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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My More Moderate Views on Education

I enjoyed my rant the other day, but find that I want to say a few words about my more measured opinions about education and the schools.

1. I have been a teacher. Not in the public schools, but in their closest collegiate analog, the community college. In addition, I taught a class (freshman composition) that was required of all incoming students but which almost none of them wanted to take or expected to enjoy. From this, I have first-hand knowledge of how impossible it is to teach students who are in your class by compulsion. I also know first-hand that a system can be less than the sum of its parts; that is, it can be full of mostly-competent people doing their best according to their lights and with as much goodwill as they can muster, and the system overall can still be failing (in my department, after we instituted a portfolio review process, we had a failure rate of about 1/3--and this was of the students who made it to the end of the semester. Another sizeable chunk tended to disappear partway through). So I have tremendous sympathy and respect for individuals in the schools, doing their jobs. And sympathy for the ones who, like me, burn out and leave.

2. I homeschool for what seem to me like good reasons, but I think the truth is that my kids, and the kids of people like me, would probably do OK either in school or homeschooled. There are some reasons of temperament that I think this is less true for Eric than for most kids, but in general the children of middle-class and upper-middle-class families, with educated, involved, loving, functional parents and resources for books, travel, trips to museums, and so on, seem to learn what they need to learn and do all right. You hear a lot about how the American school system is failing--all those media reports that we're second-to-last in some international test of math skills. But we really have at least two different educational systems in American, and my kids (and your kids, probably, if you're reading this) are in the one that works pretty well.

A few years ago I read a book whose title I can never remember, something like Making Sense of Research in Education. It looked at some of the typical education headlines and examined the research behind them. One I remember is those international tests. According to the author, most countries have more explicit tracking than the US does, and when they participate in these tests, they choose students from specific schools to participate. In some cases, they choose the students individually. IIRC, only the US and Canada actually provide random, national samples. So "America came in 26th out of 29 countries," for instance, might be a statistic that compares all American children to only the children who've been tracked into academic schools in other countries, or an even smaller sample than that--like comparing all American kids to the equivalent of kids at the High School of Science and Technology. When the American sample is sorted by race, the white kids move up to second or third; the black kids drop even lower in the rankings.

So, when people urge me to put my kids in school and get involved in my local school district: well, I know my local school district has problems (I've heard the kid culture is unusually toxic, for instance), but for the most part, that school district doesn't need me, or my kids. There's a case to be made that Lansing does, and I know that one woman in my Quaker meeting carries a concern about Quakers taking their kids outside the Lansing school district. But there are bigger problems with education for working-class people, poor people, people of color, immigrants. I don't know what to do about those problems, either as an individual or as a society. But I do think both I and society could be doing better in this regard.

3. For all my bluster, I am not a zealot about home education. I don't think it's necessary or right for all kids (or their parents)--not even necessarily for all of mine. Yehva, for instance, is so high-energy and extroverted that I will not be surprised if we put her in kindergarten just to see how it goes (yes, I know extroverted children homeschool...but poor Yehva was born into a family of introverts, and I think it will always be a challenge to get her enough stimulation if she's stuck with us most days. But we'll see). I am also less sure about what I'm doing than it might seem from my writing; one of my weaknesses as a homeschooler, I told a friend recently, is that I am always second-guessing myself. It's actually one of my weaknesses in general; I'm more likely to have questions than opinions, about a lot of things.

That's all, really. I have my ranty moments, and I have my moderate, see-all-sides moments. I shared one the other day, thought I'd share the other one today.

A Darn Cute Little Guy

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

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

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

Many thoughts and feelings arise.

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

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

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

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

What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

Well...that'll be an interesting day.

I spent the last couple of days re-watching the entire series of Firefly, Joss Whedon's love-it-or-hate-it story of outlaws eking out a living on the edges of a galactic civilization. Well, not quite the entire thing--I finally had to go to bed last night about 10 minutes into Objects in Space, the final (on the DVD, anyway) episode. It's a creepy one, so I'll wait until after the kids are asleep tonight to finish watching it.

All over the internet, people have said everything that needs to be said about Firefly, so I won't try any deep analysis. Just a few observations:

I still love it.

I was really struck on this watching by how charming I find Morena Baccarin (Inara) when she smiles.

I will go to my grave thinking Inara and Chiana would make great names for twin girls. (Hey, it's better than my other first choice: Scylla and Charybdis.) 80% of the people you met would just say, "Oh, that's pretty"; and the remaining 20% would be divided between people who would do a slow double-take and then high five you; and those who would think "You named your daughters after intergalactic space whores? You're going to the special hell."

Simon Tam's character arc really stood out for me on this watching. He goes from sheltered, arrogant, and kind of hapless to strong and a little bit ruthless (the medical-supply heist he comes up with on Ariel, for instance), yet at the same time more relaxed and easy-going; it's only in the last couple of episodes that we get to see him wearing a pullover sweater and smiling with Kaylee. And his scene with a paralyzed Jayne, after he finds out Jayne called the feds on Ariel to try to get the reward, is just masterful. Boy-to-man all the way for our Simon.

I will always love Badger, and his very fine hat.

Eric and Carl watched "Jaynestown" with me. It's like a test of developmental stages; Eric and I were rolling on the floor laughing, while poor Carl kept saying, "Why is that funny? Why is that funny?"

One of the problems I always had with Star Trek: Voyager was how quickly the Maquis crew integrated with the Federation crew; the show didn't do a good job of maintaining the tensions there. Firefly comes off pretty well by comparison, especially in maintaining the tension Jayne brings to the crew. But when you think about all the various tensions swirling among the nine people on Serenity, it goes a lot deeper than "Jayne would cut your throat for a dollar."

I love that Kaylee complains in the very first episode that they need a spare compression coil, and Mal says they can't afford it and will have to make do. "That coil busts, we're drifting," she tells him. Seven episodes later, it busts, they're drifting, and this is what sets the action of "Out of Gas" going.

Other extended foreshadowing, from the end of the pilot: Mal: How come you didn't turn on me, Jayne? Jayne: Money wasn't good enough. Mal: What happens when it is? Jayne: Well... that'll be an interesting day. When they get to Ariel, eight episodes later, it is indeed an interesting day.

The developing friendship between Jayne and Book is very well done in the incidental bits before and after more important business.

"River, you don't fix the Bible." [River: "It's broken! It doesn't make sense."] It's not about... making sense. It's about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you."

In "Trash," when Mal calls Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda "YoSaffBridge," a mashup of the three names he's known her by, it was captioned as "speaking Chinese." Heh.

When Wash and Mal are taken by Niska, what follows is the most hilarious extended-torture scene in the history of filmed entertainment. But it's really just a riff on what got to be a pretty tired Buffy meme, the Scoobies combining doing something really mundane (arguing about their relationships, studying for the SAT) with something heroic and/or supernatural (fighting demons, sitting around the cemetery waiting for a newly-spawned vampire to emerge from the grave so Buffy can stake it). Amazing they could dust it off and make it work again.

Like every other fan, I want more Firefly. And yet I think the show did just about everything it needed to in these 14 episodes; Inara and Mal were even dangerously close to getting together (likewise Simon and Kaylee), and we all know how the life goes out of a show once the sexual tension between the bickering leads is resolved. Jayne was humanizing, too. Maybe it's better to have 14 strong episodes and a bit of longing than to have to suffer through a sub-par second season. This is how I try to comfort myself.

You should all be glad I don't have a smartphone or my Facebook page all afternoon and evening yesterday would have been an endless stream of Firefly quotes.

Smallness of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, that's mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Surprisingly Vexed Issue of Birth Certificates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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