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.

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.

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.