is a model here for being mindful rather than reactionary in disciplining children.

I'm a white mom. And I've read about a thousand books on transracial parenting. But this book specifically about Black parenting felt more useful to me in some ways, although I didn't love every bit of it. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation between people who have the experience of both being and raising Black children, and by listening I learned a lot. When I read books that are aimed at white parents raising children of color, there's often still a sense of distance, of talking about "them." This book was all about "us," and that immediacy made some things clearer to me.

Things I Hate to Admit

Thinking leads to thinking, and in yesterday's post about adoption and social class, I talked about finally getting, for instance, why Barbara Katz Rothmann, whose book on transracial adoption remains one of the best I've read, is so negative about international adoption, and why Harriet at the fugitivus blog can write:

International Adoption Is Fucked-Up

Yes, I know that’s a blanket statement. I’m not going to change it. International adoption is fucked-up.

If you follow that link and scroll down to the section on international adoption, you'll see that she makes a couple of points that make sense, to me at least. One is that there is a lot of money in international adoption, and people's livelihoods depend on successfully completed adoptions. Harriet argues that just because there are babies involved doesn't mean that normal economic forces don't apply; they do. And where there's money involved, there's going to be someone skimming cream or cutting corners. If the equivalent of several years' income is going to come into your community (or your pocket) if you can provide a baby to an American couple, are you necessarily going to wait for that baby to be abandoned or orphaned in the normal course of things? You might not.

That people have not waited for the normal course of events, but have pushed things, is known to have happened: birthmothers have been paid or coerced to give up infants, and many countries lack the kind of legal protection and process we have in the US. Harriet touches on this, that international adopters will sometimes be reassured that their children's placement for adoption was fully legal, without knowing that in the child's country of origin, what is legal may not rise to US standards. For instance, I recently read that in Guatemala, there needs to be only a short report from a social worker and another from a lawyer for a child to be released for adoption; there is no judicial oversight of the process. That the lawyer making the statement is often the same person who gets paid by the adoptive family ought to raise some red flags.

The other point of Harriet's that I want to highlight is that sometimes people do bad things with good intentions. Here she is on the subject:

Let’s continue to give international adoption agencies the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say they uncover something unseemly about the adoption. Perhaps they suspect the child is not an orphan, or was not willingly relinquished by their parents. Maybe the child begins to act out in ways that indicate past sexual abuse. But this adoption is SO CLOSE to going through, and they know that if they tell the potential adoptive parents about this new discovery, the whole thing will get derailed.

And if the whole thing is derailed, this child that the agency worker has such compassion for is going to remain in an orphanage when they could have been in a family. The agency worker has met the potential adoptive parents. Zie feels that they are strong, good, smart people. Zie is sure they will be able to deal with the child’s new issues. And so zie continues the adoption, never mentioning these pesky new issues that have cropped up. Zie is sure they will be worked out. And, really, isn’t it better this way than the alternative, to let the child languish in an orphanage?

This is a hard one for me, and I'll tell you why, although I have not even admitted this to David: Over the course of our custody dispute with the Tiny Tornado's birthfather, a number of things happened that were very troubling to me. Probably, if K. had just disappeared after placing TT, like she was supposed to, and C. had never showed up to pursue custody, none of this would ever have occurred to me. But the custody fight gave me the opportunity to know K. and C. better--at a remove, to be sure, but I know a lot more about them than I would have otherwise, both through depositions and through reports of their behavior in calls to the agency and in court. And I know our agency better, too. This is hard to admit because it implicates us in a process that was less above-board and ethical than I believed it to be. But here are some things I now believe or suspect:

The agency did not counsel us adequately in evaluating the content of K's intake form.

It was read to us neutrally, without commentary, and my questions asking for interpretations were not answered. It was only in the last couple of years, as I did some reading on the behavior of people living in poverty, that I was able to make sense of things like K's assertion that she intended to get a Master's degree, made at a time when she was actively a drug addict. This kind of aspiration without understanding of what is necessary to achieve it or realistic plan to take steps toward it is apparently common; I saw similar things described many times in literature on people trapped in inner-city poverty. But the agency director, who had much more experience dealing with people like K. than I did, made no effort to interpret her statements for us; as a result, I, at least, believed her to be much more functional than she was. I was able to believe (albeit very briefly) that we had that mythical good birthmother who was making a rational decision for the good of her baby, and with her own future well-being in mind. This is, of course, what any adoptive parent wants to believe.

I have come to believe that the agency knew or suspected that K. was lying about not knowing who the birthfather was.

I am not quite ready to believe K.'s assertion that a social worker at the agency counseled her to lie and claim the baby was the result of a one-night stand, but from things the agency director said to me later, and from my now-much-vaster knowledge about adoption, I believe that they must have had suspicions. Even if they didn't have specific reasons to be suspicious of K., they should have better counseled us about how common it is for birthmothers to muddy the truth.

Why would they lie to us, or not share their suspicions? I can see several things that would pressure them in that direction. One is that we had already had one fall-through, and they might have wanted to avoid disappointing us a second time. Another is a more general pressure to complete adoptions in the most timely way possible; one thing adoptive and potential adoptive parents report to each other about the agencies and lawyers they work with is how long the wait was for a baby. Shorter is obviously better in the eyes of adopters--who pay the fees that keep the agency open and the caseworkers' children fed. Which leads to the third, economic, reason the agency might not have wanted to tell us anything that would make us hesitant to accept the placement: we paid the second half of our fee when the baby was placed with us.

I'm not sure why I don't (yet) believe that K. was telling the truth about the social worker pressuring her to say that the father was a one-night stand. It would be in the interest of the agency to have her do that, certainly: adoptive parents are going to be much less worried about the no-name one-night stand than the estranged former live-in boyfriend who is not willing to sign off on the adoption. And, given the stereotype that Black teenage fathers are not interested in being parents, the risk of lying--or of not admitting suspicions--would have seemed very low. My lawyer told me once that contested adoptions are so rare that many adoption lawyers practice their whole career without being involved in one; what were the odds C. was going to actually pursue parental rights?

The agency's response to K's assertion that her caseworker told her to lie about the birthfather was that we shouldn't worry about it because nobody would believe her over the caseworker. (This was also my lawyer's response.) In some ways, this was probably simply a reflection of reality: yes, had K. ever ended up on a witness stand, she would not have been seen as a credible witness. She was indeed a drug addict, and prone to violent outbursts, and statements she made at different times contradicted each other. But, given other doubts I've begun to have, I could also see the caseworker relying on knowing that K. would be disbelieved. I'll never know, of course. But I will never again be sure that K. lied and the agency didn't. And by God I would give up a lot to be able to be sure.

I am complicit.

I overlooked several things that made me uncomfortable at the time, telling myself that the agency were professionals and knew what they were doing. For instance: we were told that in the days after the birth, K. was so hysterical and unstable that it took two case workers four hours to get her to sign her surrender of parental rights. At the time, a voice in my head said, "How can it not be coercive if it takes her four hours to be talked into it?" But I had never adopted a baby before; the agency had done this hundreds of time. I trusted that they knew when a line had been crossed, and when it hadn't. But a part of me wishes I had said, "Wait a minute--four hours? Two case workers?" I wish that we had had more time in all the rush and hysteria and fear and excitement to sit down and think about whether our line had been crossed, even if the agency's hadn't. (Though, honestly: could we have walked away? We had driven to Chicago, we were standing in the agency offices, all we had to do was sign some papers and write a big check and we could go pick up the baby from the hospital. You'd have to be a lot stronger than I am to walk out of there and drive home without a baby just because you weren't completely comfortable about how the birthmother came to sign her surrenders.)

The director of our agency was racist.

Again, specifically because of our custody dispute, I had much more contact with people at our agency than we normally would have. This gave me the opportunity to learn that the director of our agency was a racist. I hate saying this, but she sometimes said things to me that suggested to me that her feelings toward the birthmothers she worked with (and ours in particular) were somewhere on a spectrum between disrespect and contempt. Once, she told me a story about another contested adoption that included descriptions of the birth family's behavior in court. I will not repeat what she said, because it would be familiar to most of us and might only cause pain to any Black people who happen upon this post. I will say that it involved mimicking people's accents and ridiculing their religious beliefs.

Somebody on AskMetafilter recently asked, "What do you wish you had known before you adopted a child?" People gave answers like, "If you adopt an Asian baby, it might be lactose intolerant. It took us a week to figure that out!" I told her that I found the forums at foreverparents.com the most useful thing pre-adoption; having private conversations with lots of adoptive parents gave me the best information I had.

I did not say: If I had known then what I know now, I might not have done it. I have friends who are vegetarian or vegan because they cannot bring themselves to participate in the factory farming system that feeds so many of us; they do not want to be complicit in that cruelty. Similarly, I might have chosen, had I known then, not to participate in what increasingly seems to me to be a system rife with ethics abuses. On the other hand, part of what I know now is from my own direct experience, and sometimes that's the only way we learn. I'm not sure any number of books or blogs or stories from adult adoptees would have deterred me. "That's not me," I'd have said. "That's not my agency."

Except that, it turns out, it was me. It was my agency.

Harriet has some words to say about that, though, too:

I’m a little uncertain how I feel about it when I put up something like I did, and then people say, “Oh, this has made me choose not to adopt, thank you!” Because I still believe in adoption, and for some kids, it’s their best hope, their second best option now that the first best is gone. I sympathize with workers who want to hold back details, because here they have this kid who needs a chance, and these parents who could be so good for them, but the parents might balk if they knew how hard it was going to be, even though the worker knows they could and would do it if this child was already in their home, or if this was their biokid.

The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there’s just no way around that.

TT is running up and down the house with the older two. They are pretending to be friends who visit each other's houses. They are having sleepovers. His fortune cookie last night said, "You are strong and brave," and the rest of us all laughed at how true that is. I am not sorry he's here, I am not sorry to be giving him everything I possibly can to make her life good. But I am sorry about so many things, about the world, and K.'s life, and about our agency, and about my own naivete and willful blindness. I always tell people how much money the custody fight cost us, but it also cost me a certain measure of peace of mind, because it revealed things I would never have had to see otherwise.

I don't know what I would tell a potential adoptive parent who came to me for advice, other than: be prepared for it to be a big stinking mess. Try to believe that the things that happen to other adoptive parents--the birth mother who changes her mind, the undisclosed drug use, the child adopted from foster care who is so traumatized that she can never give you the affection you crave, the agency that turns out to be less than above-board, the internationally adopted toddler who turns out to be a four-year-old whose growth was stunted by malnutrition, the teenage birthfather who inexplicably of all the teenage boys in the world wants to raise his daughter--try to believe that any of these things could actually happen to you, too. That you cannot wade into that morass and come out clean on the other side. Some of the shit is going to get on you. But shit getting on you is part of being a parent, so go ahead and be a parent. Mazel tov, I say to you. And welcome to the hard world we live in.

"There oughta be a lemon law": More About Social Class and Adoption

I just re-read what I posted a minute ago, and I noticed that I said "Yehva was born into a family of introverts." I didn't catch that when I was writing it; technically, of course, Yehva was not born into our family. She was adopted into it. But I like my little slip of the tongue, and I don't think I'll change it.

It reminds me that I have been wanting to say more about the book Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which I blogged about back in June, when I was only partway through it. Having finished it, I have a lot more to say about it, and it's been rattling around in my brain in a very annoying way, so I'm going to try to get it out before I shower and load the kids into the van for homeschool park day. It may not be very well-organized; more of a brain-dump.

I have a lot of respect for Christine Ward Gailey, the sociologist who did the research and wrote this book. I so appreciate her willingness to think about, in particular, social class and how it affects the experiences of adoptive parents and their children. In her study, there were differences in how adopters from different social classes talked about their adopted children and their role in the family, and this is what my slip of the tongue about Yehva reminded me of. In her interviews, it was only among the working-class adopters that people said things about their adopted children like, "He reminds me so much of my Uncle Louie." On the other hand, it was only among the middle-class and wealthy parents that people said things like, "We love him like he was our own." One international adopter described going to Guatemala for an infant in these terms (I have a note but not a direct quote, so I'm paraphrasing): "We went to Guatemala because we'd heard they had very healthy Caucasian infants there, and we wanted to get as close to the real thing as possible" (p. 107).

"As close to the real thing as possible." "Love him like he was our own." Hmmm.

Adopters also varied by social class in how they responded to troubled children. Gailey says that children adopted into working-class homes are more at risk of being hit, but children adopted into middle-class homes and wealthy homes are more at risk of emotional abandonment within the home when they don't meet their parents' expectations. For instance, wealthier families whose kids have behavioral problems are more likely to isolate the children from extended family. "I just leave her home with the nanny; it's easier for everybody." But working-class parents say things like, "I always take him to family get-togethers. He is part of the family. We stay as long as we can; sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's all afternoon." Wealthier families also tend to build a buffer of professionals between themselves and their troubled kids: therapists, special schools, nannies. Working-class families look to extended family and friendship networks for support and help (interestingly, single women who adopt, even if they have middle-class professions and backgrounds, often adopt working-class style strategies for support, relying on extended family, surrogate family in the form of neighbors, and alliances with other single parents).

I have often heard people speak with extreme vitriol about international adopters and the agencies that serve them, and I haven't really gotten why. I know that there are ethical problems and risks associated with international adoption, but I think that's true of domestic adoption as well, and I have always seen international adopters as embedded in the same complicated mix of love, risk, and privilege that we live in. I know many international adopters, and they are compassionate people who do not shy away from the ethical complexities of their choice, or from the responsibility they bear to their children, so I just couldn't understand where the anger toward international adopters was coming from.

And then I met the people Gailey interviewed for her book. And I get it. Oh, oh, oh, do I get it.

In her sample, international adopters were significantly more wealthy than other adoptive parents. International adoption costs more, in general, than other forms of adoption, and what adopters get for their money includes less-invasive home studies and fewer education requirements. International adopters generally pay about twice as much for their home studies as domestic adopters, but are subjected to less scrutiny.

At one point, Gailey called an international adoption agency to see if she could set up some interviews with staff for her study. The person she spoke to on the phone mistook her for a potential adoptive parent, and Gailey decided to run with that. She was told that her home study would cost about $5000 (for comparison, ours cost $1500; $1500-2500 is pretty typical, as I understand it) and would take a few months to complete. Gailey said she was in a hurry because she had already identified a child in a Peruvian orphanage that she was interested in; she was told that for $10,000, she could have her home study in two weeks.

Gailey decided to throw up as many red flags as she could. She told the representative that two weeks would be great, but she was very busy at work and often not getting home until late in the evening. The agency rep said that was no problem; they could do her interviews over the phone. "What about this class we're supposed to take? I don't see how I have time for that," Gailey said. The rep replied that they could send her the reading materials and then someone would go over them with her by phone.

In other words, this agency essentially said that for $10,000, Gailey could have a completed home study in 14 days, without ever having a home visit or meaningfully fulfilling an educational requirement.

Of course, this is neither typical or ethical. But it was only an extreme example of a trend Gailey found in her study, that the wealthiest people in her study, who chose international adoption most often, were able to use their financial resources to avoid the rigorous process other adopters go through.

Another thing the international parents were able to avoid was knowing much about the nations they were adopting from, and the political, social, economic, and racial conditions there. Some of them avoided this deliberately. International adoption agencies sometimes actively advertise, "We have caucasian babies!" Seeing an ad like this in the program at a conference, Gailey asked a woman she was talking to, who was in the process of international adoption, whether she knew that in other parts of the world, "caucasian" doesn't necessarily mean what it does in the US; in other words, a baby might be "caucasian" but be olive-skinned, with dark hair and eyes. This woman actually held out her hand to stop Gailey talking, said, "I don't want to hear about this," and walked away.

Many of the international adopters in Gailey's study had little or no information about their children's biological families. In the absence of information, they were free to construct their own stories, and they did. The stories they constructed were often Tales of the Deserving Poor. "I didn't want to deal with some crack whore's damaged goods," they might say when explaining why they didn't adopt domestically, and then go on to say something like--remember, this is in a complete absence of actual information--that they thought their child's birthmother was a pregnant teenager who had no family support, or a woman who had all the kids she wanted and could handle. In other words, your birthmother is immoral and bad, but mine is a decent woman in a hard situation making a responsible decision.

So interesting.

Gailey found that international agencies did little to educate potential adopters about the risks associated with adopting children who have been institutionalized, (most children adopted internationally have spent time in orphanages) and the adopters themselves generally did not seek this information. As a result, adopters were surprised, disappointed, and ill-equipped when their children displayed attachment or behavioral problems, or learning disabilities. And here is where social class again comes in in a very interesting way: working-class parents whose children (usually adopted from foster care) exhibited problems tended to attribute the problems to the traumatic experiences their children had had. "Who can blame him, with what he's been through?" they'd say, and focus on process rather than outcomes: "But when I think about how far he's come..." International adopters tended to give genetic explanations that absolved themselves of responsibility: "I used to think nurture mattered most, but now I see that some kids really are just bad seeds." (That's not a direct quote, except the "bad seed" part, which more than one international adopter used.)

Working class parents also tended to take a very long view in dealing with their troubled children. One parent said, "There are some wounds that take more than one generation to heal." Another said that when things were hard for her with her child, she would remind herself "that I'm doing this for the grandchildren." In other words, they accepted that their damaged child might not be healed, but they hoped they were taking a step that would make things better for the next generation.

Wealthy parents, on the other hand, tended to draw back from their children when it became clear that their children would not meet their aspirations. Reproduction of social class was an issue, and children were sometimes written off when it became clear that they weren't "college material." These parents often felt they had been duped into believing they would get a healthy, normal child, and thought that someone other than them should be accountable when that didn't happen. One father said, "There oughta be a lemon law for these kids. You ought to be able to send them back."

In Gailey's study (which she is careful to point out was done with a snowball sample, not a random one, so may not be generalizable), international agencies and adopters colluded to shield adoptive parents from the realities of conditions in children's home countries and the real risks associated with international adoption, with lamentable outcomes for the children involved.

(There are exceptions: Gailey's study included a small cohort of international adopters she called "academics." These are people who adopt from a country in which they have been doing work of some kind over extended periods of time; usually they adopt in response to observed conditions. For instance, one parent in this cohort adopted her daughter after seeing young girls selling their bodies on the streets in exchange for food. These adopters usually speak the local language, and continue to spend extended periods of time in their child's home country. Some of these children spend as much as 3-4 months per year in their country of origin, and it was only among this cohort that some children continued to have relationships with extended biological family.)

I could say so much more, about the word "orphan," what adopters think it means and what it really means (it's often a legal fiction, allowing adopters to believe they're adopting a child whose parents are dead, when in fact it may simply mean that their legal relationship has been severed); about wealthy adopters who meet their child's need for cultural knowledge by hiring domestic help from the child's country of origin; about so many other things--I have pages of notes.

But this stuff about international adoption and social class has really stayed with me. The international adopters I know are (thinking a minute) all Quakers, and almost all lesbians. In my experience, both Quakers and lesbians would be unlikely to ignore social and political realities. I would like to think that my sample is typical and Gailey's is exceptional, because the international adopters in her study really did not come off well at all (and by "really did not come off at all," I mean that they provoked rage in me). But I fear the opposite is true.

I have to get the kids fed and ready to go the park; I have to shower and load up swimsuits, towels, and snacks; I have to look up directions to the park and get my laundry out of the dryer if I want to wear a clean shirt. And I have to do all of this in the next 32 minutes, ideally. So I'll leave this here. I have tremendous respect for Gailey and her willingness to look at issues of social class, which I do not think most researchers have done.

A Darn Cute Little Guy

Yehva has been asking for a haircut for weeks, and I've been sort of putting her off, not sure whether it would be a good idea. Yesterday I finally promised I would cut her hair, so I spent some time googling around for instructions on cutting an afro, and watched a couple of videos of little boys having their hair cut (from which I learned that some black boys wear their hair in braids until they get their first haircut at about 4. Who knew? Probably lots of people who aren't me. Some of those kids had amazingly long hair--Yehva's must be kind of on the slow side, growth-wise).

And this morning I got out the clippers, chose the second-longest blade guide, and buzzed it all over.

It looks a little uneven in places, but I think it's hard to tell for sure until we wash it and comb it out. I warned her we might have to do a touch-up in a couple of days. And I wish she had let me trim it a bit shorter over her ears and at the nape of her neck, but she says she likes it as it is.

Many thoughts and feelings arise.

I wrote a few months ago about thinking about cutting her hair because my health problems were making it hard for me to keep up with it, and the extremely negative reactions I got when I went looking for advice on how to do it. I can't pretend not to feel that pressure to keep her hair long. Especially because I find myself worrying that people who see her will think I'm a clueless white mother who doesn't know anything about the importance of hair in Black culture and couldn't be bothered to learn to care for my black daughter's hair.

On the other hand, as a parent I've always had a philosophy about my kids' hair that goes like this: It's only hair. They can do anything they want with it. I think parent/child fights about hair are about the stupidest fights parents choose to have with their kids, and I'm not looking for any extra or unnecessary conflicts. So, when it switched from being about me and my energy level to being about Yehva's wishes for her hair, and when her desire to have her hair cut persisted over a number of weeks, I thought I had to respect that, as I have respected it for the boys, or I'd be a rotten hypocrite. "White boys get to do whatever they want with their hair," I'd be telling her, "but you don't because you're a girl, and you're black. So even if you hate having it long, and it hurts to have it combed out, well, that's the price you have to pay."

Another piece is that a lot of people tell me Yehva is beautiful. I've always thought so, but I'm the mom and hardly objective. But people say things to me like, "She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen." I posted some new pictures on Facebook, and a friend commented on one picture, "Holy smokes, that kid is model-gorgeous!" (It was an especially good picture.) I feel surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect of her being beautiful; on the one hand, I like to look at beautiful people; on the other hand, I think being beautiful may be hard for women in certain ways. I've heard beautiful women talk about not being taken seriously, about not having their other qualities being appreciated. Some friends in my Quaker meeting have an adult son who is unusually beautiful and has been since childhood, and his mother has told me that one way it has been a problem is that people let him get away with things. So, in my usual way, I have fretted some about how to help her know she's beautiful without being over-invested in it; I've hoped that I and other people will also help her see her many other qualities; I've appreciated her beauty, and enjoyed the attention and praise she has always gotten for it, and yet I have seen it as a minefield as well.

And yet, in cutting her hair, one of my fears was that she would no longer be beautiful, or that people would no longer be able to see her beauty. I shouldn't worry; she always wears jeans, and old t-shirts of her brothers' (I gave away all her pink t-shirts with flowers on them earlier this summer because they were just taking up drawer space). Even with her hair in braids or puffs, she is often mistaken for a boy, so with short hair, I suppose I shouldn't worry that people will judge me for cutting her hair or no longer see her as beautiful; they're not going to see her at all. Everyone is going to think she's a darn cute little guy.

Smallness of Spirit

I'm going to start by saying that today may have been, in some ways, about the worst of my life. I was going to say more, and typed some, and then deleted it. The details are complicated and you have to go back almost three years to get to the start of it. But I wanted to say something about how when I'm writing a blog post or hanging out at Facebook, I can seem like my usual cheerful, smart, chatty, funny self, but there's some stuff I'm struggling with right now that's being very hard, and that can end up being invisible. I'd welcome good thoughts and prayers from any and all directions, though.

So, Yehva turns 3 in a couple of weeks. And that means that, in addition to buying her the roller skates she claims to want, and planning a birthday party that, if left up to her, would include ice cream, cake, bowling, swimming, more ice cream, and a bike ride, it's time to write the annual letter to her birthmother.

I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, when it occurred to me that I ought to order prints of a couple of good pictures to include. And in the back of my mind, I started working over what this year's letter might say. Last year, we were just a few months past the final decision of the appeals court in our favor in our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, and I was feeling generous-hearted. This year, I spent a week or so feeling stingy and mean and wondering what would happen if I just didn't send the letter this year. After all, Kimberly has never sent anything to us or Yehva, even though every letter I've written, I've ended with a reminder that the agency will forward letters to Yehva if she wants to write one, and that there is a place in Yehva's baby book for a picture of Kimberly if she wants to send one.

I almost went back to a forum for adoptive parents I used to hang out at, to ask if anyone there had just stopped doing the letters, and what consequences there were, if any. The law can't mandate contact; we signed a document that reminded us we'd made a moral and ethical commitment to send letters and pictures. But I was kind of in a "fuck moral and ethical commitments!" for a few days there. I was tired of what seems like a lack of reciprocity, and annoyed that this hangs over Yehva's birthday every year.

And then somebody at the summer gathering asked me how things had turned out with our custody dispute, and then followed up by asking whether we'd been happy with our agency.

And I remembered that our agency really let us down in some ways. That poor communication within the agency and with us led to a whole variety of problems, large and small. That they never took responsibility for certain things that were pretty much entirely their fault and that cost us a lot of money to fix. That, in retrospect, we weren't given guidance I thought we could have used in understanding Kimberly and what she said in her intake form--that to some extent I think the agency down-played her mental instability to us, perhaps deliberately (?). I remembered that I was so disgusted with certain things that by the time we were about a year into the custody fight, I had stopped taking the director's occasional phone calls. I would let them go to voice mail, listen to the message when I felt strong and had David nearby, and then answer, if an answer was needed, by e-mail, and as briefly as possible.

My point is: it got to the point that I didn't even want to talk with our agency. And yet somehow I think I'm being Lady Magnanimous to invite Kimberly to use the agency as a go-between to send letters to us and to Yehva, just as they forward my letters to her. Why would Kimberly want to talk to anybody at the agency? She can't have good feelings or warm memories about them--she thinks they stole her baby.

"Send a letter through the agency," I chirp at her every year (four times the first year!), and then blame her for not taking me up on it. Consider it proof she's not interested, hasn't moved on, hasn't stopped using, hasn't gotten her life together, is still too unstable for us to risk opening the door even a crack.

Jesus, that's mean.

Now, Yehva's birthparents don't know our names or where we live. We were in any court documents they saw as John and Jane Doe. And there have certainly been indications that it is better for us that they not know. So I'm not going to put a return address on the envelope this year, or include my cellphone number or e-mail address, or anything crazy like that. It's not that we can't be easily found--I could write, "Dear Kimberly, How are you? Yehva is fine. Yours truly, Su," and that would be enough. After all, this blog is the first hit if you google "Yehva Su." One of the effects of having unusual first names. She could find us easily enough if she decided to look, but even so I'm not comfortable, yet, with painting a great big arrow for her to follow.

I am, though, going to ask a friend who lives in another state to let me include his address, so that Kimberly could write to Yehva without having to contact the agency first, in case that would be easier for her.

And I'm going to tell her that next year, she should look for my letter early, around late May or early June. We said we'd send a letter every year; that doesn't mean it has to be part of the run-up to Yehva's birthday for the next decade and a half. For my own sake, I'm doing to de-couple those two things. But for Kimberly's sake, and maybe Yehva's too, I'm going to try to be just a little bit bigger-hearted.

*****************

For your amusement, from an e-mail to friends written January 30, 2008, when Yehva was about six months old and the custody fight was just warming up and we still thought it would be resolved quickly. It actually took me less than a year to decide talking to Margaret was a bad idea:

Margaret, the director of our adoption agency, just called to see how we're doing. I appreciate that she's concerned and takes the time to call, but talking to her is really frustrating. She's the kind of person who never lets you finish a sentence, so it's never clear whether she understands what I'm saying or not. Also, she is an anxious person, and she tends not to call so much to let me talk to her as to vent her own anxieties. Today's gem: "I'm just so scared because Illinois judges tend to be on the side of birthfathers. They're known for it." Thanks, Margaret. That helps.

She also got all worked up about whether the birthfather had been at the hospital during the birth. "Noreen! Was he at the hospital?" Noreen said no. I said, "Margaret, if he'd been at the hospital and anyone from the agency had known it, you'd never have accepted Kim's claim that she didn't know who he was, would you?" Jeesh.

Next time she calls, I'm just going to let the machine get it, sending my appreciation for the thought into the ether but not actually subjecting myself to the conversation.

The Surprisingly Vexed Issue of Birth Certificates

On an unschooling list I'm on, somehow the issue of adoption came up, and the issuing of revised birth certificates that name the adoptive parents, rather than the biological parents. We don't tolerate a lot of off-topic chatter on that list, but I found the brief conversation thought-provoking, so I thought I'd bring my thoughts here.

One person said that she thought the creation of new birth certificates for adopted children was "the most horrible abuse of public records I can imagine."

I said that I could think of worst abuses (people use public records to stalk ex-girlfriends, for instance, or to commit identify theft, both of which seem worse to me). But I also said:

I have mixed feelings about re-issued birth certificates, but it's really standard now. We were not presented with any option to do anything but have Yehva issued a new birth cert with our names as her parents as part of the process. It makes many things easier--it's one document I have to present for proof of ID and relationship, rather than 2 (birth certificate and stack of papers from the court finalizing the adoption). It does seem strange to me, though. I would have been very happy with a birth certificate that reflected both birth and adoptive parents, and then, too, that would be a record that an adult adoptee, or her descendants, could use to trace both adoptive and biological families. It would be both more honest and more complete.

I was thinking more this morning as I was on a long drive, and reflecting that a non-revised birth certificate would reflect a different name for Yehva as well as her birthparents' names. That wouldn't be the end of the world at all; we have a single document from the court that uses her old name but that both finalizes our adoption and legally changes her name. So, for the purposes I can think of that we might need a birth certificate--to prove identity, prove her age for school enrollment, or prove our parental relationship to her--it would be easy enough to show both documents, and would only take any reasonably intelligent bureaucrat an extra minute or two to put it all together.

On the other hand, I was thinking of other instances where birth certificates don't reflect biological parentage, or have been revised in such a way that they show a later truth rather than the truth at the moment of birth.

One instance involves certain reproductive technologies. David, for instance, is not the boys' biological father. An anonymous sperm donor is. Under the law a married man is presumed to be the parent of his wife's children, so we didn't have to take any extra steps to have him named the boys' parent, and he appears on their birth certificates as their father. (And some studies show that a surprising percentage of married men are not the biological parents of their children, so while our path was different, David is by no means alone.)

This is different from adoption because there was never a thought in anybody's mind that anybody but David was, and would be, their father. Some nice young grad student in Detroit donated sperm to a place with the warm and fuzzy name of International Cryogenics, presumably because he needed cash. They assigned him a number and put him in a catalog, and when we were sperm-shopping, we picked his. We didn't want to know him, and he made it clear in his intake forms that he didn't want to know us, or any children who might be conceived with his sperm.

I know that some kids conceived with donor sperm are curious about their donors, and even look for them. When there are proposals for laws that would un-seal these records when kids turn 18, I understand that the intent is to give children more information, and yet I worry that such a law would make men less likely to donate sperm. And even though these children are curious, it seems a great deal different to me than the curiosity adopted children have about the men who fathered them "in the old-fashioned way," who must have had some kind of relationship, however brief, with the women who carried them and gave birth to them, and perhaps cared for them for some period of time after birth as well.

I just don't feel the same way about Donor # F006, as grateful as I am to him, that I do about Yehva's birthparents. When I imagine Yehva's granddaughter, say, curious about her past, wanting to know where she came from, it seems to me that she might want to know not only about my family history, and David's, but Yehva's birthparents' histories as well. Perhaps she would want to know that even more. I don't imagine Eric's granddaughter having the same curiosity about the sperm donor. This could be a failure of imagination or empathy on my part.

Even as I am curious about that branch of my family that came to the US during the Potato Famine, or the branch that came (via Canada) because somebody was heading to Australia and got on the wrong boat, Yehva's granddaughter might be curious about the forces that brought Yehva's biological family to Chicago. Were they the descendants of free blacks, who had a community in Chicago even before the Civil War? Did they come north in the early 20th Century to work in the slaughterhouses, or seeking industrial jobs during WWII?

Perhaps most interesting to Yehva's granddaughter mght be the question of how her grandmother came to be adopted into a white family in Michigan.

We happen to have quite a bit of information about Yehva's birthparents, and her maternal grandparents. But what I have in a file is not a public record; it might not be available for Yehva's granddaughter when she wants to answer these questions, even if I am careful to save it and hand it down. I understand that Yehva's revised birth certificate creates a disjuncture in the record, and I know that it felt strange and uncomfortable to hold the revised birth certificate in my hand and see my name on it as if I had birthed her. I wondered whether that birth certificate violated the Quaker testimony of Truth.

(I understand, too, that genealogy can be especially difficult for black people, because records are sparser and less complete--I was looking at a website with some old census documents awhile ago, for instance, and some places submitted documents that listed every single white person by name, but then only "10 free blacks, 27 slaves," or a list of first names for black people. Marriages among slaves might be informal, or not recorded. And so on. So, in Yehva's case and the case of other transracial adoptees, the revised birth certificate can throw up an additional barrier to her black or mixed-race descendants who want to trace their history, and don't want it to disappear into the history of my (mostly) white family, and David's.)

On the other hand: there are times when it seems entirely right and proper to me for a revised birth certificate to be issued. Neither David nor I uses the name we were given by our parents; David has a revised birth certificate, but I have never bothered to get one although I did legally change my name. These certificates are similar to Yehva's in that they reflect a reality that was not true at the time of the birth.

Likewise, some states allow transsexuals to receive amended birth certificates. Some of these are marked as amended, and some aren't. It seems entirely good and right to me that transsexuals should receive amended certificates; they are an aid in getting other documentation with the correct name and gender on them, and it is a gesture of respect.

These changes can also create gaps and confusions in the historical record. But one thing that seems different about my name change, and various friends' gender transitions is that it was their own choice to make the change and request an amended certificate.

Yehva, and other adopted children, aren't given that choice. That makes a difference to me, that question of choice. As one person on the unschooling list pointed out, it's even stranger when a child is adopted at the age of 3, or 10, and a new birth certificate is issued. How might it feel to a child who remembers her birthparents, to have them removed from her documentation?

I have protected the name Yehva's birth mother gave her; as a person who doesn't use her birth name, married to a person who doesn't use his, I have had too many instances of people pushing to know my "real" name or David's to toss that kind of information around freely. Yehva may or may not be comfortable with people knowing the name she was given at birth and carried for four short days, but I tend to think it's up to her. From that perspective, I welcome a revised birth certificate that doesn't disclose information she might not want to disclose.

And yet--the revised birth certificate hides information that may not need to be hidden. It erases Kimberly and Cordelro. It pretends to hide an adoption that is plain as day to anyone who sees our family together. Some adopted people feel that revised birth certificates are one way that adoption is still shown to be shameful and loaded with stigma.

I haven't spent a lot of time reading up on what adopted people or other adoptive families think and feel about this. I haven't talked at all, or thought much, about what the preferences of birthparents might be; I imagine they would vary. These are just my own thoughts, and there are undoubtedly aspects I haven't considered. There's a lot going on with these apparently simple pieces of paper.

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

I wasn't sure about reading Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practices by Christine Ward Gailey. I've read a lot of books about adoption, and as has happened to me with some other topics, although I remain interested in the subject, I've reached the point where I've heard the information and arguments so many times that a new book is not likely to yield a lot that's new.

I'm so glad I decided to give this book a try. For one thing, it's an academic book, and Gailey is more interested in reporting her findings than supporting an argument, and that's refreshing--it doesn't feel like I have to try to read through her biases as I have had to do in other books.

More importantly, though, Gailey addresses some adoption scenarios that no other book I've read has touched on (this may be a function of my own interests; there could well be a whole adoption literature out there that I'm not familiar with). One is public (from foster care) adoptions by working-class families, especially single mothers. Gailey talks about the forces that bring the least-adoptable children--those who have been traumatized and may be displaying behavioral problems--with the least-desirable adoptive parents--those who have few resources and no partner to share the work. She describes the bitter irony that leaves parents of the most challenging children, who need the most support, with the least. These parents often experience significant downward mobility after an adoption, in some cases losing jobs because of the demands of caring for their children, or flirting with bankruptcy, or losing homes.

I'm only 40 pages in, and I'm in a section right now where Gailey discusses the adoption of black children by black families. You wouldn't know it from the kinds of adoptions stories that get media play, but most black children available for adoption are in fact adopted into black families, and Gailey is (uniquely, in my experience) interested in the experiences of those children and families, both in their own right and in contrast with transracial adoption.

After a long section in which she has discussed the various strategies white adoptive parents use to address their child's race (ranging from denial of the child's race, interestingly enough, by such techniques as asserting that a child is mixed-race, not black, or by commenting on the lightness of the child's skin; to active efforts to create a more racially-integrated social circle), Gailey moves on to looking at how black adoptive families deal with their adoptive children's race--and this is fascinating.

Gailey found that adoption researchers had been almost universally unwilling or uninterested in looking at issues of color preference among adoptive families. But she wanted to know if, and how, that played a role, and so she asked both adoptive parents and adoption workers about it. She says, with what I can only take to be monumental understatement, that these were uncomfortable conversations:

For African-American social workers and adopters, it meant having to confront patterns of color preference and racial stereotyping within black communities in front of a white person who was going to be writing a book. It meant deciding or not deciding to speak or not to speak to an audience that would include whites. For some of the white adopters, it meant finding the words to talk about their children having been rejected by potential adopters who were black, without condemning a racialized community or appearing self-righteous or entitled. I could sense their struggles, and some expressed their discomfort to me. (38-9)

One African-American social worker was willing to talk about her experiences placing black babies, but only after talking about her own experiences growing up, in which her family privileged her brother over her because of his lighter skin and "better" hair. "It's a problem, but it's not much compared to what happened to me because I was a black woman in this society. Just get that down: I want that in the book." (39)

This social worker went on to talk about the reasons she sometimes had problems placing black children with black adoptive families. Often, the reasons are what makes children hard to place in any case: developmental delays, a history of abuse, behavioral problems. These children are often refused by black and white adoptive couples and end up with the "least desirable" adoptive families: single white women. But the worker talked about how these factors intersected with the darkness of the child's skin and the type of hair the child had. One baby, who had been born prematurely, was turned down by two black families before being placed with a white family, one because she had "bad" hair, and the other because they expected her to "darken up" too much to fit into their family.

As a white adoptive mother, this kind of story feels a little bit like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a little bit like a point of solidarity, if that makes any sense. For good or ill, according to Gailey, black adoptive families wrestle with some of the same questions white adoptive families do, and are just as imperfect in their responses to the multiple issues raised by adoption.

She goes on to quote a number of social workers at length, who thoughtfully consider the issues and talk about how placing black children with white families, while being an option of last resort, is nonetheless an option they turn to more often than they'd like. And then she gets this refreshingly "curt" response from one adoption worker:

They're not kidding when they say these kids are "hard to place." We're lucky to get anyone to adopt them. I should, but I don't even bother about whether it's transracial or not anymore. The ones [social workers] I know who handle the crack kids would tell you the same. If [the prospective adopters are] alive and not child molesters, we'll place 'em. (40)

Only one of the adoptive families in her study said they'd had a color preference for their adopted child; in that case, an interracial couple wanted a child who would not be obviously adopted, but who might plausibly have been their biological child.

Gailey points out that transracial adoption is less common in public (foster) adoption. Private adoptions are common in the US, and take many overlapping forms. One is "facilitated" adoption (adoptions arranged by a person who might or might not be an attorney but whose role is to match adoptive parents with babies). Another is adoptions in which prospective adoptive parents are primarily responsible for making contact with birthmothers, through placing ads, posting websites with contact information, and so on. There are also private agency adoption, like our adoption of Yehva, where an agency maintains a pool of potential adoptive parents and is also the contact point for prospective birth parents; the adoptive families do not advertise or attempt to find birthmothers. [Many potential adoptive families pursue more than one of these paths at a time.]

Gailey points out that all of these forms of adoption are illegal throughout Europe, where they are seen a constituting a market in children. [I am curious about the details of this, as I know that, for instance, our agency places babies with European families, but Gailey didn't go into detail.] And I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she talks about how much easier it is to get approved for private adoption than for public adoption, even though private adoptions often deal in the most "desirable" children: newborns, especially white ones, with no health problems or risk factors. For instance, a family seeking approval to work within the foster system, either as a foster family or in hope of adopting, needs to complete a course: a 3-hour class once a week for 12 weeks is typical. On the other hand, David and I were required only to take a course in "Becoming an Interracial Family" that lasted for, IIRC, 3 2-hour sessions.

The point Gailey is trying to get at, I think, is that private adoption skews more toward meeting the demands of potential parents for babies, while the public adoption system has no choice but to wrestle with meeting the needs of children, including the challenging ones. There are not a whole lot of white babies placed for adoption, compared to the number of families who would like to adopt a healthy infant, so, even though Gailey reports that adopters are less likely to cite "the long wait for a white infant" as a factor than they were 30 years ago, there are certainly "market forces" driving the higher number of transracial adoptions in the private adoption arena.

There's a part of me that does agree that private adoption and international adoption constitute a market in children and babies. I think it's naive to not take that into account. On the other hand, I think the private agency option was a good one for Yehva: she was drug-exposed in utero, and her birthmother was on drugs when she arrived at the hospital to give birth. K.'s decision to place Yehva for adoption allowed Yehva to bypass the foster care system, where she might have moved through multiple placements before being either reunited with her birthmother, or released for adoption. Gailey cites research that has found that 8 out of 10 black girls over the age of four have been sexually abused while in foster care [edited: this was her finding in her own research for the book. She was unable to find any other research that tracked this statistic, and hoped that her sample for the book was somehow anomalous]; although Yehva might have entered foster care as a newborn, it's a risky system that is not often able to provide stability for children, and I'm glad she, and other newborns like her, didn't have to spend time in it.

I didn't mean to digress; Gailey doesn't need to be argued with. She's thorough and clear-eyed and, so far at least, doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. This is a really worthwhile book. At least, the first third of it is.

Broke, But Not Really

I know I talk about this a lot, and while I suppose that will fade in time, I also think that our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather will remain one of the defining events of my life.

One of the ways it's the gift that keeps on giving right now is that, 14 months after the appeals court finally ruled in our favor, we're still paying the bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Some of our debt pre-dates the adoption, but most of the debt we're carrying is from the fairly modest amount we borrowed to pay adoption agency fees and then, when C. showed up, to pay the lawyer. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then, finally, when she called to say the birthfather had filed an appeal, to not borrow any more because we couldn't--we were tapped out. I told the lawyer then, "I don't know how we'll pay for this, or when. But I promise we will."

We initially thought this adoption would cost about $14,000. That was revised upward by a couple thou after we paid birthmother expenses for a woman who decided to parent. And a little bit more when problems with our home study stranded me and Yehva in Illinois while we got them fixed. But still in the range of about $18,000--a lot of money, but nothing to panic about.

Until the custody fight, and the endless months of our lawyer filing papers and responding to the other side's filed papers and attending hearings.

By the time the dust settled, the adoption had cost us something close to $65,000. A number that makes me either laugh or cry every time I say it out loud. I laugh because it is so completely ridiculous and unbelievable, or I cry because the effect on our family of incurring that kind of debt could so easily have been catastrophic.

It's been hard. We have so many payments that by the time I pay the bills, and we put gas in the cars, and we buy groceries, it's pretty common for us to have almost nothing left to get through the week. I can't tell you how many times I've cried when I thought I had the pay period all figured out and then was reminded that we had a $40 prescription to refill, or opened the mail to find a bill I hadn't expected, or had a sick cat, or something broken on the car.

I never thought I'd pay my mortgage late. I can't tell you how many times I've paid my mortgage late over the last three years. A year ago, we took a forbearance for 90 days because we got behind and realized we would never be able to catch up.

I've needed a new pair of sneakers for six months, and every month I say I'm going to get them, but by the time I sort out the more urgent bills and set aside the mortgage money, there never seems to be any extra. I'm still wearing my post-surgical bras from my breast reduction last November because there are always better things to spend my cash on than new bras--though we're getting close to the crisis point, undergarment-wise, and it will have to be a priority soon enough. The kids' birthday presents come from craigslist and the local consignment shops; David and I just didn't give each other presents for birthdays or Christmas last year.

I had promised myself a new dress for Joann and Carolyn's wedding in May. Back in January, I was sure that sometime in the next three or four months, there'd be a little extra for me. But as the date approached, it became clear that there was not going to be any extra, and I would not be able to buy a dress. (Let alone the new bras, dress, slip, and shoes I had originally envisioned. What was I thinking? I pay the bills. I know where the money goes and exactly how much is left every week.)

And this is where my story turns happy. Because I e-mailed my friends Adrianne and Carla, and asked if I could root around in their closets for something to wear to the wedding. They both dress professionally for jobs, and I was sure I'd be able to put together some flowing pants and a dressy top, maybe not a perfect fit, maybe not in my colors, but nice. Good. More than good enough.

But they e-mailed me back and said they had talked it over and, while they'd be happy to let me into their closets, they wanted to buy me a dress instead.

So I had a beautiful new red dress for the wedding, because my friends bought it for me. (I wore an old bra, no slip, and old shoes...it doesn't seem to have ruined the wedding.)

Our version of broke is a pretty good one. We've never been without food, only, sometimes, without a favorite or a treat. We've more than once eaten the pantry and freezer to the bare walls while waiting for a paycheck, but we've always had the pantry and freezer to turn to. David doesn't have an Xbox 360, and I don't have an iPod Touch, and Yehva won't go to preschool this fall even though I know she would love it, and Eric doesn't get to take a summer class at the science museum this year, and Carl...well, I can't think of anything Carl wants and doesn't have right now. Carl's good.

We're all good. The stuff we do without is stuff most people do just fine without anyway.

And there's a lot of stuff we haven't had to do without, and I want to say why. It's because so many other people have been pouring money into our household. Not just the hundred dollars for a dress. The kids and I haven't missed a summer gathering, because my monthly meeting pays for the kids to go, and FGC itself gives me scholarship funds, and FLGBTQC helps out with travel funds. This winter, we were able to attend the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering because one friend just flat out wrote me a check for half the kids' cost, and the friend we traveled with paid for gas and our meals (though writing that I am reminded that I still owe her for hotels). Just last week, I got to go out for a really nice dinner with a fancy appetizer, because a friend treated me. Friends have treated me a lot. Adrianne even invited me and all three of my kids out to dinner the other week, which has got to be the very picture of generosity.

Two families in my monthly meeting, independently, were led to send us $1000 each to help with lawyer bills, "or for any need," as one put it. My monthly meeting helped us through the Fund for Sufferings, as did FLGBTQC. My parents lent us $10,000 and then forgave the debt, and then a year later sent us a check for another $10,000 when the birthfather appealed. Without my parents' generosity, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we would have had to choose between paying the lawyer and keeping our house.

I'm thinking of all this now, because I just asked my monthly meeting to help with travel expenses for the summer gathering. I didn't think I'd have to--between my discount for leading a workshop, and my meeting's Connecting Kids to Quakers money for Eric, Carl, and Yehva, and the gathering being only two hours from my house, I only needed to come up with $307 plus two tanks of gas. I was sure I could do this. I even have an excel spreadsheet showing that, on paper at least, that money could be squeezed out of the budget.

But it turns out that, like the money for my dress and the money for Yehva's preschool and the money for every other thing I thought we'd surely be able to pay for in another few months, that $307 doesn't exist. So somebody else is picking up the slack for me, one more time.

There is an endpoint: in June of 2011, we pay off a loan whose payment is $525 a month. And then the rest of them drop like dominoes month by month, until (knocking wood) by the end of 2011 we have somewhere between $950 and $1100 every month that we don't have right now. When I look ahead, I'm amazed by how suddenly we're free of the whole thing: a matter of a few months. Like snapping your fingers, once we get there.

And then, as I e-mailed some friends this morning, we'll be wallowing in money like pigs in shit, frolicking through meadows tossing dollar bills like rose petals, lighting our cigars with $20 bills.

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to write a blog post about this, other than to invite others to boggle at the numbers, to laugh or cry with me about it as led. Or to get my perpetual fretting about money out of my head and onto paper so I could let go of it for awhile. Or to explain to the world why I asked my Friends meeting for $200--again!--to do something as arguably self-indulgent as attend the gathering. Or to remind myself to stop complaining because we really have nothing to complain about.

Oh, I remember--I think it's worth knowing, for those of you who haven't been through anything catastrophic like this, that when push comes to shove you have a lot more to rely on than just your own resources. That people love to help. That sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor by letting them write you a check. That they can surprise you by choosing compassion over judgment. I used to hate to ask for help, and usually turned it down when it was offered. Turns out, it's not so bad, being humbled. It's been one of the unexpected gifts of the custody fight, this whole mess of help coming our way, when we asked for it and when we didn't ask for it, whether we wanted it or not.

We're so damn broke. But so much goodness came to us out of this mess that I honestly would not wish for it to be different.

I kid you not, come January 2012, I'm lighting a cigar with a $20 bill. And then we're re-starting our savings, and catching up all the deferred maintenance on the house, and giving money to charity again, and, yes, buying poor David his Xbox 360. And looking around for opportunities to pass on a little of what we've been given in such abundance.

Angry Adult Adoptees

When I was first thinking about adoption, I read a lot of books about it, because that's what I do. I remember reading one or two by and about transracial adoptees, and coming away from them feeling like I would be damned if I did, and damned if I didn't, no matter what choices I made. One essayist would write that her mother's insistence on her participating in a group for mixed-race adoptive families made her feel like her race was the most important thing about her, that it was the defining feature of who she was, and that she was thus always set apart from her white family. The next would bitterly recount how little her mother did to help her connect with black culture and black people, and how this left her adrift and confused, without a clear racial identity or sense of her place in the world. I was both amused and bemused by this.

Recently, I had a book of interviews with transracial adoptees home from the library. I dipped into it, but didn't read much before returning it. "The interview format just doesn't work for me," I said to myself, and this is true: I don't normally enjoy reading or listening to interviews.

But the other reason I didn't read it deeply is that I have Yehva now, and I did not want to imagine her in some angry adult complaining about how her mother (it's always the mother) got it wrong. The book may not even have had any angry adults complaining about their mothers. It's just that I'd read that kind of thing before, pre-Yehva, and I didn't want to encounter it again now that I could be the mother in question.

I agree with you 100% that this is cowardly of me.

So, the other night I decided to make the best of insomnia by finally spending some time reading what adoptees have to say. If you go to John Raible's blog and look at his blogroll, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I was reading, though I also read some that aren't on that list, and I don't necessarily remember who they were or how I found them, and I couldn't necessarily find them again; they link and inter-link to each other, though, and it's clear there's a community there of activist, sometimes angry adult transracial adoptees (or TRAs).

I have a few observations about my reading.

One is that there seem to be more--I want to stop saying angry because it might seem dismissive and judgmental--maybe politicized is a better word?--OK, politicized international adoptees. Often these are people who were adopted from Vietnam or Korea after wars that America was involved in, and it seems to have been very common for families to simply ignore or deny racial and cultural differences. I found myself hoping that we do better these days, that maybe even the imperfect ways that families wrestle with questions of race and culture will mean that we're doing better by the children we have now. People who were adopted from Vietnam after the war have a common refrain: "I was pulled away from my culture and every person I had ever known, and expected to be grateful for it." I hope we do a better job of not laying that kind of burden on our kids. (I think I'll come back to the gratitude thing later.)

Another is that they make some right-on, valid points. For instance, it it certainly true to my own experience that the primary voices that are heard talking about adoption are adoptive parents. Apparently there are a lot of people like me, who are so fascinated by this whole thing they're going through that they churn out endless blogs and memoirs and confessionals. I would say the second most common speakers on adoption are people who work in the field; birthparents are a very distant third, and adoptees are rarely sought out for commentary when adoption hits the news for some reason. So when John Raible asks us to call media outlets on this--to drop them a note saying, "Hey, why did you not interview a single adoptee in your recent story?"--he has good reason to.

This issue also matters because the perception of parent and child about how the family is doing can be very different. And it matters because adoptive parents are not necessarily very good at listening when adoptees speak; Harriet at Fugitivus later apologized, sort of, for asking adoptive parents to stay out of the comments on one of her posts, but her original request came from experience. She wrote:

I put that disclaimer out there because in the adult adoptee blog sites I’ve frequented, thread derailments seem to be most often started by adoptive parents who are terrified at having their choices, motivations, and privilege questioned.

*su sheepishly raises hand*

But, on the other hand, sometimes people complained about an experience they had in their family, and attributed it to adoption, when it just seemed like bad family shit to me. In a conversation about adoption on MetaFilter, one person described feeling like she did not fit in with her family at all. She didn't look like them, she was the only one who was musical, and so on. This was painful to her, and she attributed it to being adopted; for her, being adopted meant she never fit in with her family. A number of people chimed in to say that they had felt exactly the same way about the family they were born into, but she insisted that her situation was different. Maybe it was, or maybe it was just easy to blame this unfortunate dynamic on adoption.

A few weeks ago, an adoptive mother told a story on her blog (I am so sorry I don't have links for a lot of this; I didn't bookmark stuff and the content has stayed with me but I can't seem to recreate the path I took to find this stuff) about telling her teenage daughter to stop complaining: "If you were still in China, you'd be working 14 hours a day in a factory."

This gets to that gratitude thing I mentioned above. You can see that Asian adoptees are not making it up, and I hear it sometimes from people, who tell me that Yehva is lucky to have us. Sometimes they just mean we're good parents, and I appreciate that. But sometimes they mean that she is lucky not to be living where she was born (which, for the record, is Chicago). I don't think about it that way, and hope that I would never suggest to Yehva that she is lucky that her birthmother was a drug addict and her teenage birthfather was ignorant of how to protect his parental rights, because that meant she got to be in our family instead.

But I also thought this mom's comment about factories in China wasn't necessarily an adoption problem at all--it seemed like a parenting problem to me. Any woman who would say something so unkind to her daughter would say something unkind to any daughter she had, biological or adopted. In a parallel universe where that woman had a biological child instead of adopting from China, she'd be saying something just as nasty and posting about it on her blog as if it were the most OK thing in the world. Adoption shaped the form that her disrespect for her daughter took, but I have seen too many biological parents treat their children just as badly to assume that adoption caused the disrespect.

That sounds dismissive, and I don't mean it to. Maybe it is and I shouldn't have said it. Maybe that was just me being defensive again. Maybe I'm just reacting out of my hope, as one of those bad-fit kids (I was convinced through most of elementary school that I was a changeling), that parenting can make a difference, that if this woman (and I) had had parents who did a better job of accepting our differences, we wouldn't have felt so out of place.

The truth is, it is hard for me, as an adoptive parent who wants everything to be good for her kid and isn't sure how best to make it good, to listen to adoptees talk about what wasn't good for them. And to hear the challenge in what they say. I took a break from writing to read this post on white LGBT families adopting children of color, and the particular tensions that can arise. I was very interested in what he had to say about the white siblings of adopted children of color, since I have those kids, too, and I was chugging along nodding my head at how on-target he seemed, and then I was suddenly brought to tears by the question: When will your child get a break from being the obviously adopted child?

Raible was talking about the subtle pressure that is always present for transracially adopted kids, and for some reason that question made it real for me. As a lesbian, I experienced that background tension that gets so familiar you forget it's there until you walk into a place where practically everybody is a lesbian and you feel it melt away. When and how can it melt away for Yehva as she gets older, and stops being, in Raible's words about his own childhood, "a cute and cuddly curiosity in [the] neighborhood"?

I did not when Yehva was born, and do not now remotely meet Raible's criteria for white adoptive parents. If I am being honest with myself, this means I probably have some changing to do.

QFT

Harriet at the Fugitivus blog is an angry and profane person whose rants can be hard for me to read sometimes (that her homepage photo is of her flipping off the camera tells you much about her and her attitude). But she says some things about adoption that ring very true to me, and I'm going to quote them here both to share them and to archive them for myself.

From a post called Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up 101:

Everything About Adoption Hurts.

This is not to say that everything about adoption is wrong, but everything about adoption is painful. For our modern, legal concept of adoption to exist, families must be broken. Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case scenario having already come to fruition. From there, you're working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be.

And from Another Thing about Adoption, especially where she quotes an adoptive mom saying something that I have often thought and not put into words nearly so well:

The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there's just no way around it. A TRA [trans-racial adoptive] mother I worked with once put it this way: to become the parent your child deserves, you have to come to realize that in the world you want to raise your child in, and the world you must now work to create, you would never have been their parent.

The Great Hair Blasphemy

Because I'm still struggling with pain and fatigue, I'm behind on a lot of things and just not doing a whole bunch of other things. One thing I am perpetually behind on is caring for Yehva's hair. Her hair is very thick and curly (at least it seems thick to me) and the best way to manage it is to put it in braids or twists after washing it. She doesn't like having it washed, even when we use the minimal-rinsing-required No Poo method, and once it's washed, she's pretty well done having it touched. So we are falling into a bad cycle in which her hair gets washed but not styled and devolves into a crazy textured Buckwheat-style sad linty mess; or I do manage to braid or twist it, but the style gets left in too long and taking it out becomes a whole time-consuming ordeal in itself, which just reinforces for Yehva that having her hair touched is a big pain, both literally and figuratively.

David and I have thought seriously about starting locks, in part because her hair seems to want to lock so very badly, but every time I get close to doing it, I lose my nerve. I'm not patient or especially dextrous, and I'm worried about starting them badly. "It's only hair!" David says, but I'm not sure there is any such thing as "only hair" where little black girls are concerned. And locks need to be maintained, too.

The author of my favorite book on black hair care blogged awhile ago about having to shave her daughter's head because of head lice (something I hadn't thought of: those nit-combs will not go through most African-American hair); she and her daughter both cried about it, but she ended up thinking her daughter looked really adorable with a TWA, or "teeny-weeny afro." And it made me think that Yehva, with her very elegantly-shaped head, would also look adorable with a TWA.

But you don't cut a little black girl's hair. Culturally, it's just not done. I was interested in the comments on Cherie's blog post about the lengths other Black moms had gone to not to cut their daughters' hair when they came home from school with lice. When I asked on the Adoption Hair and Skin Care Yahoo group about doing a short cut for Yehva, I only got a handful of replies--and they all told me not to do it. One woman said she's taught for 17 years in a predominantly Black school and has never seen a little black girl with short hair. Other people suggested that if I couldn't come up with a better plan, I either pay someone to braid Yehva's hair, or get one of my friends to learn how to do it (I am sure I have many friends who would love to give up their Saturday afternoons to come to my house and do Yehva's hair). In googling around, I found one website (warning: auto-play sound) with this question and answer:

My child's hair is so thick, very, very tight kinks, and it is always a battle to comb it. Should I cut it in a cute, short style?

And the answer is:

NO, DON'T CUT IT, if you do she'll be considered ugly and you a bad parent by all the African-American adults and many of the AA children you meet!

I'm not sure why not cutting black girls' hair is so important, culturally. But it does seem to be. Moreso than for little white girls, although as I've been thinking about this today I've been reflecting on the fact that I don't know a single young white girl with short hair, either. Chin-length pageboys and blunt cuts abound, but I don't know a single white girl with hair cut above her ears, for instance. No pixie cuts in this generation. So there's a girl thing there that is separate from the black thing, but I think the black thing goes deeper than the girl thing.

I honestly don't know what to make of it, for me and Yehva. On the one hand, I think I do get the cultural stuff. I mean, I don't fully get all the reasons behind the specific taboo about cutting girls' hair, but I do get that this really matters to black people, and I respect that. On the other hand, I think people should do whatever they want with their own hair. And, as I said in a discussion about this on my Facebook page, "Yehva hates having her hair washed and cries the whole time; short hair would not only be easier for me until I feel better, but it would be way easier on her. Who am I supposed to respect more, my own child or 'black culture'? Am I supposed to torture her in service to some cultural ideal?"

To complicate things for us, I cannot use any scented products. As far as I've been able to find, there are no unscented or fragrance-free product lines for African-American hair; this means that what I use on Yehva's hair is the same fragrance-free conditioner I use, which may not be right for her hair, and whatever I can cobble together from my kitchen: coconut oil, my own mix of leave-in conditioner made with water and olive oil. I don't know for sure because I can't try them, but I am told that products like the Carol's Daughter line make managing thick, nappy hair like Yehva's much easier. But we can't use them.

(This also makes the suggestions I've gotten to have her hair done at a salon not very useful; not only can it cost $70 and up to have hair braided, but hair salons are like Stinking Pits of Death for me.)

I'm not sure what my point is. Except that one reality of adopting a black baby girl is that a seemingly simple thing like, "Maybe it would be better for her to have a short haircut until I'm back on my feet" is not simple at all. It's tremendously fraught. As I jokingly said to David, "I am not allowed to cut Yehva's hair. All The Black People In America say so."