[Positive Adoption Language]

Words matter! Please mind yours.

http://networkedblogs.com/oHTnz

Text appears below in case the link goes bad.

Positive Adoption Language:

Words are very powerful. Positive adoption language aims to end the negative stereotypes and misconceptions regarding adoption, while educating others that all families look different and form in different ways. Here are some keys to positive adoption language.

1. The adoptive parents are the “real” parents. The real parents are the grown-ups who will take care of the child every day and for the rest of their lives. When referring to who gave birth to the child, simply say birth parent or birth woman. A biological father is not referred to as the real father, but the biological one.

2. We often hear biological parents of children referred to as the “natural” parents. This negatively implies that there is something unnatural about being an adoptive parent. Biological parents should simply be referred to as biological parents.

3. Adoptive families do not refer to their own children as an adopted child, a natural child, or my own child (meaning biological or by birth). All children in families are the parent’s own children.

4. Adoption is an event that happened in a child’s life when the child joined his or her family. Using positive adoption language, notice use of verb tense. The child “was” adopted indicates that the event is past tense and already happened. To say that a child “is” adopted implies the process is still ongoing. This is not true. We would simply say, “George was adopted.”

5. When speaking about adoption, it is important to note that birth parents make an adoption plan to place the child in a home to be cared for and raised. The child who was adopted was not “given away” or “unwanted.” The child should know he or she is loved and an adoption plan was created for them to live in a forever family.

6. Children born to unmarried parents are simply referred to as that. Using positive adoption language, the child is would never be referred to as “illegitimate.” Every human being is a true miracle and has a legitimate place on the Earth.

7. Children who were adopted and later seek out their biological parents should not be referred to as “trying to track down their real parents.” The child is “searching” for biological parents. If they meet, it is not a “reunion,” but instead referred to as “making contact.”

8. A child adopted from another country is not a “foreign” child. The word foreign implies that it does not belong. Instead, the child is from abroad.

9. Using positive adoption language, we would never refer to a child as “adopted,” just as we would never say an “IVF” baby, a failed contraception baby, or a c-section baby.

10. Adoption is a private matter between a child and his or her family. All families form in different ways, are all equally beautiful, and should be respected as such.

For more information, please visit www.adoptivefamilies.com.

By Rachel Wallace Reid, Certified Montessori Teacher and Parent Educator

All content copyright http://www.ParentingTree.org

© ParentingTree.org 2011

[For our Jewish friends]

A remarkable story of one congregation's thoughtful focus on infertility during their Rosh Hashanah celebration: click here

[For our Jewish friends]

Just wanted to wish all our Jewish friends and families a joyous Rosh Hashanah!

(And for all those among us who are not familiar with this holiday: learn more here!)

To really celebrate in style, try making this Rosh Hashanah Honey Cake!

[Speaking of "real parents"]

Get yourself some cookies and milk, and settle into a wingback chair for this grownup bedtime story...

THE VELVETEEN PARENT

Kathryn B. Creedy

As appeared in the Washington Post for Mother's Day, 1998

"Now this is real," I thought as I flexed my hand, stiffened by sewing on the patches to my daughter's Brownie sash.

My mind had gone back to the encounter I'd had on the train that morning when my seat mate noticed I was reading Adoptive Families magazine. She had all the usual questions of someone unfamiliar with adoption. Where were my two daughters from? How old were they when they arrived? How old are they now?

Then the conversation took another typical turn.

"I don't know how anyone can give up a child," she said. "Do you know why their real mothers gave them up?"

I've always met that question with a lighthearted response. "I feel pretty real," I said, leaving the next move to her. Such queries, for me, provide an opportunity to educate people on a very misunderstood subject. Usually, when faced with this question, I try to discuss what it means to be a parent -- not adoptive parent or a stepparent, but what it means to parent a child. As families have changed in the last few decades, society itself is struggling with that question.

"I mean the birth mothers," she said. "Why would they give them up?"

decided to answer her question by educating her on the etiquette of adoption, using language more accurate than what she had used.

"I'm so glad they made adoption plans," I said. "It was the answer to all my dreams. All I know is their birth mothers were very great women and I thank God for them everyday." I went on to explain that today, birth parents do not "give up" their children, they make plans and carefully choose who will parent their children. I also explained that the girls' adoption stories were theirs to share, not mine. I also explained that if the girls were with us, I'm sure they would share them because we are all very proud of our family history.

I've been a mother since 1991 when I brought Alexis home from Romania at the age of 14 months. Like many women in this decade, I became a mother on my own. At 39, with no marriage on the horizon and my career in place, I realized there is nothing as strong as the continuity of the generations. I knew I wanted children. But unlike many "Murphy Browns," I wanted parenthood without pregnancy.

Adoption was, by far, my first choice for many reasons; the most important of which was the fact that pregnancy did not look fun. Delivery looked even less fun. Second, I had no special investment in my genetics or in the pregnancy experience. I knew that neither provided any guarantees because there are none in life or with children. I knew many parents who said that adoption considerably improved the gene pool and did, in fact, bring them the children they held in their dreams. I now know that to be true.

I also knew how deeply I could love a child when I met my nephew, Matthew, at two weeks old. He opened a door for me and showed me what I was missing. I also knew any child I adopted would be my own regardless of how she joined the family. Alexis's sister joined us in 1993 when Brooks arrived at the age of five months. Three years younger, Brooks came from the Bolivian plains and had the golden glow and almond eyes of the descendants of the Inca.

The feeling I always had was of a fairy tale coming true. I was amazed that I was able to have two such wonderful little girls. I was amazed that if I had called central casting and asked for the perfect child, Alexis would have come marching through the door ready to party. I was amazed at the differences in Brooks, my shy, little one who curls herself into my lap whenever she has the chance.

I was amazed at their beauty in both body and soul. And I was especially amazed when I hovered over them each night whispering our good night ritual and feeling them pull me down for a big hug. To this day, I always walk away with wonderment that dreams can really come true and that I was so very, very blessed. Do people who birth their children have this much appreciation and thankfulness of the gift they've been given? Can their more traditional path to parenthood make them take having children for granted? Can they possibly love their children as much as I love mine?

Others have described real to me in terms of chores as if toiling over homework, diapers, sick children and soccer games somehow grants us an entitlement to be called Mom or Dad. All that, like the Brownie patches and birthday parties and Chuck E. Cheese's, represent our patches in this troop called parenthood, to be sure.

But what few realize is that our paths to parenthood are not that different than our more traditional counterparts. While they grew a life within them, we grew a mountain of paperwork and researched the way we would build our families. We, too, went through our own medical procedures but also had extensive home studies. We rearranged our houses in middle-of-the-night nesting rituals. Our emotions rose and fell wildly as we waited; waited the long months for our assignments and then more months before a precious picture or shaky video turned into someone who could fill our aching, empty arms and hug us back.

Even so, it is not persevering through the similar stages of pregnancy or adoption that make us real. There is much more to it than that.

Real is a tiny hand in mine as we cross the street. Real is the whisper of breathing as Brooks naps in my arms. Real is as light as a baby's touch. Real is lying in bed reading stories with small bodies on either side interrupting with so many questions you think the story will never end.

It's planting flowers and jumping in puddles. It's catching a running youngster as she jumps into your arms when you pick her up in the evening. It's mastering roller blading and ice skating. It's listening to kids pound down the stairs on Christmas morning, their feety pajamas swishing along the bare floor toward their prizes.

Real is lifting a crying child into your arms and nursing a bloody knee. It's secretly watching a two-year-old sing lullabies as she lovingly lines up her baby dolls and covers them for a nap. It's passing on the family traditions as your child takes your place at your father's side to become the official Thanksgiving turkey taster, her small hand reaching up to remind him she's ready for her job. And real is letting go of the bicycle and little hands at the classroom door.

Real is, quite simply, the thrills all parents get from just being a parent and loving their children.

Finally, around midnight, the once-bare Brownie sash was festooned with patches: the Troop 1351 patch, the theatre, dancing and sleepover patches. As I turned it over and pictured it on Alexis, it didn't surprise me to discover that my rare and feeble attempt at sewing had resulted in all the patches being affixed to the back of the sash.

"Typical," I thought, shaking my head. "Well, it will just have to do."

As I readied myself for best, my thoughts turned to my favorite passage from The Velveteen Rabbit.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day....

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

Real is also when you get lucky enough to have a child to love.

And, yes, it's also taking all the patches off and sewing them back on the right way.

[Financing An Adoption]

Some more helpful information from our friend Patricia Irwin Johnston:

THE FINANCIAL IMPACT OF ADOPTING

Patricia Irwin Johnston

For the infertile, family building is expensive business! After several years of supplementing patchy health insurance coverage for medical treatments and then exploring options and finding loans or working extra hours needed to finance adoption, many adopters have not given much thought to the financial realities of parenting.

For those unprepared, money matters in raising a child contributes to the stress of adjusting to a new family configuration.

In the fall of 1995 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Service issued a report predicting that in his first year alone a first child’s parents’ costs for housing, food, transportation, clothing, health care, child care and education, and miscellaneous (but excluding actual arrival costs–by birth or by adoption) would total $5100 for families with annual incomes under $32,800, $7070 for families with incomes between $32,800 and $55,500 and $10,510 for families with incomes over $55,500. Birthing him (but not including the costs of infertility treatments) might add from $4700 to $7800 to first year costs, and adoption costs might range from $2,000 to $20,000. Over eighteen years, the costs of raising that single child born in 1994 will range from $100,290 to $198,060. With college thrown in, plan to expend over $100,000 more. And remember, these are 1994 and 1995 estimates. Additional children don’t double the costs, but additions to the family certainly don’t slide in without financial impact.

While awaiting your child’s arrival, plan to spend time focusing on the family finances. Consider this “nesting behavior!” The following issues need advance-of-arrival attention:

* A will. Many single people and childless couples have not drafted a will, but the arrival of a child complicates inheritance issues and necessitates planning for guardianship should parents die. Your adoption attorney may be able to help you draft a will or refer you to another attorney aware of potential adoption-related complications–and there are some in some states and provinces.

* Insurance. Contact your health insurance provider far in advance of Baby’s arrival in order to make the transition smoother. Only the state of Arizona decrees that adopting parents’ insurance must cover a birthmother’s prenatal and birth expenses, and even that law islimited to those employers who are not self-insured and whose insurers are based in the state. Federal law, however, doesmandate the coverage of your adopted child under the same conditions as if he had been born to you, however claims staff areoften poorly informed about this. You will find it less stressful to anticipate their confusion and educate them in advance of Baby’s arrival.Singles, while aware of a need for disability coverage, often have seen no prior need for life insurances. Childless, two income couples may have felt that disability and life insurance were unimportant. But parents need to plan for their family’s financial well-being should they become disabled or die, leaving diminished family income and/or urgent child care, health assistance, and homemaking needs over a child’s growing up years.

* Housing. While stories of babies cradled in bureau drawers are the heart of family legends, babies quickly need space and “stuff.” Before Baby arrives give thought and begin to plan for your family’s future housing needs–living space, play space, safety, schooling, etc. A downtown condo may not work as well for a family with a toddler as it did for dual-career couples. Your transethnically adopted child must grow up in a neighborhood and school system where he will feel included and respected. Moving with a baby is much harder than moving only adults, and, if your child will have spent any time before arriving with you in interim care or in an orphanage setting, his need for consistency demands that you impose no unnecessary future moves upon him in his first year. Before Baby arrives, adopters should consider whether making a move will be necessary within the first two years of his arrival.

* Transportation. Babies need car seats; car seats need their own seatbelts. Either parent must be able to safely transport Baby at a moment’s notice. That two-seater sports car may not be appropriate family transportation once Baby arrives, and two door cars can be particularly inconvenient when struggling to strap a little one safely inside.

* Employers and income. While you wait, be sure to let your employers know that you are expecting. Explore issues such as available leave time, availability of a dependent care account (which lets you use pretax dollars to pay child care expenses), how to adjust your paycheck to reflect appropriate deductions. Does the employer provide for parenting leave which is not part of the medical benefits plan? (Federal law mandates family leave for employees of firms of over 50 employees.) If so, the leave must be available to parents by adoption as well as to parents by birth. If parenting leaves are not possible and another form of leave cannot be arranged, will you be able to take accumulated vacation time on short notice? Are there adoption reimbursement benefits? Increasingly, large corporations are adding this type of benefit, which is relatively inexpensive but public-relations-positive.

* Setting up short and long term expense funds. In the short term new babies are so expensive that it makes sense to change the family budget during the year before your baby’s arrival to create an early-expenses savings fund to cover unanticipated medical and adoption expenses, extended parental leave or job changes, etc. Over the long term you would be wise to plan from the beginning of your child’s life with you to save small amounts steadily in anticipation of his post-high school educational needs. Can one parent stay home or work part time? Two parent families should explore the possibility of one being able to leave full time employment to become a full time parent. Not only is it in any child’s best psychological and physical interests to spend his first year or more in the full time care of his parent rather than by even the very best of nannies or child care providers, but for some families financial realities will determine that when expenses of a child (including his food and clothing and medical expenses as well as hundreds, and often thousands, of dollars in day care) are added to the clothing, food and transportation costs already there, one parent’s job actually costs the family money rather than adding to its income. Single adopters have fewer options, but some have found ways to accumulate extended vacation or leave time in advance, to work from home, or to budget for part time employment. How to manage loss of income? Save carefully during the year or two before your child arrives. Also explore moving to smaller or less prestigious quarters for a while, driving less expensive cars, and reducing recreation and entertainment expenses.

* Day care. If you will be returning to work shortly after your child’s arrival, think about child care long before baby arrives. Choosing in-home care providers is a complicated process. Many infant care centers and family day care providers have long waiting lists. While it may be impossible for you to predict exactly when your child is “due,” some centers will be flexible about trying to provide a space for you if they know about your pending adoption.

* Unanticipated Adoption Expenses. Some adoption-related expenses are difficult to predict accurately. A newborn’s illness or a birthmother’s complications may increase birth-related expenses. Foster care expenses may rise if birthparents need more time to be certain. Counseling sessions for your child’s birth parents are important and can’t be predicted in advance. The need to stay longer than anticipated in order to deal with local bureaucracies may increase travel expenses in international adoptions. Prospective parents may find that they money they have spent in anticipation of a specific adoption may be lost when a birthparent has a change of heart. While in limited instances “adoption insurance” can be purchased to help with some of these unforeseen problems, and home equity or credit card loans may provide a cushion, while you wait, you would be wise to sock away into a special account as much money as you can manage to save. Believe me, if you don’t use it on the adoption, you’ll find many opportunities to use such savings to your child’s benefit as he grows!

Additional resources:

How To Make Adoption an Affordable Option

Adoption Benefits ToolKits for Employers & Employees

[Adopting After Infertility]

Abrazo's friend, Patricia Irwin Johnston, is retiring and has graciously given her consent for our use and distribution of this very important article, which happens to be the first chapter of one of her books... we thank her for her many years of faithful service to the infertility and adoption communities, and encourage you to read this in its entirety!

Beware the Dragon!

Chapter 1 from Adopting: Sound Choices, Strong Families

By Patricia Irwin Johnston, MS

Once upon a time there lived a princess so beautiful both inside and out that every man in her parents’ realm longed to marry her. After many months of grueling challenges, a noble, kind, and handsome prince won her hand, and they were married. As they left the palace of her parents to make their own way in the world, the young people were given the blessings of the monarchs, who presented them with a carefully drawn map. On it were plotted the roads and the rivers, the mountains and the mansions, the forests and the fields, the towns and the trading posts of their known world. It was a beautiful map, complete in every way…for as far as it went, that is. All around the edge of the map, beyond the blue of the wide sea and the purple of the impenetrable mountains, were printed warnings in bold red ink, “DANGER! Here there be dragons!”

Most of us spent many childhood days curled in warm laps listening as a parent read even more sexist versions of stories much like this one. Surrounding us was the firm shape of a parent who kept us safe and secure. The fairy tales gave way to more realistic stories, but the themes remained substantially the same: for those who are good, noble and true, for those who try their best, the dangerous unknown is only a fairy tale. Those who try hard will succeed.

And so, like the fairy tale princes and princesses of our childhoods, our expectations about love and family building were idealistic and simplistic. Two people fall in love. They commit to one another. They establish a firm foundation on which to build a secure home. They have children.

In biology class, in family living, in health and sex education there were drawings and diagrams, and warnings about the dangers of premarital sex. These classes offered several messages for Gen Xers and Millennials who are reading this, my third infertility/adoption decision-making book. The first message was about the demons of sexually transmitted diseases, and in particular AIDS. The second was the one familiar to earlier generations: our bodies are time bombs set to go off. If we engage in sex, we will get pregnant! Beware of that dragon, for sure!

Social studies sent a third message to those of us who did not find a partner with whom to parent as well as to those of us who were not heterosexual. It was that growing tolerance in society would soon open family building opportunities for us as well.

Ah, and then there was the comforting final message: People of the second and third birth control generations, you have as long as you want to become parents! Go ahead and delay marriage and parenthood. Get all of your financial, educational and career ducks in a row; take time finding just the right partner before parenting. There’s always time.

You listened, and here you are—young-marrieds or married-agains, without a partner or with a same gender partner—facing a dragon guarding the entrance to parenthood.

When this dragon rears its head, many tend first to play ostrich, burying their heads in the sand and pretending not to see. For months and even years we may deny the possibility of a problem. We just haven’t met the right person, we tell ourselves. Or, when we have and we are trying to conceive it’s, well, We’re under so much stress at work. Our timing is off. The travel schedule has gotten in the way. Looking back now and remembering your own denial, you may wonder why it took so long for you to realize that you needed help, why you wasted so much time with the wrong partner, the wrong doctor, why you refused to acknowledge that there was a problem brewing here.

The answer is not so difficult. You were afraid. Somewhere in the back of your mind you sensed that a dragon was lurking there. You hoped to avoid the crisis of facing the dragon by ignoring it.

The Chinese, an ancient and philosophically sophisticated culture, write not with a sound-based alphabet, but with complex word pictures. Interestingly, in Chinese, the written expression of the concept of crisis is said to be drawn by putting together the characters for two other words: danger and opportunity.

Because we sense danger in the face of any crisis, we often put off facing its reality. And so it was with singles, with gay couples, with fertility impaired heterosexual couples. To acknowledge a barrier to becoming a parent was to face imminent danger. Though at first we might not have been able to clearly identify precisely what it was that we feared, our subconscious sensed the possibility of loss or disappointment ahead and insulated us from pain through denial.

Do you remember that childhood friend who moved away when you were four? The special toy lost irretrievably on the plane to Grandma’s? The cat that ran away? The math test you failed? The first love who dumped you unceremoniously? The college which turned you down? Getting laid off from that great job? Every day we experience losses and disappointments. Some of them are painful, etching themselves on our memories, changing who we consider ourselves to be. Others pass by nearly unnoticed because we have become so accustomed to dealing with them–keys misplaced for a couple of frustrating hours, another lottery ticket with the wrong numbers, forgetting an appointment, missing your train. But every loss–the large and the small–is one of the lessons which contribute to the development of a unique and very personal pattern for how each of us copes with disappointment and loss, a pattern which becomes so familiar, so automatic, that one rarely even recognizes that it has begun and is going on again.

Do you recall, for instance, having found yourself in a situation like the following…

After having spent a day shopping, you arrive at home with your house key in your pocket and your arms loaded with packages only to hear the insistent ringing of your telephone on the other side of the door.

Almost since the invention of the telephone at the dawn of the 20th century, people who have one have had a terrible time allowing a phone to go unanswered, so as a typical person, you struggle with the packages you are juggling in order to fish out a key and then rush inside to answer the phone.

As you put the receiver to your ear, you hear yourself saying, “Hello? Hello?”… to a dial tone (denial). You’re surprised to hear that dial tone, and yet, after ten rings, you knew of course that enough time had passed between the last ring and your picking up the phone?

You begin a litany of “if onlys” (bargaining). …”If only I’d had my key out and ready”… “If only they’d let it ring one more time.”

Feeling frustrated and disappointed about the lost call, you begin to vent a little anger at somebody… “Doggone it! Why are people so impatient? They should have let it ring!” Or, perhaps, “Darn it, won’t I ever learn to keep my keys in my hand!”

You look at the packages strewn in your foyer and, subconsciously you begin a familiar process—your personal process—for coping with (accepting/resolving) a loss.

Remember, all of us have been experiencing losses since infancy. There was the babysitter who talked on the telephone despite your cries for a diaper change or a bottle. The goldfish from the fair died and Daddy helped bury it in the backyard. Your best friend moved clear across the country when his mom was transferred. That really cute girl said no when you asked her to the eighth grade dance. You failed an all important math test. Your favorite uncle died. A lover left.

There are many ways of coping with loss, and after years of experiencing losses large and small, each of us develops a personal pattern for doing so. Some people are more comfortable than others in accepting loss as normal and natural, as a part of their fate. They may shrug this lost phone call off with an “Oh well, if it is important, they’ll call back” and go about the business of putting away the groceries. Others feel more comfortable with a substitution. Such a person may pick up the phone and call a friend. “Hi, did you just call? No? Yeah, well, I missed a call just as I got in from shopping and I thought it might have been you? So what’re ya doin?”…

Still others cope with loss more aggressively by seeking to avoid future losses of a similar kind and assuming as much control as possible over every situation. If this is what you most commonly do, your reaction to an accumulation of lost phone calls may inspire you to explore the option of adding voice mail or caller ID to your phone service or send you out shopping for an answering machine.

Those whose family building is challenged by infertility or their marital status or their sexual orientation experience multiple losses, each with its own degree of significance. Taking the time right now to determine how it is that you (and your partner, if you have one) cope with loss is an important step toward deciding what family building alternative is right for you. But first you must acknowledge the series of losses built into your experience. Over many years of thinking about it, reading about it, talking with hundreds of couples about it, I have come to see six distinct areas of significant loss , many of which encompass several other related losses. The following sections address each of those areas.

Losses Accompanying Challenged Family Building

* Control over many aspects of life

* Individual genetic continuity, linking past and future

* The joint conception of a child with a beloved life partner

* The physical satisfactions of pregnancy and birth

* The emotional gratifications of pregnancy and birth

* The opportunity to parent

The Loss of Control

Perhaps most clearly and immediately felt by those who experience family building challenges is the loss of control over numerous aspects of their lives.

Today?s adults, who came to sexual maturity and selected partners after the birth control revolution precipitated by the wide availability of the birth control pill in the mid sixties, have always had the distinct expectation that they would be able to control their family planning. Unfortunately, because infertility was not discussed as they grew up, this expectation included not just the expectation that they would be able to avoid pregnancy when they so desired, but that they would be able to achieve pregnancy when they so desired. Losing control of a part of life which one’s peers take so completely for granted is devastating and, for many people, precipitates a humiliating blow to self esteem.

Treating infertility demands that couples give up even more control. Control of their sexual privacy and spontaneity, for example, is forfeited to a medical team which asks them to chart their intercourse, supply semen samples, appear within hours after intercourse for a post-coital test, etc. Control of their calendars is given over to treatment.

Couples often comment that with infertility they feel that they have lost control of every aspect of their lives. What type or size car to buy depends on whether or not it will be carrying children. Accepting a new job or a promotion can become dependent on how travel impacts the treatment program, whether or not the new company has excellent health care benefits which cover infertility treatments, as well as whether or not the new employee’s coverage for infertility treatment would be excluded because it was defined by the insurance company as a pre-existing condition. Continuing education may be put on hold when a woman expects that any day she will become pregnant, so that finishing a term might be difficult or impossible. Whether to buy a house in the suburbs with sidewalks for Big Wheels and excellent schools, or a condo in the city close to work and cultural events is controlled by infertility. Social calendars may be driven by the menstrual cycle. Even the most private of decisions–how much time to spend in a hot tub, how much coffee to drink, how many miles to run each week, whether to buy briefs or boxer shorts–can be controlled by the infertility experience.

Singles and gay couples, most already feeling the sting of discrimination, have often compensated for much of the rest of their feelings of being “out of control” by taking careful control of as many aspects of their lives as they can. They may have planned and lived out successful careers, own beautifully designed homes in carefully chosen communities, yet they know that the dragon which guards the door to family building is outside their control.

To many individuals for whom being in control is an important part of theirability to feel confident and competent, challenged family building represents a devastating loss, but this is not its only loss.

The Loss of Genetic Continuity

Potentially, challenged fertility means the loss of our individual genetic continuity–our expectation that we will continue the genes of our families in an unbroken blood line from some distant past into a promising future. For those raised in blood-is-thicker-than-water cultures, this loss is significant enough to be avoided at all costs. While some extended families are entirely comfortable with the idea of adopting in order to carry a family into the future, others believe strongly that the family blood line cannot be grafted onto. Why we feel this way is not as important as is the fact that we acknowledge that we do. When the potential for this loss is felt powerfully– sometimes re-enforced by repeated conceptions which end in miscarriage–alternatives such as donor insemination which allow a woman to use her own eggs and to be pregnant, or traditional surrogacy which provides a man with the opportunity to carry on his genetic material, or gestational surrogacy which allow both partners to use their own genetic material can sometimes be more attractive than traditional adoption. However, as we’ll discuss later, for individuals for whom loss of genetic continuity is central and powerful, pursuing family building alternatives which allow the other partner to retain genetic continuity at the loss of one’s own can be devastating to the relationship.

The Loss of a Jointly Conceived Child

Our earliest dreams about parenting included the expectation of our parenting a jointly conceived child. Gay and lesbian partners perhaps face this loss earlier than heterosexuals do. In choosing a life partner all of us do at least a little fantasizing about what our children might be like. Will he have her intellect and his sense of humor? Grandpa’s red hair and Aunt Wilma’s athletic prowess? Gosh, think of the medical expenses if she inherits both her mother’s crossed eye and her father’s terrible overbite! This child who represents the blending of both the best and the worst of our most intimate selves also represents for many a kind of ultimate bonding of partner to partner. In giving our genes to one another for blending, we offer our most vulnerable, intimate and valuable sense of ourselves—a gift that is perhaps the most precious we can offer. How more vulnerable can we be to another, how much more trusting, than to agree to give 23 of our unique chromosomes in exchange for 23 of our partner’s to make a new 46 chromosome human being? Losing that dream and so feeling forced to consider alternatives such as donor insemination, hiring a surrogate mother, adopting, etc. can be painful indeed for those for whom this expectation was particularly important.

Pregnancy and Birth: Lost Physical and Emotional Expectations

Another challenging loss to deal with is that of the physical satisfaction of successful pregnancy and birth experiences. Though many people see the loss of a pregnancy as belonging entirely to women, this is not so. True enough, the physical changes and challenges of pregnancy and birth are experienced by women alone, but producing a child, as any counselor of pregnant teens will verify, is the ultimate rite of passage for both men and women—the final mark of having reached adulthood. You’re grown up now, and your parents aren’t in charge anymore. Beyond that, the physical ability to impregnate a woman or to carry and birth a child represents the ultimate expression of maleness or femaleness—our bodies at work doing what they were built to do. For many people, losing such capacities challenges their feelings about their maturity or their sexuality or both about their competence as adult men and women. It is their own discomfort with, and fear of, this loss which generates from outsiders the tasteless humor which relates infertility to sexuality in comments such as, “Do you need a little help there? Happy to offer my services!” or “Let me show you how it’s done.” or “Hey, all Steve has to do is look at me and I’m pregnant–must be in the water!’

Some do succeed in becoming pregnant–sometimes over and over again–but these pregnancies result in repeated miscarriages and neo-natal deaths. Trying to block out the unhelpful platitudes from well-meaning others (“Perhaps it was God’s will.”…”Don’t worry, there will be another.”…”At least you know that you can get pregnant!”) can be a struggle like no other.

And there’s more. Over the last several decades, a substantial element of our society, fearful of the impact of massive changes in family structure (and there certainly have been some), has mystified the experience of birth to an exaggerated extent. In search of the perfect “bonding” experience, couples carefully choose specific kinds of childbirth preparation—they attend classes together, read books, practice breathing, and so on. They expect to experience a magical closeness in spousal relationships, an irreplaceable wonder in sharing the birth experience, an expected instant eye-to-eye bonding between parents and child (a kind of magical superglue without which many fear that families will disintegrate). Hospitals marketing to the expectations of these couples, compete with one another to provide birthing rooms with the perfect equipment (birthing beds, chairs, tanks), the perfect atmosphere (music, guests allowed, champagne afterwards), and the perfect preparation (Lamaze classes, classes for siblings-to-be).

This set of expectations about the emotional gratifications of a shared pregnancy, prepared childbirth, and breast-feeding experience, though far too often unrealistic, is widely held. To risk losing such an experience is much more significant to today’s would-be parents than it would have been to their parents and grandparents–whose mothers gave birth anesthetized in sterile operating rooms while fathers paced in waiting rooms outside, who often didn’t see and hold their children until hours after their births, who bottle fed formula to their infants, and who bonded with their kids!

The Loss of the Parenting Experience

Finally, to be permanently family-challenged threatens the opportunity to parent, which is a major developmental goal for most adults. The psychologist Eric Erickson identified a series of developmental milestones humans work toward throughout their life span. In adulthood, Erickson wrote, the major goals are regenerativity and parenting. To be infertile, single and partnerless, or homosexual on the surface threatens our ability to achieve that goal, so that for many, challenged family-building represents a devastating blow.

Erickson and others have clearly demonstrated that it is possible for individuals achieve this developmental goal and to satisfy the need for nurturing without becoming parents. Many adults find other ways of redirecting or rechanneling their need to nurture–through interaction with nieces and nephews and family friends; by choosing work which brings them in frequent contact with children; by volunteering as religious class teachers, scout leaders, or for a group such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters; by substituting pets for children; by becoming active in non-child centered volunteer work; by nurturing the earth through nature hobbies such as gardening, etc. This is not to imply that lists of possible redirections like these are seen as equivalent substitutions, or as realistic direct replacements for the lifelong experience of parenting a child jointly conceived and birthed with a much loved partner. While some adults can and do actively choose to meet their developmental needs to nurture without becoming parents, for those who have made the choice to become parents and have then been thwarted by family building challenges, the choice to redirect that energy is difficult.

For readers of this book – people who are considering adopting – reactions about this particular loss (parenting) are the most important of all. Adoption provides the opportunity to avoid this loss and this one alone. Singles and couples who adopt will become parents, but in doing so they will give up even more control to the process of adoption: they will forfeit their genetic continuity, they will lose the jointly conceived child of their dreams, and they will be deprived of the emotional and physical expectations of pregnancy.

It is these potential and realized losses which tore at your gut during those days or weeks or months when you tried to deny the challenges you faced. These losses were the danger lurking in the crisis, and they were difficult to face. Now you are asking yourself to examine adoption—one of the potential opportunities which is a part of the crisis. Facing your feelings about infertility’s losses can help you to decide if adoption is right for you.

So unless the loss of the opportunity to parent strikes you as the one loss you would most like to prevent–the one you would find most devastating–adoption may not be for you. The truth is that adoption is not a good choice for everybody!

Addressing the Crisis of Challenged Family Building

When I was a child we had a toy—a child-sized plastic figure with a clownish face filled with air and weighted on the bottom with beans or sand. Its purpose was to be punched, and to rise from the blow grinning, waiting to be punched again.

It has often seemed to me that as my husband and I experienced infertility we were like a pair of those punching bag toys placed on a conveyor belt moving through a system punctuated by swing arm gates. As we moved along that conveyor belt from doctor to lab to bed, to doctor to hospital to bed, to doctor to pharmacy to bed, to doctor to counselor to agency to attorney, and on and on, we found that the belt began to speed out of control (rather like the conveyor belt in the candy factory where Lucy and Ethel scrambled to fill boxes that rushed by).

Grinning madly (stiff upper lip, and all that) we were knocked askew by alternating swing arm gates—the doctor, the lab, the hospital, etc. and sent separately reeling to cope with new information, new alternatives. Occasionally in swinging upright again from a blow we would bump against each other and provide one another with a momentary steadiness. But each time we were hit again, we went our own separate ways—alone.

There are several ways that people commonly deal with crisis, but victimhood is the least helpful. Spending significant amounts of time allowing yourself to become the victim of the crisis, floundering in a sea of despair as you are overwhelmed by waves of decisions that must be made is often undergirded by a sense of damaged self esteem. Infertile heterosexual couples, gay or lesbian couples, partnerless adults may all harbor the fear that family building challenges are a punishment of some sort or a message that they wouldn’t be good parents anyway. Some fertility-impaired people react by believing that they are somehow less competent than they were before infertility was discovered. If their reproductive systems aren’t working, they somehow illogically reason, then maybe they shouldn’t trust their judgment, either. (Maybe Uncle Charlie was right; we’re just trying too hard. Perhaps Mom’s manicurist’s cousin’s doctor in Podunk is better than the reproductive endocrinologist at the medical center. Maybe my neighbor who thinks adoption is a sad substitute for real parenting because nobody could ever really love somebody else’s reject isn’t so far off base!)

Feeling neither confident nor competent, victims become unwilling and unable to make decisions. They begin to abdicate more and more control to others, losing their power. The partnerless may date desperately or not date at all, putting aside any thoughts that time is passing quickly. Infertile people may move robotically from treatment to treatment, never looking at alternatives such as adoption or collaborative reproduction. Caught up in the panic of the situation, such people tend to make decisions only when they must be made, struggling forward from crisis to crisis. Those who allow themselves to become victims drift into a childless future they do not want because they haven?t been able to make the decisions that might have helped them consider choices available to them. Victims will fall into a dropped-into-their-laps adoption because someone they saw as competent told them it was the next logical step, and, unprepared for the challenging differences in adoptive parenting, will struggle for years with a feeling that things aren’t quite right, that this didn’t work either.

I worry about victims, because when one operates by crisis management there is little opportunity for reflection. Victims stumble forward on that conveyor belt carried by a panicky momentum much like that we felt as out-of-control young runners about to skin our knees again. I worry because family-challenged people operating in such a mode tend to act out of desperation. With self-conscious laughter, they tell you that they would do anything to have a baby?even drink poison! Sadly, many really would. They sense that the surrogacy service or the adoption lawyer made it just a little too easy (and yet too expensive) for them to skip ahead of more “traditional” clients. They beg for one more cycle of a drug their doctor has decided isn’t working. They borrow money for yet another in a long string of unsuccessful IVF attempts. They risk it all on a not-quite-legal adoption. They juggle two or more potential adoptions or an adoption and a high risk pregnancy at the same time. Obsessively driven toward the goal of bringing a baby home to a waiting nursery, they have thought very little beyond arrival day.

I worry about these would-be parents, because by allowing themselves to become victims of the challenge to their family building dreams, by allowing themselves to avoid thinking about the ramifications of their crisis management style, they almost guarantee that they won’t effectively deal with their losses. And, that years later those losses will reappear as reopened wounds when new and different losses set a grief reaction in motion – for example, losses of jobs, divorce, death of a parent or close friend or spouse, their adopted child’s recognition of loss as a part of his adoption experience.

I worry because the self-absorption of people operating as victims won’t allow them to feel compassion for others–for birthparents, for people dealing with secondary infertility, for the confused and panicked parents of quads or quints conceived on fertility drugs or in IVF cycles, for couples dealing with an untimely pregnancy, for pregnant infertiles who can’t find a place to ‘fit in’ anymore. For one who has experienced reproductive loss or challenged family building to have lost compassion for those experiencing other types of family-related challenges is particularly ironic.

I worry because for victims there is no joy in living.

There comes a time to stop—to recognize that one has not been in charge and to step off the conveyor belt, regain balance, and look around for a better way. My hope is that the process for decision making offered in the next chapters of this book can become a tool to help couples and singles make that pause for reexamination happen, offering them practical ways to regain control of their lives again, helping them to look far enough beyond the danger represented by the dragon to see the opportunity lying just ahead.

Many significant beginnings and endings in our lives are marked by rituals that publicly mark the transition and invite the support–either in celebration or in mourning–of others. Weddings, funerals, christenings, baby showers, bar mitzvahs, graduations, going-away parties are examples of transitional rituals. Psychologists and sociologists are increasingly noting that transitions which are not accompanied by ritual–divorce, loss of a job, miscarriage, private changes of direction–are often harder to make, since they lack support.

Many family-challenged people are finding it important to create and participate in private or public rituals which acknowledge the progress of their lives. Infertility support groups across the county have put together periodically repeated mourning ceremonies for miscarried or unconceived children. Such ceremonies offer the opportunity for couples and their supportive family and friends to experience a release similar to that in a traditional funeral service.

Several years ago Bonnie and Lawrence Baron of San Diego wrote about their personally composed ceremony in which they formally ended treatment and moved on. Their ceremony was firmly rooted in their Judaic tradition and included elements of several ceremonies and prayers, as well as some nonreligious readings and music.

Mike and Jean Carter of North Carolina, authors of Sweet Grapes: How to Stop Being Infertile and Start Living Again (Perspectives Press, Inc., 1989, rev. 1998), note in their book and in their presentations the formal way in which they marked their choice to live a childfree lifestyle.

Wendy and Rob Williams of Ontario, Canada, created a poignant and very personal ceremony for saying goodbye to the child whose adoption was not completed because his birthmother changed her mind several weeks after placement.

In many ways the structure of the decision making format which will follow encourages the opportunity for using or developing rituals, whether formal or informal. You may wish to explore with your partner the idea of participating in appropriate transitional rituals yourselves as you mark your journey.

In “The Picnic,” one of the wonderful short stories in her collection The Miracle Seekers: An Anthology of Infertility/ Mary Martin Mason tells the story of Jill and Dan, frozen in time and unable to move beyond the miscarriage of Gerald, the baby they had waited for so long. In an awkward attempt to help, Dan takes Jill on a picnic along the raw Rhode Island shore. With her sketch pads and charcoal in hand, Jill makes her way to an ancient cemetery to do some rubbings. Dan finds her later, weeping over a one hundred year old tombstone that bears the names of a couple and their five sons–each of whom was named Josephus, each of whom died in infancy.

Here, Jill comes to see that what is preventing her from moving on is the fact that no one–not her mother-in-law, not her friends, not her husband–has allowed her to experience her grief openly, to mourn the loss of her son, to say goodbye in a formal way to the baby who was not to be. And so, together, Dan and Jill say goodbye to Gerald by burying a baby rattle which Jill has brought with them in the earth above the babies Josephus.

All significant endings and beginnings are indeed crises, fraught with the fear that is a part of facing the unknown. The Chinese concept of crisis consisting of both danger and opportunity is an important one for us to keep in mind as we do the hard work of making good decisions. Many years ago I clipped from a church bulletin a wonderful quote that speaks to this. It was attributed to Merle Shain.

“There are only two ways to approach life–as a victim or as a gallant fighter–and you must decide if you want to act or react… a lot of people forget that.”

[Preparing the Relatives]

From Abrazo's friend Patricia Irwin Johnson, who is retiring and shutting down her adoption website, comes this valuable information on what NOT to say when your relative is adopting... thanks to Pat for giving us permission to reprint this article here for our own use!

Five Hot Buttons Not to Push

By Patricia Irwin Johnston

The following article has been excerpted from the Perspectives Press book Adoption Is a Family Affair! What Relatives and Friends Must Know.

These are examples of amazingly insensitive comments heard recently by members of one Adoption Waiting Room Internet bulletin board. Names have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent. There are many people, who, before reading Adoption Is a Family Affair!, might not even have understood what was so bad about some of these comments, but you probably get it now. If you see yourself reflected or reported here, you may have some apologizing to do. If, on the other hand, you feel confident that you were never so insensitive, good for you! In that case, perhaps these examples will serve as an impetus for your helping to get the rest of your family circle better prepared for the addition adoption will bring to the family.

5. “What about the money?” (Didn’t your mother teach you it was bad manners to talk about money, politics and religion?)

* “From my mother-in-law when we first told her that we were going to adopt, ˜You know, you can get a Mexican baby for $250!’ “

* Friends of mine adopted, and shortly after adopting the husband was telling a client about it and the client asked, “Oh, well how much did she cost you?” No this was not a blundering idiot like most, but a social worker!

* Q: “Why would you spend so much money on adoption after spending so much money on infertility treatment?”

A: “Well, didn’t you just buy that nice $35,000 SUV? This is our family we are talking about. Priceless!”

* My brother-in-law told his kids that we were “going to Korea to buy a baby!”

* Someone asked me if adopting babies from China was like a black market! I had to explain how they take good care of the babies and rigorously screen who they will allow to adopt and that the fee is used to keep the orphanages running and take care of all the kids, including those who won’t be adopted. I sure don’t ever want my kid getting the idea that she was bought on the black market.

* An acquaintance who heard about our plans asked us “How much will your child cost?” (ARGHHHHHHHHHH) No further comment with this one. On the other hand, yes, my husband and I have had this question numerous times! Some people who have inquired are very sincere, as they too, are weighing the decision to continue infertility treatment, live childfree, or move to adoption. That is very understandable, and I respect that question from them.

4. “Adoption connections aren’t real connections anyway!” (Do you really want to say “You can do better than this”?)

* Are you sure you tried hard enough?” (to conceive)

* Q: “Does it bother you that they won’t be of your own?”

A: “My favorite comment to this one is what I read from the Adoption Waiting Room bulletin board earlier this summer: ‘I gave birth to them through my heart”‘…. that is the shorter version I use with this stupid question. It makes people think about how ignorant they were for asking in the first place.”

* I mentioned to my sister-in-law that I wanted to name my future adopted son Truman, nickname Tru. She said “You can’t call him Tru Kinglsey, because he is not a true Kingsley. He will not be related…umm, I mean by blood”. I was appalled and since then have refused to tell anyone the names I am considering for my future children.

* My husband adopted his first wife’s daughter at the age of 9 months (she is now 22) and adopted my son at the age of 3 (he is now 10)….much to our surprise, I am now 30 weeks pregnant. On New Years Day we went to husband’s mother’s house. His sister (whom he has never really liked and hadn’t seen in over a year) comes swooping in the door and hugs him and loudly exclaims, “I want to hug you before you get to become a real father.” My husband said very angrily, “I’ve been a real father twice now, but thanks.” He was so angry, and I was so angry, especially because both his son and his daughter heard her comment. I couldn’t believe how stupid and totally insensitive and wrong her comment was.

* Q: “What’s her mother’s name?”

A: “My name is Lisa.”

Q: “No, I mean her real mother’s name.”

A: “I’m her mother.”

Q: “NO, I mean her real mother.”

A: “What do you think I am? Polyester?”

And then, as if I must be some sort of an idiot, I said, “Ohhhh you mean her birthmother!”

Q: Then she said, “Well you knew what I meant all the time.”

A: “No I didn’t. I”m her real mother and I always will be. What do you think Sara will go through if she heard u say that I’m not her real mother and she is too young to understand?”

* From my brother who has a master’s and a PhD in theology when my mom told him over the phone that we were going to adopt: “Why don’t they just have their own kids?”

* “Too bad you have to adopt…your real kids would have been real cute.”

* Q: “What does her mom look like?”

A: “You tell me you are looking right at her!”

Q: The nerve of this woman She kept prying she said “Come on you know what I mean.”

A: I said “No ,I do not!”

* “She looks like she could be yours!”

* “Can they get her back?”

* “What are you going to do when he’s three or four and the birthparents want him back?”

* “Can you give him back if you find out he’s retarded or something?”

* An adult adoptee asked me, “If you and your husband get divorced, will you have to give him back?” I was so dumbfounded I didn’t respond how I really should have, which would have been to ask if her parents would have had to “give her back” if they had ever divorced.

3. “Adopted people are ‘flawed.’” (The Bad Seed myth, or is it Racism?)

* My reproductive endocrinologist said, “You might not want to adopt… you never know what you’re going to get.” As if you know with a biological baby!

* “Adopted kids are always so stupid!”

* I was talking to my sister, who by the way, is very well educated and is currently in a high-paying, high-profile job… working for an AA man. I was mentioning to her about our long wait for our child. She (once again) asked what my “criteria” was for our child… meaning, had we requested a newborn, toddler, what race..etc. I told her that all I asked for was that the child be under age 3. To which she said, with much surprise, “Even a black child?” “Yeeeeessss” I replied. “But you don’t know how to cook collard greens, or how to comb their hair!!… and Desiree (the daughter born to us) will KNOW that s/he is not her real sibling!!” she says, totally serious. Funny thing is, (and I also told her this) that I am hispanic (Colombian), yet I have NEVER cooked a Colombian meal for my daughter!

* “I never knew Adopted Children could be so cute”

* An old friend of the family said “I think if someone is stupid enough to get pregnant and doesn’t want the baby, she should turn around, walk the other way, and never look back.” I thought that was so cruel. As if he is so superior that he never has made a mistake, and as if a birthmother could ever forget her child. This experience taught me not to tell many people about our open adoption. It’s really no one’s business.

* A co-worker of my husband said “I wouldn’t adopt, you will never get a perfect child.” I was stunned when he told me. She has a toddler who I am sure isn’t “perfect” and I think anyone who expects any child to be “perfect” is setting that child up for a life of misery!! My husband told her we were hoping not to have a perfect child, because it wasn’t going to have perfect parents. GO husband!!

* When I told my friend (a woman who was aghast that there was another girl in her play group with the same name as her daughter-she wanted hers to be the only one with that name) that if I had a boy, I’d name him Noah she exclaimed “Yikes! Why would you name him something so unusual, he’s going to stand out enough as it is. Why not name him something normal, like Larry?”

* Q: “Why don’t you just try to get a healthy caucasian baby?”

A: “HELLO!!!!! We want a baby from another country. That is our choice.”

* Q: “Why on earth would you want to adopt a black baby. They are ugly, have kinky hair and are always boarder babies. No black baby is ever given up for adoption without drugs and alcohol. Could turn out to be a criminal, too.”

* Apparently, everyone born in Asia speaks an Asian language because it’s a genetic thing. People are forever asking me if our toddler son Cameron (who was born in Vietnam)can speak English. Just for fun, I told one person he was bi-lingual. After all, he was just a baby and saying only ma which happens to be Vietnamese for mother) and ba which is Vietnamese for grandmother.) I suppose he’s as bilingual as the next baby!

* Our Latina daughter was born in Alabama, but people are always asking me, “Do you think she will have an accent?”

* “Why not just adopt from Russia? At least they’d look like you?”

* A girlfriend who told me during my infertility treatment, “Why not just get a dog, it’s a lot easier” (probably should have ended the friendship right then) noted the other night that “It’s a good thing you are adopting an Asian kid, because he’ll be short like the two of you!” When I informed her that Koreans come in all different sizes like Americans she said, “Well we all know that Asians are generally shorter than Americans.”

* I am 6′ and my husband is 6’3″ We have had two people tell us we shouldn’t be adopting from Guatemala because our daughter will be short. Who cares!!

* “Oh, no! You’re going to adopt a Mexican?”

2. “Didn’t you know that…” (Ignorance isn’t bliss in personal relationships)

* “Why don’t you just go and pick one out?” Gee, where’s the closest Babies-R-Us store?

* “Will you tell her she’s adopted?” Duh…our Chinese daughter and we won’t exactly look alike.

* We adopted our daughter from China in Dec. 1999. A few months ago we went out to dinner with my father- and mother-in-law. Our dauther was eating rice and getting it everywhere (she was 16 mos. Old.) My father-in-law said, “If she were home she would know how to use chopsticks by now.” I just gave him a weird look and said “She is home and what does chopsticks have to do with it?” I know he did not say it to be mean; he is just clueless. He loves his granddaughter to death.

* “If God intended for you to have children, you’d be pregnant by now.”

* We are African American, and we have been asked more than once: “What’s taking you so long. Aren’t there piles of AA babies that need homes? You must be doing something wrong!” I think that her comment does kind of reflect this notion that there are a lot of AA infants to be adopted — and this is in part supported by agencies and other adoption professionals. There isn’t a “surplus of AA babies out there. What is closer to reality is that there are a lot of older children of color in the foster care system, many of whom are adoptable.

* At Christmas my sister-in-law asked about the progress with the adoption, commenting that it is taking a long time. I told her our homestudy is being reviewed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and this time frame is about what the agency projected. She responded, “Well, if it doesn’t work out you can always go for artificial insemination.” Was she really paying that little attention during all the years we struggled with infertility?????

* Q: “Do you get to name her?” She was still a baby, and had only the name the Chinese government assigned to her. Should I have answered “No, I have to call her Rover for the rest of her life”?

* “Well, you should know adoption is expensive”…Hmmm., well thanks for telling us that. Those hours researching adoption must have done us no good.

* “You mean you can still adopt within the United States?”

1. And, last, but not least, Sad-but-True variations on the NUMBER ONE INSENSITIVE COMMENT TO THOSE WHO ARE ADOPTING-”Now you’ll get pregnant! They always do.”

* Adopt and then you’ll get pregnant at last!” Does that mean the adoption won’t have any meaning then if a woman becomes pregnant?

* Everybody in my life knows that my significant other is a woman and that we want to be mommies. So, when I told my oldest sister that we were planning on adopting, she delivered the usual line about getting pregnant now that we’ve decided to adopt! So I told her no, we’ve stopped all treatment. We’re building our family through adoption. She insisted, “Oh no, you won’t need treatment. You’ll get pregnant now that you are going to adopt.” I finally just said, ‘Do you know how babies are made?’

* “Once you adopt you will soon become pregnant!” That is impossible since I had a complete hysterectomy. These people who say this to me, knowing I had the surgery, are down right mean. How cruel!

* My mother and my mother-in-law both really believe that once I adopt I’ll get pregnant. In fact, I hear this from everyone I tell that I am trying to adopt. Sheesh, pregnancy after adopting only happens in about 5% of the cases & who knows what their fertility problem was.

* My mother-in-law added the best comment to this one. “If you adopt and get pregnant I am not coming to Ontario to help you with babysitting!” My response is “THANK GOODNESS!”

But it’s not all bad. Marni checked in to report, “On the other side, I told one of my oldest/dearest friends (whose wife is thirty-two weeks along with their second baby) that I almost felt like I was pregnant. His comment? ‘Well, you are an expecting mother.’ Now, that’s what I call a great comment.”

You can redeem yourself and learn to be as sensitive as Marni’s friend! What’s more, you can help others “get it,” too. Keep reading…keep learning!

[Speaking of "real parents"]

Many thanks to Abrazo's friend, Patricia Irwin Johnson, for her permission to share this article, as she is retiring at the end of the year and shutting down her website...

Getting Real

By Patricia Irwin Johnston

The earliest version of of this article first appeared in Roots and Wings (now part of Adoption Today) magazine’s Spring, 1996 issue. It has been revised and expanded from that original. It is included in the Adopting: Sound Choices, Strong Families.

For several years I’ve had the interesting experience of participating in Internet newsgroups and commercial on-line usegroups discussing adoption. The culture on the Net is different from that of local support groups or conferences or magazines. Protected by anonymity and by the facelessness of those to whom they are “talking,” Net folks often feel less constrained by conventional “rules” to coat their anger or their angst in politeness. Net groups are dominated by an oustpoken few. Many other subscribers merely lurk, reading over the shoulders of other posters, afraid to chime in with their own opinions for fear of being blasted. Conversation is up front, “flaming” is commonplace.

While those engaged in Net dialogues or diatribes are frequently reminded that they cannot and should not speak for others, there’s a lot of generalizing on the Net, but the bottom line concerns are really little different than they turn out to be after months of getting to know somebody in your local parent group: Adoption can be wonderful, but it’s scary, too. It brings with it a blend of gain and loss, happiness and pain. Some people on all sides of the triad go through periods (sometimes lifetimes) of feeling powerless and victimized by the experience. Pain expressed in any forum tends to create defensive attitudes on the part of other members of the triad. The fear is nearly palpable. These wounded souls are in constant search of their “real” selves… whatever that means.

As a young parent (it seems a long time ago now that my children are 17, 20 and 26) I remember worrying that the babies I was fiercely loving might not see me as their “real” mother, or that their grandparents, who were loving them, too, might not be “really” seeing them as grandchildren. I came to understand that many of those concerns were a result of my own self esteem questions–questions that were brought to the surface once again by infertility and by adoption, but which were not created by it. I suspect that’s true for many others.

I began to read omnivorously about adoption. One of the most mind-opening things I read was social work professor and adoptive parent Jerome Smith’s now somewhat dated (1980) book You’re Our Child. It introduced me to the concept that adoptive parents need to build a sense of entitlement to their children–coming to feel that their children are theirs to parent and that they are deserving of the parenting role.

Building a sense of entitlement is related to attachment, but it isn’t the same as attachment. One can be firmly attached but not feel entitled. One can feel quite entitled to a child who is not attaching well.

Over the years in the workshops I frequently do for professionals and people touched personally by adoption I’ve expanded a lot on Jerry Smith’s concept. It seemed to me early on, for example, that entitlement was not just a task for the infertile adopters about whom Smith wrote, but that preferential adopters had issues to deal with, too. Though Smith didn’t say so, it seemed clear to me that entitlement was a two way street, and that children being raised in adoption needed to build their own senses of entitlement to their parents and families. Still later I saw that, depending on the closeness of the family, it is likely that not just parents and children need to work on this entitlement building stuff, but that grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, too, need to build a sense of entitlement about those joined to them by adoption. The result of a healthy entitlement building process is that the members of a family come to believe that they all belong together and are deserving of one another. When entitlement building is ignored, the fact that “something is missing” is clear from both inside and out.

Smith says (and I include some of my own expansions here, too) that building a sense of entitlement involves three steps. A first step is in being honest with oneself about the motivating factors that brought you to adoption… for adoptive parents that means dealing with infertility or honestly acknowledging the good and the bad about other motivations for adopting; for adoptees this step involves understanding and accepting why a birthparent chose adoption rather than parenting; a grandparent may need to embrace his child’s philosophical drive to make the world a better place or to mourn the loss of his genetic connection to this particular grandchild. The second step is coming to understand and deal positively with a concept first discussed by sociologist H. David Kirk: that adoption is different from being related by birth in significant and unavoidable ways. The third step in building a sense of entitlement is to learn to deal straightforwardly with society’s widely held and broadly spread conviction that adoption is a second best alternative for everybody involved.

In my husband’s and my family, adoption has been central to two generations of family building. My in-laws and their brothers and sisters were not a very fertile bunch. Of five siblings between the two sides of Dave’s parents’ generation, two gave birth to only children and the other three (including Dave’s mother and his father) adopted children. So of Dave’s generation of six cousins, only two were born to the family and four were adopted into it. In the next generation, Dave and I are parenting three children thanks to adoption.

I’ve often shared in speaking and writing some of our multi-generational adoption-expanded family’s defining moments in “getting” the concept of entitlement, which we believe is central to successful adoptive family life. I use our personal stories in trying to help families exploring adoption understand the importance of all members of an adoption-expanded family coming to feel a sense of entitlement to one another and to their respective interactive places in the family. I encourage these families to begin before arrival to bring their families on board, and to expect that issues surrounding what brought them all to adoption may resurface later and need to be dealt with on a variety of levels over time. Accepting that this is so, I tell families, will allow them to be less defensive about their own pain, and the result of that lack of defensiveness will be that they will be more open to listening to growing children’s processing of adoption’s gains and losses in their lives.

Perhaps if I share one particulary poignant anecdote here, you’ll understand why we believe that the done or undone tasks of entitlement-building have a powerful impact on all who are touched by adoption…

My husband Dave was adopted at age six months by his parents, Perry and Helen. His parents were particularly “advanced” in their adoption thinking for their time, and Dave does not remember ever not knowing that he and his younger sister had been adopted. His questions were answered openly and honestly. The Johnstons were intensely involved parents–volunteering at school and in scouts, baking cookies and building projects. His parents and extended family embraced Dave and Mary into the family fold without apparent reservation, and the gang of six citified cousins growing up in Chicago and the New Jersey suburbs were a close and rowdy bunch when gathered at the family’s homeplace in Central Illinois.

During his growing up years, Dave received a number of family heirloom gifts from his father: the Civil War sword and camp stool carried by a Johnston ancestor who was a Union soldier; the pocket watch with which a Johnston grandfather had clocked a long career with the Chicago and Elgin railroad; a late-1800s-published book, The Johnstons of Salisbury, which traced the family from New England in the 1600s as it branched out and extended through the South and the West (and into the back of which his grandfather and then his father had carefully printed the updated information available for their own generations of cousins and children and grandchildren.) These things came into our marriage and found places of honor–along with the Chinese lacquer box my own great grandmother had brought home from her days as a missionary, the medical texts from my great-great-grandfather’s country medical practice and the law books from his son’s Illinois State Supreme Court offices, and the beautiful landscape painting by my housepainter great-grandfather–in the home we established as our own for the family which was to come to us through our adoption of three children.

When our son was about nine, our middle daughter three and our youngest girl just a baby, Dave’s parents moved from the house they had lived in for nearly 50 years to a retirement community. In the process of weeding out all those years’ accumulation, the senior Johnstons asked us during one Sunday afternoon phone call if there were particular things we would like from their home. Mary’s list had been long: china, crystal, this chair and those lamps, handmade quilts, etc. But Dave, a less acquisitive person already dealing with a confirmed pack rat wife, had fewer wishes.

Two items from his parents home came to mind that day–items whose stories I already knew. The first was a rickety table from the dining room. I shuddered to think how long it would stand in our house with active youngsters. But the table had come to Central Illinois over 100 years before in a covered wagon driven by his mother’s people, who were migrating from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The second item was a string of sleigh bells belonging to that same covered-wagon family. The bells had hung on a leather strap in the front hall of his parents’ home for as long as Dave could remember. Dave’s interest in those bells had little to do with their heirloom status, but instead involved a custom begun by his own dad– one that Dave was following (albeit with modern adaptations and a single garage sale purchased bell) with our children.

Every Christmas Eve during the 23 years Dave lived with his parents, Perry Johnston had waited until his children were asleep and then ventured out into a Chicago winter with those sleigh bells in hand. He put a ladder against the side of the house and climbed to the porch roof; from there he made his way in the windy Chicago night onto the usually icy roof to a spot above his children’s rooms, where he stomped his feet, rang those bells, and shouted out a hearty “HO, HO, HO!” What a memory!

When Dave expressed interest in those two items, his mother blurted out, “Oh, I’m sorry, Dave, I’ve already promised those things to my nephew, Bob. He’s my only living relative.”

We mumbled a few more awkward words, said our goodbyes and hung up. I dashed downstairs from the bedroom extension to where my husband had been using the kitchen phone. He was leaning against the counter, softly crying.

Her only living relative? For over 40 years the son Helen loved with all her heart (we don’t doubt it for a minute!) had felt no questions about who he was or where he “belonged.” But in that moment, 40 years were nearly shattered. For in that single conversation, Helen Johnston revealed a carefully hidden piece of her own unresolved pain: parenting her cherished children had not been enough to heal the anguish of her infertility and the loss of earlier children to miscarriage and neonatal death. Though her children had felt entitled to her, an important piece of herself had been held in reserve for the genetic children she never had on behalf of her family of origin.

That afternoon Dave and I wandered from room to room in our house, turning over keepsake items and family mementoes and applying pieces of masking tape bearing our children’s names to the bottom of them. We were determined to protect our children from ever having to feel pain in adoption. (How naive we were to think we could do that!)

And, yet, that single moment taught us more as adoptive parents than any book we could have read, any class we could have taken, any counseling or preparation we had had. The greatest gift we give our children is our own determination to do the personal work necessary to build our own senses of entitlement as parents in adoption and to bring our family and friends firmly on board with us, so that all of us, together, can help the children believe in and feel entitled to our familiness.

Since this article was first written, the story above has come full circle. A couple of years ago Dave and I were invited to the wedding of his cousin’s daughter–the first wedding in this next generation of the family. We were delighted to be there and were pleased to be seated in what seemed to be a place of honor behind the family of the bride and then to find ourselves at the bride’s parents’ table at the reception. As introductions began, we listened as Bob’s wife introduced her large extended family of many brothers and sisters and their children, her nieces and nephews. Then Bob rose, and looking around the room, he chuckled that his family introductions would be shorter. He had been an only child, and his parents had been dead for many years. He put his arm around Dave’s shoulder, tears welled in his eyes, and he said, “I’d like you to meet my cousin, Dave Johnston, and this is his wife, Pat. Dave and his sister Mary Jane are my only living relatives.”

Bob never knew–still does not know–the story of Dave’s request for the sleigh bells and the table which were bequeathed to him instead. But Bob feeling of family entitlement is secure. He, like his cousin, is bouyed by the family he has loved his whole life–no matter how those connections began.

“What is real?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit in Margery Williams’ classic children’s book of the same name. And the skin horse who was the nursery’s philosopher responded by reminding the rabbit that, yes, becoming real does sometimes hurt, and that it usually doesn’t happen easily to people who need to be “carefully kept.” Real, advised the skin horse, usually happens after your fur has been loved off and your eyes have dropped out, but that doesn’t matter. For when you are real, you can only be ugly to those who do not understand.

We claim this book–we touched by adoption–and yet sometimes it is we ourselves who do not understand. Building a sense of entitlement to one another is a part of the claiming and bonding process for all of those in adoption-expanded families. It’s about believing, with all of one’s being, that you are OK, that you are deserving, that you belong, that, together, the family and each of its members is whole and strong. That we are real.

Copyright © Patricia Irwin Johnston. Please do not republish in print or on the internet without the author’s permission.

[What's Your Ideal Situation In Open Adoption]

For more about the historical significance of the "what KIND of family do we want to adopt from" debate, take a look at THIS. (Check out the historical photo at the left of this article... how many of Abrazo's families would take top prize in the "Fitter Families" contests of yore, I wonder?)

Here's a blogger who is also a birthmom and has a thing or two to say about adoption programs that focus on working only with the "right kind" of people: Motherhood Deleted.

And if you've never ventured into the topic of "selective breeding", enter at your own risk.

[What's Your Ideal Situation In Open Adoption]

Of course, this is assuming my ideal situation would be the case... that the birth mother would be a good Christian girl from a good family, who just made a mistake. I wouldn't feel comfortable with an open adoption from, say, someone who was a chain-smoking bar hopper with a lot of "drama." That's the kind of birth mother I imagine would badmouth the adoptive family... I have a hard time imaging that sort of ill will if the birth mother were from a good Christian home[/i][/b][/color]

I have been trying really hard not to respond because I think even at Abrazo, we still have plenty of clients who still think this way, at least initially, and that pains me to admit it.

Yet... it's all too easy to forget that expectant parents living within ideal circumstances rarely need to place.

(And that children who were once adopted still need their parents to honor their primal connection to "chain-smoking bar hopping birthparents with lots of drama" just as much as those whose birthparents are good Christians from good families.)

Obviously, some adoptive parents struggle with entitlement issues, and need to view themselves or their life choices as being of a superior quality to those of their child's birthparent/s. But can you imagine the unspoken message that is relayed (and repeated) to the adoptee, who grows up understanding they ultimately were someone's "mistake"?

Much of what is unspoken in the comments of "Future Adoptive Family" has to do with eugenics, and the idea of "better stock" (and those attitudes are still alive and well in the greater adoption community today, unfortunately.)

Let's be honest: most adoptive families DO come to the adoption process hoping for a "smooth" (read: drama-free) placement experience, and some do expect to be protected by a hermetically-sealed bubble that exempts them from the effects of the dramatic circumstances surrounding those who must place. Those are the ones who are "fine with openness"... so long as none of the chaos of their child's birthparents' lives impacts them, as well.

And most birthparents who place are likewise hoping that their child's life will be free of drama, too, and they don't expect their future to be affected by chaos in the adoptive parents' lives, because they've generally been assured that the people to whom they are entrusting their child are more stable and secure than they themselves are.

But the ideal situation in open adoption, in my mind, is for an adopting family and a placing family to appreciate that their contrasting circumstances do not compromise their shared commitment to a child's welfare... that the differences in their background need not define their friendship... and that the child for whom they are both responsible will ultimately grow up to reflect the very best of whom both families are, in this life.

[Who Birthmoms Are]

Another Addition to the "Who Birthmoms Are" and Why They Place survey...

Abrazo has also worked with a mom or two in the past who got caught in a surrogacy deal-gone-bad...

I think there should be special legal sanctions for those who pay to get other women pregnant and then pull out... so to speak.

[Resources for dealing with an unplanned pregnancy]

For parents or parents-to-be who may be interested in the research about the effects of parenting under less-than-optimal conditions, this is a very balanced and highly-respected academic journal that examines the impact of what the experts refer to as "fragile families."

(Or CLICK HERE and scroll down to read the entire journal online.)

[The Trimesters of Adoption]

Thanks for reviving this, Melissa! (Newcomers, please take note: you now must have five face-to-face visits with your homestudy worker in the first six months following placement, compliments of the Texas Department of Family & Protective Services Residential Childcare Licensing officials, who decided apparently that adoptive parents needed monthly post-placement interviews, instead of quarterly. What WILL those fun-loving crazy bureaucrats think of next?! )

[Resources for dealing with an unplanned pregnancy]

Oh, Monica... big hugs to you. I know you are struggling to come to terms with the decision that you made, and I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with others.

It's very common for women who have placed to seek to rationalize their decisions afterwards, especially when they are under pressure from others who may not agree with the plans they have made. That's not to say that hormone changes don't impact women during pregnancy (clearly they do: read more, here.) But every woman who places is impacted by stress, by hormones and/or by depression, frankly-- and in the end, it's up to them whether they wish to view their own adoption decision as having been the "right" choice or not.

There is nothing in Texas law that enables parents who place to undo an irrevocable relinquishment based on hindsight nor hormones, which is why even the relinquishment document requires all affiants to confirm before signing, by their own initials, that they know they should not sign the document if they are not thinking clearly because of "illness, any substance or medication, my emotional health or any other reason."

Rest assured, Monica, that you are currently in the midst of continuing hormonal fluctuations during what some professionals call the "fourth trimester", and that this continues to impact your current thoughts and feelings-- and yes, the post-adoption grief experience, as well.

That doesn't mean that what you are presently thinking or feeling is not "real" but it is to say that this may not be the most appropriate time to try to permanently evaluate whether or not you made the right decision for your son's welfare. (Hindsight is always 50/50, as they say.) Every mother with an untimely pregnancy can only make her own best decisions on what she knows at the time, hormones or stress or depression or not, and I hope in time you will be able to trust that you, too, did the best you could, given your circumstances at the time.

[Celebrity Adoptions]

Fascinating... I never knew that after losing a biological son in childbirth, Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder) went on to parent at least three boys through some sort of foster care/adoption arrangement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane

(And for those who prefer sources other than Wikipedia, there's lots more info HERE.)

(Plus, a bonus read for those who enjoy Little House on the Prairie lore as much as my sons and I do: In Honor of Half-Pint! )

[Nursery Notes]

We are waiting to receive profiles (of homestudied couples) so we can show this mom that there are families ready to match with her, who will dearly love her baby, as well.

[Nursery Notes]

I'm sure it would, Wendy... her concern is just that she wants her baby-- and their baby-- to be the center of their universe, which is as it should be.

[Nursery Notes]

She was hoping for a Texas couple because she doubts an out-of-state couple will faithfully return to Texas for visits, and she truly wants that kind of openness as her child grows, so he and his brother can have a continuing connection throughout their lives. When I spoke with her today, though, she said she is getting scared that there may not be a family in place before the baby gets here, so she may be open to out-of-state couples if they are truly committed to open adoption.

[Nursery Notes]

We are in desperate need of homestudied, childless couples living outside San Antonio who would be interested in the possible placement of an African-American baby boy due next month! His mama is an articulate, conscientious parent who is very invested in an open adoption and wants him to be the family's firstborn, so he gets ALL the attention! but she'd prefer that the adoptive family not live in her proverbial backyard. If you know of homestudy-ready couples who wish to be considered, please have them forward a copy of their profile and their homestudy to Abrazo A.S.A.P!!!

[Designated Program]

(Not to add to the fires... but think "Bald Tires"!)

[The Catholic Corner]

In Australia, the Church is apologizing for thousands (150k!) of "forced adoptions" of babies involuntarily seized by and placed through Catholic churches and agencies from 1950 through 1970s:

Catholic Church of Australia offering penance for stolen children

[Celebrity Adoptions]

It's easier than you think... unfortunately.

Casey Anthony, having been acquitted of murder, manslaughter and child abuse and having had her mental competence affirmed in court, would certainly not be incapable of pulling off a private or independent adoption. Her existing criminal record shows only convictions for check fraud and lying to investigators, and neither precludes one from adopting under most states' laws.

Although her "celebrity" was borne of notoriety, our reality-programming driven culture is bound to equip her with a certain fan base, however questionable their judgement may be. Given that Anthony is reportedly considering million-dollar book deals and movie rights offers, it is sadly conceivable that she could acquire a baby from somebody who sympathizes with her, identifies with her plight and/or wants to benefit from her "fame" by association.

Most homestudy workers generally feel inclined to approve the clients that hire them, and while it may (er, should!) raise questions that a child previously in Anthony's care died of unknown causes, the fact that she was acquitted means she could not be disqualified for that reason alone, assuming she could provide a child with adequate shelter and had the means to provide for him/her.

And should any of Anthony's relatives see fit to entrust a child to her for any reason-- in thirty-one states, no homestudy would be required whatsoever. Anthony could simply have the legalwork drawn up by her attorney, Jose' Baez, and assuming he was friendly with a judge willing to sign off on it, Casey Anthony's adoption dream could become a fait accompli.

Scary, isn't it?

[Age of adoptive parents]

HOPE FOR AARP MEMBERS INTERESTED IN ADOPTING!!

I'm genuinely glad little Asia is getting adopted, but I hope one of the conditions of her South Carolina placement is that there's a Life Alert unit in the adoptive home, because God forbid this little girl should have to summon help before she's old enough to use a phone or give CPR?

[NEW PARENTS NEEDED!]

Lately, we've had several prospective birthparents requesting childless couples living in San Antonio, and at present, we have none to offer (at least, none that are homestudy ready.) If you know of good childless couples who are open to children of all ethnicities, who are living in the San Antonio area, please encourage them to send in a completed inqury. Thanks!

[Who Is (or Isn't) Cut Out for Adoption?]

Today, another adoptee blog discussed these quotes and how the attitudes contained therein seep into societal perspectives as well as adoption politics....

BUSTED: Adoptive Parents Speak

In the interest of full disclosure (and perhaps in an example of inexplicable irony), this piece also includes a published quote by one of our own, Abrazomom and renowned novelist, Jacquelyn Mitchard.

As the godmother of a son borne for Jackie and her husband Chris by a surrogate after Jackie adopted her first two daughters at Abrazo, I know Jackie and her children well. I know they speak openly about the birthparents of their kids, and I can imagine Jackie saying this to her Francie in the same tone in which I shame my kids into behaving with threats that Santa is watching. I, too, have been guilty of referring to my sons as "brats" on choice occasions, although I am not proud of admitting it and though I've never been literate enough to add the word "writhing" because I'm not sure how to pronounce it.

Jackie has enjoyed continuing contact with her daughters' birth moms over the years, so I know she would've written the referenced piece in full candor, knowing they might well read it and identify with her maternal frustration.

I admit, though, that I may be biased, and others may well find Jackie's quoted remark as disturbing as all the others.

If there's one productive takeaway lesson to be learned from all of this, maybe it's just that we all must remember that the institution of adoption that makes families possible is inevitably impacted by what we all say about it--and how we say it-- and ultimately, it's our words (all of them) that will eventually shape how our children view their origins, as well.