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.

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.

Detroit History; Black Boys in Public Schools; the TBR pile

I've got a couple of books going at the moment. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue has been such a mix of what I already knew and what has completely taken me by surprise. The influx of Black people during WWII was not a surprise to me; I knew that bit of history. It was likewise not exactly a shocking revelation to me that that they were often shunted to the most dangerous, filthy jobs--one that was described in pretty graphic detail was a job workers called the "mankiller," in which the worker had to lift a heavy white-hot spring coil off a fabricating machine, to chest height, and then submerse it in a cooling bath, all within a few seconds.

I was disturbed by how deliberate the maintenance of black ghettos was, even as they were increasingly overcrowded and underserved by public works. That Cobo Arena is named for the mayor who pretty much devoted himself to maintaining a segregated city and blocking the construction of affordable public housing for black people makes me want to vow never to go there again. Well, maybe once. To spit on it.

What surprised me is that I had (from my own narcissistic perspective, I guess--did anything that happened before you were aware of it really matter?) always imagined that Detroit had a kind of Golden Age that stretched from World War II until the deep recession of 1981/82, when I was in high school.

But in fact, Detroit had something more like a Golden Blip during and for a couple of years after WWII. By 1950, there were no more parcels of land near railroad tracks that were big enough for manufacturing plants, so development within the city came to a standstill. Automakers had to build new plants someplace, so they build them in Ohio, in the South, in California--places with weak unions, lower taxes, and vast tracts of undeveloped land.

I was amazed to learn that Detroit lost 70,000 jobs in the decade of the 50s. Jobs were lost to automation (no more "mankiller" once a machine could do it...but then, no more job, either), to companies' shifting of manufacturing to other locations, and by the weeding out of the many auto companies and related industries that had sprung up during the Blip and later failed.

By the end of the 60s, the city had lost a total of 130,000 jobs. When the book was written in 1996, the author was able to say that Detroit had sustained a steady decline in jobs for over 40 years. Who knew?

After WWII, companies like Lockheed stayed in the defense business, but in Detroit, auto companies couldn't re-tool factories and get car production up and running fast enough, in anticipation of high demand as soldiers came home, got married, bought houses, had families.

But putting so many of its eggs into auto production made Detroit perpetually vulnerable. New cars are one of the first things people put off buying in an economic downturn, even a small one. So, rather than being the powerhouse I imagined it to be, Detroit spent most of the 20th century limping along, booming and busting, struggling with race relations and economic downturns and business failures.

I'm not done with the book; I'm in 1960, where:

Only 15 years after World War II, Detroit's landscape was dominated by rotting hulks of factory buildings, closed and abandoned, surrounded by blocks of boarded up stores and restaurants. Older neighborhoods, whose streets were lined with the proud homes that middle-class and working-class Detroiters had constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were now pockmarked with the shells of burned-out and empty buildings, lying among rubbish-strewn vacant lots. (pp. 147-148)

That is not the image I would have come up with for Detroit in that era. The first Detroit history I was aware of were the late-60s race riots, and white flight (my mother says that white people from Detroit used to drive out to South Lyon, where we lived when I was very young, and knock on doors in our neighborhood, offering to buy houses that weren't even on the market). I always thought of that as a kind of sudden explosion, but it had been simmering for 25 years.

This may be the kind of academic book I don't end up finishing; I'm interested, but not sure how much tolerance I have for year-by-year analyses of housing patterns broken down by race--though there's a chapter coming up about how class divisions within the black community created conflict in the 60s and 70s that looks pretty good.

Mostly, it's a sad, sad story. And I'd like to warn any of my Black friends away from reading it, the same way I'd warn a rape victim not to rent I Spit on Your Grave because--well, because it seems like the history of Detroit from 1944 to 1996 is pretty much a 50-year parade of white people fucking Black people over on purpose, viciously, humiliatingly, and with malice aforethought. I know Detroit is not alone in this by any means. But you probably don't need to hear it again.

I'm also reading Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson. It's a meaty book, written by a sociologist using participant-observer techniques. Since it was a dissertation, it's perhaps a bit heavy on jargon ("This can be understood as a transgressive act...[that] can be seen as redressing a fundamental social lack.") though readable enough overall. What I am finding especially interesting--as I did when I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest--is how people who not only don't intend to stereotype children, but in fact may see themselves as deliberately doing the opposite, nonetheless manage to conspire with other factors in children's lives to push them into predetermined roles. (On the other hand, an administrator in the school introduces the author to a 10-year-old boy with the words, "There's a jail cell out there with that boy's name on it," so it's not all about damaged institutions overriding individual good intentions.)

The author of Bad Boys is also interested in the narratives educators tell themselves about why children are the way they are (family factors are a common one), and in the ways that classroom misbehavior and deliberate challenges to authority can become adaptive responses for Black boys, a source of self-esteem and peer respect.

At the school she studied, she was also interested to discover that the room where kids served in-school detentions was essentially hidden from the rest of the school; it couldn't be reached from the school's interior, but only through an exterior door that let onto the playground, the windows were arranged in such a way that people couldn't see inside; the children serving detention had playground and lunch times separately from the rest of the children in the school. Not only would it be almost impossible to stumble upon this room, she could barely find it after she'd been given directions.

Her sense that problem Black children were being hidden away led to her exploring, and finding evidence for, the theory that one of the school's agendas was to hide problems in the school from white families, for fear they would exercise their options to take their children elsewhere to be educated.

I don't always love the author--her analytic sections seem very good to me, as do her descriptions of what she observes in the school. But memoirish "field notes" sections between chapters seem a little precious and self-indulgent to me, and I have taken to skipping them, mostly. I hope her next, post-dissertation book won't read quite so much like she's trying to impress her committee with her grasp of theory and jargon. I may get worn out and come to feel I've learned as much as I need to know about how Black boys get shafted in school--especially since it's really no surprise to anybody that they do. So this is another one that has felt worthwhile but that I might not read every page of.

On the other hand, I have just learned that the publication of One Was a Soldier, the new Clare Ferguson/ Russ Van Alstyne mystery, has been pushed back to March of 2011, so I may read every single page of both these books, including the footnotes, because what else am I going to have to do?

In my to-be-read pile:

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith by Frederich Buechner

Claiming Abraham: Reading the Qur'an and the Bible Side by Side by Michael Lodahl

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition by Ezra Greenspan, which I really want to dive into in the next 10 days because I am leading my workshop on Song of Myself at the summer gathering and I always like to know something about the poem that I didn't know before when I teach it.

I also have an annotated edition of Song of Myself (published just a few months ago) to take along. Very excited about that. We can look stuff up!

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption by Christine Ward Gailey. This one may end up back in the library bag unread; it's possible I've read so much about race etc. in US adoption that the marginal utility of reading another 200-page book on the subject is approaching the vanishing point. Though the class and gender stuff could be new and interesting.

The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor. I've started this several times and not finished it because it's so good I want to be able to really take it in and digest it and never feel like I have time to do it justice.

Liturgies of Quakerism by Ben Pink Dandelion. I paid a lot of money for this last year at the summer gathering, after considering it for several years, and I have tried several times to get through it. Here's what I said last time I attempted it, in September:

I’m not sure I’ll ever get through The Liturgies of Quakerism. This is an import from Britain, and it cost $35. I’d been looking at it in the bookstore catalog, and at the Gathering bookstore for a couple years, and thinking, “That’s a lot of money for a book.” Finally this summer, I decided to buy it. I am very interested in this notion that Quakers have a liturgy and curious about what that might mean.

However, this is my third attempt at the book since I bought it, and I have yet to make it past page 2, “The liturgy functions as a hermeneutic of sorts that, through its ordo, helps to make sense of numinous experiences,” or page 3’s “A rhetorical transaction, therefore, may be best understood as operating at some point on a continuum of conscious choice-making on the receiver’s part.”

It’s not that I’m not equipped to read this sort of thing; a graduate degree in Political Philosophy and two years of graduate work in literature render it all very familiar. It’s just that one of the consolations of having dropped out of grad school eight years ago when Eric was born was the freedom to never have to read about hermeneutics or rhetorical transactions or “the artificial tensions and releases created by consonance and dissonance” or how the Quietist experience is “inherently related to a realized eschatology” or the “de-coupling of a sense of end-time and a sense of intimacy.”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I just don’t know that I have the intellectual energy to cope with the language. On the other hand, I paid $35 for the damn thing. I suppose if I were to add up all the $10 words I would see that I was getting much more than my money’s worth.

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.

Comfort and Discomfort in the Spiritual Home

This week, I read big chunks of Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African-Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, by Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel. This is a huge, carefully-researched history of Quakers' relationship to black people, slavery, racism, abolition, civil rights, education, and more. Julye and McDaniel wrote the book as an antidote to Quakers' partial understanding of our own history; we often point to the fact, for instance, that Quakers stopped owning slaves a good hundred years before the Civil War, without necessarily digging deeply into how complex, fraught, hard-fought, and divisive that decision was. The tone of the book is neutral and factual, the level of detail is impressive bordering on numbing, and it's all in there: everything we got right (freed our slaves! marched on Washingon! Opened a school to meet the needs of black children in Detroit!), everything we got wrong (actively participated in the slave trade! resisted abolition! refused membership requests from exemplary black applicants!). It's a very thorough portrait of a flawed people with a checkered history with regard to race.

The piece that I've been chewing on for a few days, though, is from Vanessa Julye's author's statement, the very first paragraph, in which she writes:

I am one of very few African American Quakers, and I have naturally been drawn into the question of why this is so. I believe that the seeds of this circumstance were planted more than three hundred years ago, that Friends have been plagued by racist attitudes from that time to this day. These attitudes largely account for why our numbers in the Society of Friends have been and continue to be small. (xix)

I've seen this assumption for years: that any organization or institution that is predominantly white is that way because of its racism, or the racism of its members. But I'm not sure. It seems to me that in a society that continues to be as segregated as ours, a specific institution could be segregated for reasons that have little to do with the racist attitudes of its members; in fact, one could argue that Quakerism, for instance, remains predominantly white despite the active anti-racism of many of its members. This is something that I have heard white Quakers talk about with confusion and pain.

In the case of my own meeting, it is easy to imagine outside influences working against racial diversity. For 40 years, the meeting has been located in a city that the census bureau tells me is only 7% black; in a meeting with about 50 members, we would need only 3.5 black people to match our immediate community demographically. Success!

Of course, that's a very partial picture. Our Quaker meeting draws Friends from all over the area, including a city that is 22% black, and the suburb I live in, which is only 4% black. But I wonder if this is part of why it's hard for a Quaker meeting to reflect its area more accurately: most Quaker meetings are the only game in town for Friends. Some people drive half an hour or more to come to worship, and they might not do that if there were another meeting close by. By way of contrast, the ELCA church locator tells me that there are 10 Lutheran churches within 15 miles of my house, and 11 in Lansing proper. How far do people normally go when they're looking for a new church, I wonder? Are there people in Lansing who never find us because when they go church shopping, of the 10 churches in easy travel distance from their home, not one is a Quaker meeting? (And will our racial makeup change now that we've moved from the suburbs to a meetinghouse in Lansing? Will we end up on more people's shopping lists?)

So, on the one hand, I think Julye may be wrong in attributing the overwhelming whiteness of liberal Quakerism primarily to racism within the Religious Society of Friends. It seems to me that societal and structural legacies of racism could be doing the job just fine without much help from us at all.

On the other hand, I wonder how much it takes for a black person who comes to worship to decide it's just not the place for her. I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of comfort and discomfort because sometimes it seems to me that my reasons for taking a break from my meeting are petty and reveal me as a small person: sometimes people say things I disagree with. Or they hurt my feelings.

I have often thought that we place too much emphasis on being comfortable, often couching it in language about "safety." This came up a lot in the years I worked security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where many women wanted us to regulate other women's behavior because, they told us, they felt "unsafe" around (pick one): women with certain body modifications; women in leather; women who drink beer and get loud around the campfire at night. For a long time, I was very sympathetic to these complaints, until it dawned on me that "safe" and "comfortable" are not synonyms, and that if someone else's behavior or words make you uncomfortable, that isn't the same as them hurting you or threatening to. And sometimes being made uncomfortable is the first step in growth.

So I have been concerned that, in taking a break from my meeting, I am protecting myself from imaginary threats.

On the other hand...

Some of the things I find hardest about being at my meeting are things I deal with all the time elsewhere. I would like my monthly meeting to be a haven from what is ugly in the world, but it seems like most Quakers don't see some of the ugliness I do, and thoughtlessly recreate it. This means that at my meeting, as much as anyplace else, I get to enjoy hearing women who weigh a hundred pounds less than me complain about how fat they are and how much weight they need to lose. I get to hear moms speak about their children in dismissive, labeling, judgmental ways, or confidently predict the trouble I'm going to have with mine someday. I get to listen to the insights of people who think they understand poverty because they lived on a really tiny stipend while they were in graduate school. I get to hear people who've recently been tourists in third-world countries rave about the spiritual wisdom of the natives there, their deep connection to the earth, their openness and generosity despite their poverty.

And you know what? I get enough of that shit elsewhere. I don't need to come to Quaker meeting for it.

So now I imagine a black person coming to our meeting for the first time. She is likely to be welcomed effusively, as all newcomers are, because we are really nice people at Red Cedar. She may feel there is a slight tinge of "oh, yay, a black person!" in the welcome; she may suspect that, as happy as people are to see her in particular, they are also at least a little happy to think that if she keeps coming, she might improve our demographic profile. She is probably not wrong about that. She has probably experienced this before, and may feel prepared to deal with it. She may like us, and what we do, well enough to come back anyway.

But what happens on the day that tourist talks during Joys and Sorrows about the happy, enlightened, spiritually advanced poor natives he saw on his trip? What happens if she overhears a white woman making fun of the decor in the home of an African-American family she visited recently*? What happens when somebody refers to a stereotype about black people that they think is harmless because it's a positive stereotype?

How much does it take for a black person to decide we're not worth the trouble?

I want to be clear: I do not subscribe to the idea that all white people are automatically racists. I don't feel guilty about either the color of my skin or my middle-class upbringing. I don't think guilt and self-flagellation are productive.

On the other hand: I want to hold myself and my beloved community of Friends to a high standard of awareness, a high standard of behavior, a high standard of speech. We can be 99% racism-free, but our careless assumptions about who is in the room with us, how much they have in common with us, how universal our experience is, how correct our understanding is--these can be enough to tell a newcomer that he does not belong.

We should be challenging everyone who walks through our doors: challenging them spiritually, challenging them to grow into a deeper understanding of God's Truth, challenging them to join with us in the hard work of becoming the people God calls us to be. To do that, we have to be a place where people can become humble, open, and vulnerable, because it is only in that state that new truths can be heard. If people have to guard themselves against us, they will have to be exceptionally strong to simultaneously open themselves to God.

I imagine Julye must be one such exceptionally strong person, to respond to the racism she experiences in the Religious Society of Friends not by leaving but by giving seven years of her life to research and writing a book of truth about our history. She (and her white co-author) see our impoverishment of spirit and understanding, and respond by giving more of themselves to us. This is not something we can expect of every black person, or every working-class or poor person, or every fat person. We are filled with love for each other--I know that I am beloved in my meeting, sometimes very deeply loved by the same people whose behavior I find most hurtful. What we need to understand is: Love isn't enough.

*I don't make up examples or rely on hearsay. If I describe something in my meeting, it is something I have directly witnessed.

Children are Priceless (pp. 33-34)

This is from a chapter called "Motherhood in the Marketplace."

Children are priceless. And yet we know they are costly. We know that getting and maintaining children is about as expensive as anything in this society. A child costs more than a car, less than a house. There really are price tags here. If you just get easily pregnant the old-fashioned way, there are still the costs of pregnancy care, birth attendants. One adoptive mother, rightly offended when asked how much the baby cost, replied, “Less than a Cesarean section.” But if you can’t get pregnant, there are often serious costs: reproductive technologies, adoption—these are big-ticket items.

This is a tension we live with. Viviana Zelizer expressed it perfectly in the title of her book Pricing the Priceless Child. She talked about the sentimentalization of children, their pricelessness, and the necessity of putting price tags on them. A kid is killed in a car accident and we sue. A dollar value is assigned. An infertile woman or a man without a woman wants someone to get pregnant, grow them a baby. A dollar value is assigned. And the costs are not the same for all babies. A minister at the Antioch Bible Church is trying to raise money for a billboard that will show a white baby, a Latino baby, and a black baby, and next to each the fee charged by adoption “facilitators,” of thirty-five thousand, ten thousand, and four thousand dollars, respectively. “I raise thoroughbred racehorses. I sell them by supply and demand. I’m not going to let people sell children by supply and demand.”

Most people don’t have any need to know much about how adoption works, and so they don’t. People I’ve spoken to about adopting Yehva are sometimes surprised to learn that adoption law varies state to state; since you do not have to adopt in the state you live in, this means that it is possible for adoptive parents to choose to adopt in a state whose laws they prefer. We, for instance, adopted in Illinois, which allows no revocation period once the birthmother has surrendered her parental rights; we didn’t choose our agency for this reason, but were glad not to have the risk of bringing the baby home and then having the birthmother change her mind and take the baby from us. Dan Savage, in his book about adopting his son, The Kid, says that many people choose to adopt in Oregon because Oregon has very weak birthfather rights laws.

[On the other hand, birth parents can only place a child for adoption in the state where they live. A couple I know recently lost the potential for a birthmother match because she was in a state that does not allow same-sex couples to adopt. Our birthmother could not have chosen, for instance, to place her child for adoption in Michigan, which has a much longer revocation period during which a birthmother who has placed a child can change her mind. I know there are reasons for this restriction, that have to do with child trafficking. But here is a case where adoptive parents have much more freedom and control than birth parents do.]

You can also choose your agency, and policies vary widely between them. We chose ours in part because they will work with single women and men, unmarried opposite-sex couples, and same-sex couples as well as married opposite-sex couples like us. We also chose them because on their website they decried the practice of charging different fees for babies of different races. During my research, I had seen many agencies that listed graduated fees on their websites: lowest for black babies, a little higher for partially-black babies, a little higher still for Hispanic babies, and a whole lot higher for white babies.

Supply and demand certainly drives this. White newborns are in such high demand and low supply that agencies can be very choosy about the adoptive parents they work with. In my research, I found that most agencies placing white newborns would have excluded us, for instance, for any or all of the following reasons: being over 35; having biological children already; being fat; not having medically-documented infertility; having a mood disorder. Meanwhile, the adoption e-mail lists I’m on regularly include appeals from agencies that place children and babies of color, expressing the need for more adoptive families.

[Another digression: David and I recently received such an appeal from our Michigan agency. Although we are both entirely clear about our family being complete, each of us, independently, upon opening the e-mail, had a knee-jerk reaction: “We should update our home study!” And then we laughed at ourselves.]

I understand the social forces that lead agencies to try to give economic incentives to adopt children of color. But adoption rhetoric says that the fees we pay are not funds for the purchase of a baby; they’re payment for services provided by the agency. Why then should it cost less to adopt a baby who is hard to place? Shouldn’t it cost more, if the agency has to work harder to find a home for that baby? (Or, if adoption is driven by the desires of adoptive parents, is the current fee structure partly because agencies have to work harder to find birthmothers of white infants?)

Nonetheless, I was not willing to work with an agency with a graduated fee structure. “Why did you pick me, Mama?” I imagined my future child asking. “Well, honey, you were on sale.” No.

Would I have preferred to adopt a white child? Oh, what a question. Easily set aside now with the answer that I cannot imagine anyone but Yehva being my third child; comfortably evaded three years ago by the knowledge that we were excluded from the marketplace of white newborn adoption.

I want to say no, though, for a number of reasons. One is that I really do think a black kid is just as good as a white kid; I don’t aspire to the kind of faux anti-racism that claims to be color-blind, and I know that adopting a black baby brought a different package of challenges and concerns than adopting a white one would have. But I could not imagine it making any difference to my love of my child and my delight in her.

Also, there is a part of me that wanted the adoption to be visible, as a way of asserting that I see this way of building a family as entirely valid. That adoption is not something to hide. (But what about the Twelve Swedish Women? Am I somehow trying to express publicly my valuation of something that is a symbol of the high costs of racism and poverty? Gaaagh! It's tangly and it hurts my brain.)

Finally, I did not want to adopt a white child because I did not want people to think it mattered to me to have a white child.

(I’d be interested to hear friends who have adopted white children talk about how this is for them, especially when they’re surrounded by so many white parents who have adopted interracially.)

Twelve Swedish Women (pp. 17-18)

There are several streams that feed into transracial adoption, each of which is deeply problematic at its source. Adoption itself is one: Why is there ever a child being placed for adoption? Adoption solves, in a wonderful and satisfying way, the problem of infertility for so many people that we tend to forget that adoption itself is a problem and not just a solution. I once led a student reading group on adoption…. We read widely, bringing in books and articles to share with each other. One evening a man brought in a table of international adoption statistics. Sweden—not Utopia, but a place with good social services, readily available contraception as well as abortion, decent services for single mothers, along with all mothers and children—Sweden had twelve domestic, nonfamily adoptions that year. Twelve Swedish women found themselves in a situation where placing their babies out for adoption was their best option. Twelve. When you take away most of the social forces operating upstream that put women in that awful position, you are left largely with personal idiosyncrasy, personal reasons. Twelve.

The United States is bigger than Sweden; if we had the kinds of social supports the Swedish have, we would still have more than twelve babies available. But we would never, ever have anywhere near the number of babies we currently have placed “voluntarily” for adoption, and we would never have enough to solve the problem of infertility. Adoption is the result of some very bad things going on upstream, policies that push women into giving birth to babies that they then cannot raise.

Rothman goes on to talk about race; class; gender bias that leaves more black boys than girls without adoptive homes (perhaps one of the reasons that, not long before we started working with them, our agency stopped allowing adoptive families to specify what gender baby they wanted).

But I want to pull out that notion of “voluntarily placing a baby for adoption” that Rothman interrogates with her quotation marks. Previously I mentioned concerns about coercion of birthmothers, and here Rothman is arguing that the whole system is coercive. “Racism is of course the other feeder stream,” she says, and “A lot of what adoption is about is poverty… And a lot of what poverty is about in America is racism.”

I am stuck here. I have, on the one hand, so much to say; and on the other hand, I want that image of the Twelve Swedish Women to stand there, for people to just hold that image for a bit.

This is one of those bits that I found convicting—that say to me that I could not choose to adopt a black baby without being complicit in a coercive system. People have commented many times about my compassion for our birthmother, about my compassion for the birthfather even when we were in a custody dispute with him (“You seem like a really compassionate person,” my lawyer said to me one day, not unkindly, “But it’s time to cut that shit out.”). But what does it mean to have the luxury of compassion because other people, because a system of racism and entrenched poverty, have already done the coercing?

This is not news to me—I’ve been able to talk glibly about how white people who are not racists nonetheless benefit from racism for twenty-five years or more. But something about this, about the way Rothman speaks so plainly—“adoption itself is a problem”—and about the embodied reality of Yehva here, and not there, that hits me viscerally, that takes it to a deeper level of reality for me. Again, I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t think I’ve done wrong. But I am trying not to shade my eyes from the glare of truth.

I'm going to have more to say about coercion. But this is all I want to say right now.

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.