Norcroft Women's Writing Retreat to close

Many years ago, I spent a month in Lutsen, Minnesota, at Norcroft, a writing retreat for women founded by Joan Drury. Drury is a novelist and publisher who wanted to support other women writers, and her retreat was wonderfully egalitarian in its vision: it was free to everybody, and you didn't have to be published to go there. Places were assigned by lottery among everyone who applied; I think I got a spot the second year I tried for one.

The retreat itself was wonderful. There was a main lodge, a roomy house overlooking Lake Superior, where four writers in residence had bedrooms, and four writing sheds (I loved mine and still dream of having something like it again someday). If you got a bedroom overlooking the lake, your writing shed was in the woods, and if your bedroom overlooked the woods, your shed had a lake view. I had a lovely, roomy bedroom overlooking the lake.

A caretaker did the housework and bought groceries; you could put anything you wanted on a list in the kitchen, and it would appear in the fridge. Writers did their own cooking. Because writers had to share space during the day, silence was observed until 5 p.m. every day so as to keep the writers from falling into socializing instead of working. The caretaker also made sure there was always a fire laid in the fireplace, so you could have one whenever you wanted (and, this being the north shore of Lake Superior, you often did, even in July).

My four weeks there was a productive, peaceful time. I was either writing, reading, walking, or riding my bike to a nearby resort where I could use a public phone to call David. It was a gift I do indeed thank Joan Drury for.

However... friends who had been there warned me that Drury was a difficult person. She owned a home next door to the retreat, and they told me that if she was staying there, she would usually come for dinner at least once a week, and at these dinners she expected to be fawned over. Each one of them had a story of being insulted or offended in conversation with Drury. "Whatever you do," my friends said, "just don't have dinner with Joan."

For the first three weeks I was there, Drury wasn't. But the final week she was, and one night she did indeed come for dinner. I was mindful of my friends' warnings, but I was too curious not to attend the dinner.

As with so many things in life, I really should have listened to my friends. In the course of dinner, Drury told me that one project I was working on was of no interest to anyone and completely unpublishable, and that another project, which I had been most productive with during my stay, had been a waste of time that squandered the opportunity she had given me.

One of the the other writers who arrived that week was from Minneapolis, where Drury lived, and was a friend of hers. A semi-famous ex-girlfriend of mine had been involved with this writer's lover while on sabbatical in Minneapolis a couple of years earlier; this writer considered my ex to have "stolen" her lover and she had stopped talking to me once we had stumbled upon the connection in a getting-to-know-you conversation. Apparently she talked to Drury about it, because it amused Drury, during the dinner, to reveal my former relationship in an insulting way calculated to get a laugh at my expense.

Which is when I got up and went to my writing shed.

I don't know if Drury was universally nasty or if she picked a scapegoat at every meal, and I was just unlucky. Some of my friends thought she picked on women who weren't deferential or fawningly grateful enough; I don't really know, I only met her the once, and once was enough. The other three writers in residence at the time seemed to like her well enough, and stayed up late laughing and drinking with her in the living room of the lodge.

I just took a break, wanting to find something from the letters I wrote while I was there, and got sucked in. It's fascinating in a painful way; I was so early in my recovery from an anxiety disorder and it's all out there on the page, these long daily letters I wrote to (very patient) friends, full of crazy ups and downs. Nothing I'd really want to excerpt here. On the other hand, I had forgotten the good camaraderie I had with the other writers there; I always see myself alone in my memory but the letters reveal we were quite a social bunch. Also, I smuggled a hamster into my writing shed with me, and fed the local chipmunks her pellets and seed mix. They used to come and stare at me through my screen door if I hadn't put any out on the stoop, and there were several I knew by sight.

Anyway, I read this morning that the retreat is closing. While I don't share the article's enthusiasm for Joan Drury (if I have a "fairy godmother," I do so very much hope it's not her), on balance I think this is the passing of a good thing. I'm sorry it won't still be there for other women; I don't know of any other writing retreat that is both free and open to writers at all levels, and Drury is to be honored for that.

Social Class, Female Solidarity, and the Child Welfare System

In the Baltimore Law Review, Chris Gottlieb, a lawyer who represents parents who have been accused of abuse or neglect, talks about the child welfare system, the rights of parents, and why women with privilege should feel more solidarity with those whose parental rights are challenged.

(Adapted, shorter, non-pdf version in the New York Times here.)

I'm only about halfway through and am already kind of goggle-eyed at the analysis she's making and what she has to say about the child welfare system. Some quotes:

In advising my clients, I frequently tell them that the single most important factor in whether they will be able to keep their children (keep their children!) is how well they get along with the caseworker. You've seen the pictures of the burnt and beaten children who have suffered at the hands of abusive parents, some ending up dead. Those are the children whose stories motivated our child welfare system and continue to fuel efforts to be more protective of children. Yet, as almost anyone working in the field will tell you, those instances of severe abuse, which garner all the attention in the media, are unrepresentative of the cases that clog the system.

Most children in foster care simply are not there because of child abuse. In most cases abuse is never even alleged. Neglect is the charge and neglect is broadly construed. It entails everything from having a dirty or run-down house, to refusing special education or recommended psychotropic medications, to corporal punishment, to smoking marijuana. In other words, neglect includes many things that reasonable people have very different ideas about. Indeed, it includes many behaviors that my yuppie friends and I engage in without threat of government intervention. (pp. 378-9)

And this:

But these cases are often viewed by the caseworkers and judges not as being about material, economic problems, but as being about parenting ability. The parent who "chose" to leave her ten-year-old alone while she went to work is deemed to have such bad parenting judgment that she may not be trusted to keep her child safe under any circumstances. Of course, a mother who leaves a child home because otherwise she will lose her job and means of supporting that child was choosing between two bad options. She may have made the wrong decision (though, of course, this is one of the many parenting questions on which contradictory views are held), but she may be an excellent parent. She certainly is a parent who could be given better options. Similarly, the mother who "chooses" to let her child live in sub-standard housing may not be taking every step another parent would to address the situation, but that doesn't mean she's unworthy to be a parent (whatever "worthy to be a parent" might mean.) It surely does not mean her children must be better off without her.

Acting as if these cases are about parental judgment is dangerous and ultimately bad for the kids involved. None of us would pass the test of always exercising the best possible judgment when parenting. It's just that some of us have luxuries that mean our bad choices don't have to be between two really bad options (and our choices, whether good or bad, are far less likely to be seen by government officials). (p. 381)

And this:

The point is not that rich, white kids are never abused, and certainly not that we should be less concerned about the poor and minority children who are. The point is that, just as when there is any severe discrepancy in how rich and poor or black and white are treated, we should question what is underlying the disparity. Clearly, we are far more willing to allow government officials to judge the parenting of poor and minority parents. We have allowed, indeed encouraged, government officials to be judgmental of certain--but only certain--parents. With respect to these disadvantaged groups, rather than limiting intrusion into family life to the relatively rare extreme cases of parental behavior that are truly beyond the pale, we have invited the government to engage in an endless game of "What is wrong with that mother?" As any mother knows, this is a game no mother can win. (p. 382)

And this:

Even when mistakes are caught and unnecessary separations ended, those children can never again have what we like to believe is the birthright of all children: a feeling of security that their parents will always be there for them, that their parents have some power to control an otherwise scary world. We take that away when we act as though parents are so great a threat to their children that it should be easy for government workers to come between them. (p. 385)

It's very much worth a read.

You Can Tell I'm Feeling Better When I Sing

When I've been through a bad patch, it's always a sign of recovery when I catch myself singing as I go about my work. I don't notice when I stop singing, but I always notice when I start again. Some songs I've caught myself singing in the last few days:

Queen Anne's Lace, Del McCoury Band ("She could never place me in her mind, to me the years have not been kind. She'd never see the boy she knew in the man I've grown to be. From her station and her place, she'd never recognize my face; I have fallen like a windblown leaf from her memory. For she's traded all her pain for bright lights and chilled champagne, and I'm sure her new-found friends all think they know just where she's been. Yes, they think they know her well; Oh, the stories I could tell! She's as fine as Queen Anne's Lace, but I knew her when." Give it a listen!)

All This Beauty, The Weepies

The Weakness in Me, Joan Armatrading

Turn It On, Turn It Up, Turn Me Loose, Dwight Yoakam

142 Stratfield, from The Sacred Harp, 1991 ed (just the alto part!)

What We Look For, and What We Get

Kirk Cowell over at A Soul in Training is looking for a new church to attend, and while he is explicitly Christian in a way I'm not, and most Quakers I know aren't (even the Christocentric ones, I think), his thinking about what he and his family need from a church resonates with me. I've been musing off and on in recent months about how people come to Quakerism, and what they look for once they're there.

I know some people in my meeting come and stay because they find support and recognition for their political activism, a community that sees that work as important and spirit-led. Some come, I think, because we're a group of nice, welcoming people. Although some people in our meeting have known each other for twenty years or more, we're not insular. I think we do a pretty good job of making newcomers feel welcome but not overwhelmed. We can be accepting in good ways--one single mom who started attending a few years ago told me she appreciated the lack of judgment about her status as a single mom and about the way she dressed, after spending some time at a church where she felt scrutinized.

Some of us come to Quakerism because we're not comfortable with liturgical worship, or because we've been hurt by the Christian churches of our upbringing. This was my path; I wasn't raised in a church, but as a young radical lesbian feminist with vague spiritual yearnings, I couldn't see myself listening to a sermon about God the Father or singing hymns about Jesus. I tried joining some of the local lesbians in their pagan celebrations, but it didn't seem to me that anybody there really believed in what they were doing (I could have been wrong about this). And I wasn't comfortable with the Native American Lite spirituality of many white lesbians. So I tried the local Quaker meeting, and liked it well enough to stay.

The thing is, we come there for all kinds of different reasons. This can create tensions--as at a recent Meeting for Business I've talked about before, in which I had been seriously thinking, "If we approve this wording about what it means to be a Quaker, I'm going home and writing my letter withdrawing my membership," only a few minutes before a very beloved Friend said something like, "When we do this kind of word-smithing, I think we're getting awfully close to defining a creed, and I have to tell you if we start spending very much time on this kind of thing, I'm out of here." Despite the distress I was feeling, I couldn't help grinning inwardly and thinking of Mr. Bennett telling Elizabeth, "An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do." I think people in the meeting that day would be aghast to think they'd come to the brink of losing one or the other of us.

But I think overall we--my meeting, at least--do a pretty good job of being together in all our unlikely unity. I have a mystical relationship with a personal God I know experimentally, and Paul is an avowed atheist, but not only does the meeting want (and need?) both of us there, but Paul and I really care for and about each other. It seems to me that we bump up against our differences as we go about our Quakering--half the meeting loves so-and-so's vocal ministry, and the other half wishes he'd shut up already; one person needs to name God and another is pained to hear the word--but when we take time, in retreats or in business meeting, to listen to each other, we do it well, and it unites us.

What was my point?

Oh, I was going to say that we come to Quakerism for a reason. We're looking for a place where we will be comfortable and accepted, or where some of our questions can be answered. Does anybody walk through the door hoping to have all her most treasured beliefs challenged, to be transformed by faith, to be converted? Somehow I doubt it. And yet, to me, that's the best part of being a person of faith (also the scariest): the completely unexpected things that can happen to you when you let yourself be open. I joke that I am a person of faith today because when people told me that Quaker worship was a bunch of people sitting around waiting on God, I naively believed them, and after I waited long enough, God started showing up. And the thing is, once God shows up, crazy unexpected things start happening. Your whole like can change.

The balance seems tricky to me: we don't want to frighten people off, but if we think our purpose is to make them comfortable, we're never going to do God's work or help them find their piece of it. And yet, if we're honest with people, we would have to tell them that they're taking big risks by trying to listen to God, even if they don't call what they're listening for by that name. Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club and Lit, converted to Catholicism right in the middle of the pedophile priest scandal. She totally gets why people think she's a complete moron, and yet her conversion felt inevitable to her, and it was central to helping her become sober--conversion saved her life. But it also wrecked her life. Does anybody come to meeting for worship hoping to have their life wrecked? Should we warn them?

I went looking for a Flannery O'Connor quote I remember from 20 years ago, something about most people coming to church by means the church does not allow, and I couldn't find it. I found this one, though: "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."

I preached in worship on Sunday (I just can't say "offered vocal ministry" right now, sorry) on the subject of conversion. At least, I think that's what I was trying to talk about, with God's help. I was hoping, I think, to encourage people to be open to the way their faith and their practice can change them, though I also ended up talking about why people resist that. Why I do, even after having been through it before. It's because your faith and your practice can change you in ways that seem intolerable from where you're sitting now.

When I first came to Quaker meeting, I came to "Quaker meeting." It was years before I could say "worship," or anything else that sounded religious. Now I have an affinity for the religious aspect of our society (I am the one who, if I didn't rein myself in, would be prissily correcting people who talk about "The Society of Friends" instead of The Religious Society of Friends) and even for religious language from outside our tradition: convicted, preach, grace, mitzvah. And yet, having gotten comfortable here, I don't really want to be changed any more. It's not that I have thrown down all the walls and am ready to follow God wherever God leads; it's more like I moved the walls. This far, and no farther.

I talk about me here, and I talked about me some in worship on Sunday, not only because I like to talk about me but because I want people to know that when I invite them to be open not only to the comfort that Spirit and spiritual community provide but also to the ways that Spirit and their spiritual community can change them, push them in uncomfortable ways, I am not speaking as someone who has solved this problem for herself. It's more like I'm looking for company in a prickly and frightening place.

I am woefully ignorant about the Bible (I recently asked my friend Julie, a Lutheran pastor, to clarify for me: Peter and Simon Peter: one person, or two? Julie is very patient). But in the few bits I do know, it seems like Jesus is always asking people to give up all they have to follow him. And nobody can blame the ones who answer, "You have got to be kidding me," and go back to their vineyards and mansions and piles of gold coins. And even the ones who say yes sometimes get what seem like paltry returns. There are a couple of people in my meeting who can speak eloquently on the subject of following a leading right into a brick wall at 60 miles an hour.

Hmm, I don't think Ministry & Outreach is going to be asking me to write the new outreach pamphlet anytime soon. All this talk about life-wrecking. But there you have it. You come into a silent room for a little peace and quiet, with maybe some coffee after with nice people who seem to like you. And then a bomb goes off.

The ranty part of the Hierarchy of Harm post

That last post was two-faced: loving and gentle in the top half, angry in the bottom half. I decided to split it into two; I really want people to hear the angry part, but I don't want it to overwhelm the loving part.

A few things I wish everybody would get:

1. Just because it's "natural" doesn't mean it's not a trigger.

Let me repeat that: JUST BECAUSE IT'S "NATURAL" DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT A TRIGGER.

To emphasize this, I will tell you that I have been made ill by herbal teas ordered by people sitting at my table. Also, if you think for a minute you will be able to come up with a list of a hundred natural things that can be harmful to some people, from pollen to snake venom. So please, please, please, stop telling us folks when we ask you not to use something that's making us ill that it is impossible because it's "natural." When you say, "It's really the chemicals that people react to, not the scent," you may be right about some people, but you are wrong about a whole bunch of other people including me. It's possible I'm going to stab the next person who says this to me, so you'll want to be very careful about it from now on.

2. This goes for essential oils, too.

3. I am not the only person who is sensitive to scents and chemicals.

I really appreciate it when you "try to remember" not to put perfume on when we're meeting for lunch. But all those days when we are not meeting for lunch, and you wear perfume, you may be making other people ill, giving them headaches, or triggering their asthma. When people treat this as an issue that they only need to think about because of that one friend of theirs, it puts every sensitive person in the position of having to advocate for herself all the time, and this is stressful and exhausting. I get tired of having to ask, everywhere I go, for people to make "special" accommodations for me, or of telling someone they've made me ill after I'm already ill, which feels really crappy to both of us. [And those times you forget to try to remember, and wear the perfume? They break my heart.]

If you stop thinking of this as an issue of mine, as something that you only need to think about when you know you're going to see me, but instead as something that you do for the well-being of all kinds of people you don't know who might be in that stuffy conference room with you, or in line behind you at the grocery store, or on the bus, if you start to think of it as something you do for the sake of accessibility, you won't have to "try to remember" not to put perfume on to have lunch with me, because you won't be wearing it anyway.

I'm not special. I'm unlucky in this way, but I'm so far from being the only one that it's not funny. This is not an issue about me. It's an issue about accessibility and harm reduction. Please consider taking a step down the Hierarchy of Harm. I will thank you, and the unknown person who does not have to go to bed for two days after you get in the elevator with him thanks you, too.

[Also, I say this with all love: if you find yourself wanting to post a comment that is a defense of your choice to use perfume or other scented products, please squash that impulse. I don't need to hear it again. That's your choice, you don't need to justify it to me, and I'm not going to give you my blessing. "But I just don't feel dressed until I've put on my perfume," is another thing that's getting awfully close to a justifiable stabbing offense, so tread lightly. I know this is hard; I've lived with it a long time. You have my sympathy if you just don't get it, or don't want to be told you have to change one more behavior, or think me and people like me are just entitled whiners, or want me to forgive you for refilling the fragrance-free soap bottle in your bathroom with Dial, as one of my best friends recently did. Lots of very good people have been, or are, in that same spot. But right now in my life, beyond writing this and other things about the issue, I can't be the one to help you with that. Because I realized as I was writing this that I'm carrying a lot of anger and pain about this right now.]

For People Who Want to Be Scent-Sensitive: Su's Hierarchy of Harm

People are becoming more aware of how scented products and chemicals can impact accessibility, for people with asthma, those who get migraines, and folks like me who react to the scents themselves. But it can be hard to know what's hurtful and what's not, and some well-intentioned people trying really hard bump up against the problem that the limited array of fragrance-free products may not meet their needs, so that it is a gleeful discovery to find a FF hair gel that doesn't make your hair look and feel like you styled it with Elmer's Glue. As a scent-sensitive person, I appreciate people's efforts and don't want them to give up because they can't be perfect, so today in the shower I came up with Su's Hierarchy of Harm: a list of scented things from worst to best, which I offer with the idea that the farther you can move down this list, the more helpful you will be to folks like me.

Caveat: this is my list. Some people are more or less sensitive than I am, or sensitive to different things. But I think the stuff at the top of my list does most harm to most people who have sensitivities or for whom scents are triggers, so this should be more broadly helpful, I hope.

So, from worst to best:

1. Anything whose only purpose is to add fragrance to a person or environment.

Perfume, essential oils, scented candles, incense, plug-in air fresheners, hanging air fresheners in cars, and oh god patchouli. Patchouli is far and away the worst for me, with incense a close second. Patchouli is about the only thing that can require me to leave an open-air event (homeschool park day, for instance) if someone shows up wearing it. If people would stop adding fragrance to the environment just to add fragrance to the environment, about 80% of the exposures that make me ill or exclude me from events would disappear.

2 (tie). Scented grooming products used in communal spaces or in my presence.

Most scented grooming products, like shampoo, conditioner, soap, and deodorant, don't trigger me unless they're freshly applied, I'm in the bathroom where they are or have recently been applied, or we're sleeping together. (Reminder: this is me. I am not everybody.) Usually I am not bothered by anyone's shampoo if their hair is dry. These scents linger in poorly-vented bathrooms, so if we're sharing a communal bathroom at the Gathering, say, I need you to not use this stuff in the shower even if I'm not in there right now (so please don't call out, "Is anybody in here sensitive to scents? No? Then I'm going to go ahead and use this body wash.").

2 (tie). Scented hand lotion.

I don't know if scented hand lotion is really stinkier than all the other stuff people use, or if it's just that this is the product women are likely to whip out of their purse and apply any old time--at the table in a restaurant, in a meeting, in the car--but scented hand lotion accounts for a lot of my worst exposures. If you could swap out a nice little tube of Aveeno or Eucerin FF lotion for whatever's in your bag right now, it would make a big difference in my life.

4. Fabric softener, especially the long-lasting sheets.

Even if you use scented detergent, that probably won't cause me any problems unless we're snuggling or I'm trying to sleep in a bed at your house. But some of the strongly-scented, long-lasting dryer sheets (at least, that's what I think is causing this) are so toxic I can't have you in my house, and may have to leave a public event, if you're using them.

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What's above this line are the things that, if people would just stop using added scents, switch to unscented hand lotion and unscented fabric softener, my world would be a lot friendlier. If you want to work on this issue, making those changes would get you much of the way without, I think, being too onerous.

You can go farther than this if you like, of course. There are a lot of unscented products (but you should know that "unscented" products sometimes have "masking" scents added, so they are not fragrance-free and can be triggers) and more and more FF products all the time. You might consider at least trying laundry soap, shampoo, soap, lotion, and cleaning products (edited to add: and cat litter!); they may not work as well as their smelly brethren, but they might work well enough for you. And if they don't, at least you're making an informed decision to keep using that hair goop that is the only thing that tames your frizz. And maybe that hair goop ends up being the only scented product you still use. This is a harm-reduction model, so any fragrance you can cut out adds to the communal good.

(Note: there was a ranty lower half of this post. I moved it to its own post here so it wouldn't drown out the more loving voice I want people to be able to hear in this part.)

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.