Review: "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet"

By David Biddle

The "Do I Love Them Yet?" Syndrome

Once that last child begins to drive, most of us realize our capacity to parent is fading. We get a few years of empty-nest freedom before grandparenting kicks in. But the marathon is over. We finished!

Then there are the Melissa Fay Greenes of the world—and her attorney husband Don Samuel, a man who practices courtroom statements on his kids instead of reading them bedtime stories. Samuel and Greene, a journalist, had four children using their own DNA: Molly, Seth, Lee, and Lily. But then, in their early forties and with encouragement from their biological kids, the Greene-Samuel team adopted five more in less than a decade.

It began in 1999 with Chrissy (whom they renamed Jesse), a four-year-old boy of Romani (“gypsy”) descent from a Bulgarian orphanage. Then they adopted five-year-old Helen from AIDS-ravaged Ethiopia, where, Greene notes, 11 percent of the nation’s children were orphans in 2001. After Helen came nine-year-old Fisseha (renamed Sol), followed by brothers Yosef (8) and Daniel (11)—also all from Ethiopia.

In No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, Greene tells the story of building this mega-family—two loving parents, two quirky dogs, nine amazing children from three different birth cultures—all living under one roof in Atlanta, Georgia.

Cute, huh? Sweet?

Hardly. Greene is not a master parent by any means—in far too many scenes, she just lets chaos reign in her household—and this is not a simple, feel-good treatise on the ultimate blended family. Her memoir is powerful and alluring, almost like a reality TV show where you actually care about the characters.

Greene comments intelligently on adoption, family, intercultural experience, and—above all—real love. This last resonates with me most, because as a mixed-race adoptee, I know that love between parents and children, adoptive or biological, is one of the greatest mysteries I’ve encountered in life....

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

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Editor's Note: The full text of this review—"Adoption, Light and Dark"—appears in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Talking Writing. This issue features a special "Spotlight" on adoption and parenting in honor of National Adoption Month, including a companion essay about Melissa Fay Greene called "Whoa! I'm a Character in a Friend's Memoir?"

 

We invite you to check out Talking Writing and subscribe—it's free!

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Adoption on TV: "Modern Family" or "Parenthood"?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


A gay dad sits at the dining-room table, making a scrapbook about baby Lily's adoption. A tiny conical hat perches on his head. It's all the funnier because this dad—ex-college-football player Cameron—is so large.

"Look at this." Cameron reverently holds up the hat.

"Oh my God!" cries Mitchell, his partner. "Lily's little hat that we bought her at the airport in Vietnam!"

Cameron puts it on, its red ribbons trailing beside his cheeks.

Mitchell eyes him. "Remember how cute she looked in that?"

"Remember how I used to wear it and walk around and act like I had a giant head?" Cameron giggles.

"That was good acting," Mitchell says.

Politically incorrect? Over-the-top satire? Yes on both counts, but that's why a sharply written sitcom like ABC's Modern Family gets at the uncomfortable  aspects of adoption—especially for us white middle-class adoptive parents.

In many ways, Cam (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) are the fruitiest of gay stereotypes, but the hat episide of Modern Family that aired last spring ("Two Monkeys and a Panda"), veered plenty close to my own adoptive family. My Vietnamese adoptee is older than Lily—and he's not been slapped with an Asian flower name—but he's got his own tiny conical hat.

It's taken me awhile to appreciate Modern Family, so I'm only now watching Season Two on DVD; the show is currently in its third season. But I'm up to date with another show also in its third season—NBC's Parenthood—and lately I've been struck by the contrast between the two when it comes to adoption.

I used to enjoy Parenthood, even when this drama about the Braverman family in Berkeley, California, slopped into preciousness. Zeek (Craig T. Nelson) and Camille (Bonnie Bedelia) Braverman oversee the clan from an artsy Berkeley house that's probably just up the hill from Chez Panisse. The four adult Braverman children are by turns believably angst-ridden and annoying. But their kids make the show engaging. And the evolving story of young Max, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome in Season One, is notable for its unvarnished look at how hard this can be on a family.

Yet, the current story involving the quest of Julia Braverman-Graham (Erika Christensen) to adopt a baby is not only an inaccurate portrayal of the ups and downs of the adoption process. It leans heavily on a heroic adoption narrative—just the sort of thing Modern Family skewers brilliantly.

The basic narrative goes like so: Two prospective adoptive parents, after battling with infertility, deeply long for a child. They have plenty of money, a huge extended family, a homey house. Meanwhile, the pregnant birthmother is destitute, without family, friends, or the child's birthfather. She struggles mightily over whether to give up her baby for adoption, but when she decides to do so, the music swells. She tearfully surrenders her infant. The End.

In Parenthood's version of this cliché, Julia and her husband Joel (Sam Jaeger) have a biological daughter, but Julia can't get pregnant again. They decide to adopt, and Julia, a high-powered lawyer, flings herself into the bureaucracy of private domestic adoption. Before you can say "adoption agency," she's frustrated. She can't just make it happen by writing a check.

This isn't what bothers me about the story, though. On many levels, adoption is a financial transaction. Julia's chop-chop way of going about it is true to her character. One of her brothers even says she's trying to "buy" a kid. To whit: In the September episode "Hey, If You're Not Using That Baby," a young woman named Zoe (Rosa Salazar) conveniently turns up pregnant and ready to get rid of "it." Zoe runs the coffee cart at Julia's law firm, and Julia shadows her like a vulture. Before long, she asks Zoe flat out if she can have her baby.

It's improbable soap opera, but I like Julia's upper-middle-class myopia. I like the fact that Zoe, who's attractive and bright, responds, "Um, no."

But here's what I don't like: In under a month of TV air time, Julia has become a saint. She's apologized to Zoe. In a recent episode, Julia takes her to the hospital when she feels ill, then brings Zoe home for the night. In Julia's fancy kitchen, the unhappy pregnant girl gets to observe perfect-dad Joel playing with their daughter. Soon after, Zoe shows up on their doorstep again, saying, "If you still want to have my baby, you can have it. You have a nice family."

On Parenthood, it's all hugs and tears—though maybe not The End, because the adoption plot is still unfolding. Maybe once Zoe has her baby, she'll change her mind. And if the adoption does go through, maybe it will be an open one in which Zoe remains part of the Braverman saga. Wouldn't that be cool?

The run-up isn't promising, however. I can just picture the Braverman clan rallying around the new adoptive parents after a few predictable twists. For example: Zoe almost revokes her consent; her ne'r-do-well boyfriend shows up and tries to stake his own claim; the baby is born with a disability—but saint-like Julia and Joel love the child anyway.

If only adoption were being handled as realistically on Parenthood as autism is. The heroic baby hand-off is never the end, as many real birthparents and adult adoptees will tell you. Even the broad satire of Modern Family, which portrays only the adoptive parents' point of view, gets across how much these gay dads have changed over the months they've been parenting.

With Parenthood, there's reason to hope that the ensuing adoption complications may yet rise above clichés. I'm drawn to the Bravermans, a big happy clan, TV fantasy though they are. I long for a form of community my own tiny family of three doesn't have.

But when a drama like this strikes too many false notes, I end up feeling manipulated. As someone who grew up in a working-class suburb south of Berkeley in the same era, it's already tough for me to suspend disbelief. I know how much the Bravermans reek of a particular kind of groovy privilege.

Most TV families—and Modern Family is no exception—are middle-class and inwardly focused, and they generate an ever-expanding tangle of unrealistic plotlines. But if the characters expose all their nasty, unpretty edges, I stay hooked. That's especially true for an adoption story, which is why I've grown fond of those argumentative, accessorizing gay adoptive dads.

Their comic outrageousness—and obvious self-deceptions—cut far closer to the truth than a thinly disguised melodrama with a pretty soundtrack.

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Links to Episodes:
• "Two Monkeys and a Panda" (Modern Family, aired March 2, 2011)
•  "Hey, If You're Not Using That Baby" (Parenthood, aired September 20, 2011)
• "Nora" (Parenthood, aired October  11, 2011)

Podcast on "What's My Heritage?" and Other Adoption Topics

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


Today I was interviewed by Mary Beth Wells on "Adoption—Journey to Motherhood." We talked about Artyom, the adoptee who was sent back to Russia this past spring—what Mary Beth termed the issue of "good child-bad child"—and also the push-and-pull of culture-keeping with international adoptees, based on "What's My Heritage?", my article in Brain, Child magazine last year.

It was a wide-ranging conversation. To listen in, click here (it's the July 12, 2010 show). You can also download it for free.

And for those who can't get enough of The Last Airbender, click here for my review. I finally watched the thing with my son and assorted children and adults last Friday. Lord have mercy. A preview:

"I left the theater feeling jangled, as if somebody had spit up on me. As one of my fellow adult sufferers, a scriptwriter, described the waterbending special effects: 'Yuk. Death by spit and icicles...'"

"The Last Airbender": Do We Take Our Kids?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


As I watched the trailer last weekend for The Last Airbender with three eight-year-olds, two of whom were Asian adoptees, I knew I was doomed. Even as they hissed at each other that Aang's tattoo was wrong—where's the blue arrow??—they were hooked by the special effects, just as they were meant to be.

M. Night Shyamalan's summer action extravaganza is set to open July 1, gunning for a big holiday weekend. The first review I read this morning was in the Boston Globe, and others are popping up online as I type. What's the initial verdict? Ty Burr of the Globe writes:

"The Last Airbender is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic.... The film probably should have stayed a cartoon; live-action kills it dead."

I should be doing a gleeful air-dance like twelve-year-old Aang, the movie's namesake and Dalai-lama stand-in. In Salon and elsewhere, I've been writing for months about the casting controversy—three of the four main characters from the anime-inspired Nickelodeon cartoon series are played by white actors in Shyamalan's movie—as have many Asian-American activists, including cartoonists like Gene Yang.

Today Roger Ebert tweeted a link to what he calls "The best writing I've seen on the racist casting of 'The Last Airbender.' Devastating." It's by Vietnamese blogger Q. Le at Floating World.

We should feel vindicated.

Well, of course I do. It seems that Shyamalan's auteurish blindness about casting white actors in Asian roles represents benighted moviemaking throughout. Burr says of Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone, who play the brother-sister heroes Katara and Sokka, that their "crime, again, isn't that they are Anglo but just painfully dull."

Here's the thing: My son—an adoptee born in Vietnam—broke into tears two weeks ago when he thought I was going to forbid him to see the movie. He knows I've been railing in print against the racism implicit in the casting, so he assumed he'd be sitting at home while his friends all streamed to the theater and Airbender parties.

This is one of those unlovely damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't, white-adoptive-parents-trying-to-be PC quandaries.

I assured him he could see it if he wanted to; that anything else would be unfair. I have strong opinions about it, I told him earnestly, but they don't have to be your opinions. It's OK, it's OK, it's OK.

No, it's not.

In fact, I wonder what his opinion will be. We'll do our best to boycott the film this opening weekend—Racebending.com activists and others are calling for a boycott of at least the first two weeks in order to put a dent in Airbender's take—but I doubt we'll make it past July 4, considering that he wants to go with friends.

Or as my husband wryly put it this morning, "If it's a real dog, we better not wait more than one weekend."

Here's the other thing, though: It won't just be a matter of suffering through a reeking mess for two hours. The main media spin will be the trials of M. Night Shyamalan—so gifted! so much potential!—what curse is the great director suffering under?

Burr's review begins like so: "The Last Airbender has had more bad karma than almost any movie deserves." He details its "litany of disasters," from the cartoon's main title (Avatar) being ripped off by James Cameron to pissed-off fans to the last-minute 3-D forced on the film to the director's string of flops. Burr notes that it would have been great if Shyamalan had overcome the odds, perhaps like young Aang himself, to produce a winner.

Scott Mendelson writes in his Huffington Post review, "As a film from the man who once wrote and directed such films as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, it is a heartbreaking tragedy, a 'sign' that perhaps the once-great M. Night Shyamalan is truly 'broken'."

So Shyamalan the Fallen looks like the main review focus, rather than the persistent whitewashing of Hollywood films. I confess to my own secret hope that The Last Airbender would be good, even awe-inspiring. At least then my Asian son and I—not to mention other parents and fans of all races and creeds, adoptive or bio—could have had a real discussion about whether casting decisions should reflect the racial and cultural referents of source material.

If Peltz, for example, had turned out to be a great Katara, then I'd be willing to eat a few words. But given that it sounds like "great" doesn't describe anything here—as Christopher Kelly ends his review in the Miami Herald, "It's a little early to be saying this, but I'd wager good money that you won't see a worse movie this year"—I'm left with the utter cluelessness and cynicism of Hollywood. Of the lousy 3-D, Burr of the Globe writes, "I've got winking-Jesus postcards that look better."

Which means The Last Airbender deserves every bit of its rotten karma. I'd lead with "One bad decision begets another...and another...and another."

Like Fire Lord Ozai and his evil daughter Azula, give me some real opposition, please. Otherwise, where's the fun?

The best outcome may be that a few of the money-people behind movies wake up. When I watched the trailer with my son and his friends last weekend, we were in a theater to see the re-make of The Karate Kid—a movie with people of color in all the main roles.

My advice? Despite the postcard-romantic scenes of China in the new Kid, it had a lot to offer my kid. If you can avoid the Airbender juggernaut, don't let it give Jackie Chan a run for your money.


This is a revision of a post that also appears on Open Salon.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Adoption Secrets

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


Since the late 1990s, most parents in the English-speaking world (and by now, far beyond) have met Harry Potter.

At least ten years ago, before my adopted son entered our lives, I read the first book in the series—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone—just to see what all the fuss was about. I enjoyed it. But I decided to wait to read the rest of the books until my own child came along and was of an age when we could go through them together.

Now my eight-year-old son is ready to jump in, and we've begun the great Harry Potter reading marathon. But revisiting the first book has confronted me with a familiar challenge: How much should I protect my son from negative images of adoption and orphans—and how much, in general, should I censor his access to popular culture?

Harry is not strictly an adoptee; he's the poor orphan, fostered and mistreated by his remaining biological ( or "Muggle") relations. But there's much in his story that real-world adoptees will recognize.

Early on in The Sorcerer's Stone, for example, his aunt lies to him, saying his parents died in a "car crash." Harry learns "the first rule for a quiet life": "Don't ask questions."

My son is still young for reading these books. More to the point, he doesn't want to read them by himself. If he had his druthers, he'd just watch the movies. But I want to slow this process down. I figure that if we read through the books before he sees each movie, then he'll be older as the series proceeds and becomes more disturbing.

He's predictably hooked on The Sorcerer's Stone. We're halfway through after a few days. But the first night, he also had nightmares.

It's not that I was clueless about the orphan theme when I originally read this book. Yet now I'm seeing it through my son's eyes—and author J.K. Rowling's handling of this standard plot device seems deeply satirical—and wonderfully unvarnished—and also unexamined.

Whether that lack of examination is a problem is the question. Ultimately, I don't think so, but I've been doing some pondering as we race through the chapters, and Harry is confronted with one secret after another about who he really is.

This past weekend, I had a bit of an "ah-ha" moment when I attended an academic conference at MIT put on by the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture. The topic was "Adoption: Secret Histories, Public Policies." An array of historians, social scientists, memoir and fiction writers, and documentary filmmakers were on hand. (Click here for the program and participants. It was a terrific conference.)

Of many fascinating sessions I went to, "Adoption in Film," with panelists Kim Park Nelson (a multicultural studies scholar) and Joyce Maguire Pavao (a well-known clinician), had me leaping back to Harry. The Harry Potter movies figured in neither of the panelist's presentations, yet his orphan status is connected to their discussions.

Kim Park Nelson's topic was "The Horror of Adoption," in which she detailed pernicious images in some recent horror films that involve an adoption premise. She didn't focus on more well-known fiascoes like last year's Orphan, which generated a letter-writing protest campaign, but on genre movies like The Ring and Silent Hill.

In her analysis of these films, adoptees are either bad seeds or shattered beings trapped between their good and evil selves. Birthparents are evil incarnate or victims of fate. Indeed, almost anyone connected to the triad seems to be a victim of fate, driven to discover the horrible secret of a child's identity. Adoptive parents are victims, too, walking into danger to save their kids.

Compare this with Harry Potter, who begins not knowing he's a wizard and certainly has to grapple with his fate but is allowed an active part in the process. For example, when students first arrive at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, they're "sorted" into houses (dormitories) in front of everyone. They put a sorting hat on their heads. Here's an except from The Sorcerer's Stone:

"The last thing Harry saw before the hat dropped over his eyes was the hall full of people craning to get a good look at him. Next second he was looking at the black inside of the hat. He waited.

"'Hmm,' said a small voice inside his ear. 'Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind, either. There's talent, oh my goodness, yes—and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that's interesting.... So where shall I put you?'

"Harry gripped the edges of the stool and thought Not Slytherin, not Slytherin.

"'Not Slytherin, eh?' said the small voice. 'Are you sure? You could be great, you know, it's all here in your head, and Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, no doubt about that—no? Well, if you're sure—better be GRYFFINDOR!'"

Rather than horror films, Pavao focused on a list of her ten favorite movies in which adoption is part of the storyline.* She noted that orphans appear in many children's stories and movies because the experience of family loss can feel so universal. Readers and viewers identify with such loneliness.

But I think orphans also serve a basic story function. From the Boxcar Children to Harry Potter, kids without parents are the protagonists. A few reassuring adults may pop in, but the kids get to have adventures. Harry does come to terms with his birthright as a wizard, but his actions very much determine the story. He is not acted on in the same way as the helpless bad seeds of those horror movies.

It's a compelling image: a lonely orphan, who feels different from all the Muggles around him, learning he has power within. Harry Potter confronts many barriers in discovering his birth history—just as adoptees do—but he always feels he has a right to do so.

At past non-academic adoption conferences, I've gone to sessions in which speakers talk about which books are "good" or "bad" for young adoptees. I've bristled at the censorship implied.

While I may cringe at the image of Harry stuck in a cupboard in his aunt and uncle's house, and while my son may ask how they could treat him that way, I think talking about our responses can be more illuminating than any spoon-fed message.

I suggest another test: Are the main characters of a story or movie in charge of their own fates? Are they determined to learn the truth?

If yes, then let the Muggles parade and stinking potions brew, the secrets revealed may well be magic.

*A Few of Joyce Maguire Pavao's Top Adoption Movies

• "The Miracle"
• "High Tide"
• "The Official Story"
• "Coco"
• "Second Best"
• "Catfish and Blackbean Sauce"

As presented May 1, 2010, "Adoption in Film," at the conference organized by the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture

Who Gets Baby Emma: Her Single Daddy or Her Married Adoptive Parents?

Guest Post by Laura Deurmyer for Adopt-a-tude

I bring two distinct and sometimes warring perspectives to bear on media accounts of adoptions. I am an adoptee—adopted at birth during what is known as the Baby Scoop Era. I have also been a foster parent who tried unsuccessfully to adopt a baby I loved.

If women are to have a real adoption option when confronting an unplanned pregnancy, we must take adoption questions and issues seriously as a society. We must stop treating adoption as the next human-interest story or as a tear-jerker movie of the week. 

The baby Emma Wyatt story featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times recently interested me as much for what it didn’t say as for its unmistakably fascinating facts. What set it apart and got it featured in the Post and in the Times and ultimately on Good Morning America rather than simply in a few obscure adoption blog sites, was its play on the Dr. Phil show.

The basic story—birth father who wants to raise his own child is denied that opportunity by birth mom who places the baby for adoption against his wishes—has been played out numerous times in recent years. It’s a common enough problem that there are whole websites devoted to helping unwed birth fathers retain custody of their children. Several of the players in the baby Emma story—the adoption agency, the lawyer, the state of Utah—feature in more than one of these tales.

(Note: One website that does catalog and discuss problems with adoption is poundpuplegacy.org. Although I don’t agree with much of that site’s seemingly anti-adoption bent, I have linked to it in this story because it clearly lists and explores problematic cases like baby Emma’s.)

Even in major media coverage of the story, a rational discussion of adoption policy or a thorough examination of states’ roles in voluntary placement adoption is mostly lacking. Instead, the story has devolved into the heart-wrenching tale of a father’s loss with class-warfare overtones.

Emma was born in Virginia and spirited away to Utah—a state that makes it notoriously difficult for unwed dads to asset their rights—for adoption immediately after her birth. Virginia courts have sided with the father, John Wyatt, and have ordered the little girl to be returned to him. Utah courts have thus far maintained that John Wyatt did not comply with their regulations for asserting parental rights and that the adoption should stand. 

There has been no intimation that the child would be unsafe either with her adoptive parents or with her natural father. John Wyatt works at a nightclub; he is twenty-one. The adoptive parents are established, successful college-educated mid-career professionals who are very economically stable, married, and no doubt desperately in love with this little girl after raising her for almost a year. 

Much of the news coverage of the story sides openly with John Wyatt, and I would have to agree with that. However, the idea that Emma might be better off with the more economically advantaged and martially stable adoptive parents—the state of Utah’s underlying basic argument—is implied in Lisa Belkin’s New York Times piece on her Motherlode blog, in which she asks:

Who do you think should have custody of “Baby Emma”? The stable married couple who are, as their lawyer says, “the only parents this child has ever known,” or the single 21-year-old nightclub worker who has never seen her, though he certainly has tried?

(Belkin later used comments to clarify that she too believes John Wyatt should have custody.) 

My heart goes out to John Wyatt. He has been trying, since his daughter’s birth, to be a responsible father. Had he been married to Emma’s mom, Emma would likely be with him now. 

My heart also goes out to the adoptive parents. They put their trust in the adoption agency, the lawyers and the birth mom. After having Emma in their homes and in their hearts for a year, they stand to lose a daughter. I know what that feels like—it’s like a death in the family.

Most of all, however, my heart goes out to Emma Wyatt. She deserves to know her Daddy. She deserves the chance to be Emma Wyatt. Perhaps her material future would be brighter in a home with higher net worth and two parents. But she has a birth parent who loves her, who wants her.  Ask any adoptee—that’s all most of us ever wanted—to know that our “other” parents did love us.

For the families involved in this situation, it is no-win deal. Someone will end up devastated. Baby Emma will deal with emotional issues for the rest of her life.

Adoption can be a wonderful thing; it is a gift of the heart. A choice to love. So many children need desperately for someone to choose them. Their birth parents either don’t want them, or can’t get their lives in order enough to parent them safely. 

You will never convince me that an adoptive parent can’t love an adopted child just as fiercely as a “real” parent. Having been both the child and the parent in an adoptive relationship, I know better. 

Though I have wanted to know my birth background most of my life, I have never doubted that my parents—and they are my parents—love me.  Though I knew that raising our baby girl would have had its problems—crack babies can have behavioral issues well past infancy, and we would have had to address racial identify questions sensitively and honestly—I loved her, and love her, with all my heart.

Love aside, adoption is not always the best choice. We should be talking about cases like this in order to shape our adoption expectations as a society. If states like Utah, with its majority Mormon population and overwhelming prejudice against single parenthood are allowed to compromise the rights of parents in other states, that is unacceptable. We need to talk about that.

If as a society, we believe a two-career, multi-degreed, financially successful married couple should trump a blue-collar daddy or a single mom for parental rights, in the best interest of the child, despite that single parent’s desire and ability to raise the child, that is unacceptable. We need to talk about that. 

Adoption should be easy, when the circumstances call for it. It should be virtually impossible when we are taking children away from biological parents against their will absent abuse or neglect. 

Some states are toying with the idea that they can choose not to follow federal law in selected matters; now is the time to codify exactly what we can and can’t stomach in the adoption process as a society. Otherwise, states with a hard-right theological bent might move even farther in the direction Utah has taken, with disastrous results for children and families.

Adoption, Russian-Style: Are We Up to the Challenge?

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

The saga of seven-year-old Russian-born Artyom Savelyev’s adoption gone wrong has once again focused attention on the controversies that dog international adoptions.

Artyom’s tragic journey begs us to consider if there is a difference between an adopted and a biological child—and if so, does adoption give a parent the right to return a child when the relationship disappoints?

As the adoptive mother of a twelve-year-old born in Russia, I have to say an emphatic no.  From the moment I held my son in my arms and smelled his skin, I knew he was a part of me. These kids are not Russian dolls. They didn’t ask for us. We wanted them.

The problem is, Artyom’s story has become a convenient hook for Russian politicking as well as for commentators who know little about the experience of parenting deeply troubled children. Sensationalized headlines make great copy, but they distract from the truth.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the actions of Artyom’s adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, a 33-year-old single mom and nurse, “a monstrous deed.”  Pavel Astakhov, the Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner, threatened to suspend adoptions unless Russia and the U.S. sign a treaty to ensure that Russian children are better protected once they leave the Motherland. Acrid complaints about the treatment of Russian adoptees in the hands of American families have resurfaced, specifically 16 deaths due to abuse since 1996.

What is omitted from the storyline is Russia’s own treatment of children who are abandoned and orphaned and then placed in institutional care.

The Russians also conveniently seem to forget that protective laws are already in place. The United States and about 80 other nations have signed on to and ratified the Hague Convention, a body of treaties whose purpose is "to work for the progressive unification…of private international [adoption] law…” (from Article 1 of the Statute of the Hague Conference). Standardizing these practices, especially when it comes to money, adoption disclosure, and parent training, seems a crucial tool for monitoring pre-and post-adoption placement. Russia, however, is currently a non-Hague Convention country.

Brandeis researcher E.J. Graff, laid out in the Boston Globe this past week just how dire Russia’s intransigent position could prove to be.  Thousands of institutionalized children who desperately need homes may not be placed in one. Those placed might fear return to their first country if the placement does not go well.  

Russia officialdom’s outrage is a hollow distraction as it tries to dig into the deep pockets of American largesse. Lacking both the political and financial will to fix their corrupt institutional care system, the Russians would love nothing more than to have American dollars pay for the care and oversight they themselves have chronically failed to provide.

In the pecking order of Russian social services, institutionalized children get a very thin slice of the safety-net pie. In a 2007 report, Unicef cited that nearly 200,000 Russian children lived in state institutions and were provided only the minimum of custodial care. With a low qualification threshold for childcare workers and a woeful lack of adequate resources, the staff often reflects the same lethargy as the children in its care.

Compounding the neglect is the Russian political tactic of delaying international adoptions. Since 1998, when we adopted our son, the waiting period has doubled from four months to eight, if everything goes without a hitch. The intention is to give Russian nationals the opportunity to adopt before proceeding with an out-of-country placement. The reality is that Russians have been slow to adopt.  The number of children available greatly outpaces the demand.

While the media, the U.S., and Russia wrangle and posture over the legal machinations of this case, the real-life tragedy has been pushed off-center like a sidebar. 

Last year, Americans adopted 1,586 children from Russia, the third highest rate for non-domestic adoptions. Chuck Johnson, CEO of the National Council for Adoption, stated on NPR last week that more than 60,000 Russian children have been successfully adopted in the United States.

When looking at failed adoptions, Johnson said the rate is 15% for both foreign and domestic adoptions. Biological families, like adoptive families, can also become unhinged. In 2006 (the most recent year for which there are statistics), the number of children in domestic foster care topped 510,000.

So if many kinds of families do fall apart, why has this story captured our collective consciousness?

Simply stated: shame.

Artyom’s story tells us not just that two nations and assorted agencies supposedly working on his behalf failed him but that our American ideal-laden notions of parenting, family, and adoption did as well.

How frightened and alone this seven-year-old must have felt, plucked, like a toy in a claw-operated prize booth, from where he lived and flown across the ocean to an English-speaking home in predominately white, rural Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Although some facts have dribbled out through the media free-for-all, we really know very little about Torry Hansen or what actually occurred in her home. Hansen herself says she will not speak or meet with investigators unless she is formally charged with a crime.

Artyom’s life both prior to and after his adoption is a mystery, deeply concealed by both language and cultural barriers. It is unclear when Hansen began to feel overwhelmed by his unhappiness. Was she self-blaming and resentful? Or was the reality of life with her adopted son so removed from her imaginings of motherhood that she found the situation unbearable?

Adoptive parents may be able to empathize with Hansen, but what we need, as a society, is a reality check. Adoption is not a trial run. When we adopt, as when we birth, we bring into our orbit of love and care a being wholly dependent on us. It’s about a no-turning-back lifetime commitment to raising a child and helping that child navigate his or her way safely into adulthood.

I know something about what Hansen must have been going through. Like her, I am a single parent. (My husband died three months after we adopted our baby son. Our biological daughter was three at that time.)  Like the alleged reports about Artyom’s disruptive behavior, my son has been a tough kid to parent: four schools, multiple therapists, meds, lots of acting out, and need for in-home support.

But unlike Hansen, I never thought it an option to relinquish my son, despite extreme moments of exasperation, his bouts with unpredictable behaviors, and the number of gray hairs he has given me.

Although my son was just five months old when we adopted him, institutional neglect was already apparent. He was constantly hungry, underweight, malnourished, listless, prone to self-soothing, and subsequently chronically ill for the first four years of life.  In pre-school, the best that could be said about his social skills was “does not play well with others.”

But instead of his challenges pushing me away, they have fueled my quest to be a better, smarter mother. I have attended workshops, support groups, individual and family therapy, and secured mental-health services.

I say this not as a putdown to Hansen, or any other parent who has struggled with difficult children, but as a way to offer insight into what it takes to nurture, care for, and love a child that flails against your best intentions. Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have benefited from a highly educated, massively professionalized, and resource-intensive urban area. As an older parent, I have many friends who have also adopted, and together we share our uncertainties, experiences, and support systems.

With professional help, I learned to overcome the great waves of inadequacy I encountered when my son was a toddler and I wasn’t sure I was up to the job of being his mother. With the loving support of friends and family, I have navigated through the tough social and educational choices I needed to make for the well being of my son.

I have learned that asking for help is not shameful and does not reflect on my parenting inabilities. I have learned, as all parents must learn, that the needs of my son are often much more urgent than my own.

And I have also learned that the only thing shameful about this kind of struggle is a lack of funding and political will for the services families truly need to care for their children. If we’re not up to the job, then who is?

To read more about Fran's personal story of adopting an infant son in Russia, read her 2009 Adopt-a-tude piece "Why Do the Russians Make It So Hard to Adopt?"

Haitian Adoptees: The Problem with "Why Not?"

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

This is the third in a series of commentaries on Adopt-a-tude about Haitian orphans and international adoption. The press spotlight has been on ethical infractions, for very good reason. But now we have local news stories about U.S.-Haiti adoptions that have been completed successfully. The word "savior" is never mentioned, but that's where the focus seems to be—again.


It's Saturday morning, and the Boston Globe has a beautiful, provoking, complicated photo above the fold on the front page. A dark-skinned girl with a purple headband and huge grin tackle-hugs a white woman with strawberry-blonde hair.

They're sitting on an oriental rug that's covering a hard-wood floor. The caption: "Wislandie, an 8-year-old orphan from Haiti, is right at home with adoptive mother Beth Wescott of North Andover."

I love this picture. As an adoptive mom myself, it's a relief after all the mug shots of misguided missionaries trying to smuggle children out of Haiti. In the video that accompanies the online version of the story, "A New Home for Wislandie," adoptive mom Beth gently rocks a little girl who is lively and mischievous but also clearly in need of comfort.

Yet the Globe's photo spread, video, and story by Maria Sacchetti—"Joy, Frustration Brought Home"—raise big questions for me, too, because of all that isn't said or shown. This front-page feature, more than all the press about those criminally ignorant Baptists, exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that's part of transracial adoption.

Why is the white-savior storyline so entrenched? And why is it so hard for the "objective" journalistic voice to talk about race?

The racial difference of these Haitian adoptees and their adoptive parents isn't mentioned once in this story. Perhaps the photo and video are supposed to lay that issue on the table—and they do—but the story frame is the usual one of dedicated church members (Wislandie's adoptive father is a pastor) visiting Haitian children in a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

To be fair to Wislandie's new parents and the orphanage (the Marion Austin Christian School) and this story, "about 10 Boston-area churches regularly send mission groups to help at the school," Sacchetti writes—and the connection prospective adoptive parents have formed with children apparently often goes back to when they were toddlers. Many of the prospective adoptees are in their teens.

Before the earthquake, some adoptions were already in-process; according to the article, a few like Wislandie's have been successfully completely. But other potential adoptive parents and adoptees wait, mired in even more bureaucratic red tape, as conditions for the orphanage children worsen. (In this same issue of the Globe, the story above Sacchetti's, after the jump to page A8,  is headlined "Haiti Wants Refugees Back in Ravaged Areas.")

As Massachusetts state rep Barry Finegold asks: "These children are never going to have families in Haiti, so why not try to bring them into loving families in Massachusetts?"

Yes, why not? The rhetorical question rings true in the most immediate way for long-time orphans. Seventeen-year-old Auguste Joseph wants to join his frustrated adoptive parents in Ashby, Masschusetts. Like other kids in the orphanage wearing Red Sox T-shirts, Auguste is quoted as saying, "I'm dying to go.... I've been waiting for a long time."

Why not?

For many of us in the international adoption community—adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoption workers—this question is far from simple, though. After "why not?",  I also wonder "what next?"

There are hints of the dissonance to come in an evocative description at the end of the Globe feature: Wislandie is now wearing pink Crocs and has a bedroom of her own with heart-patterned wallpaper. "It is not an easy transition," Sacchetti writes; the girl's adoptive parents "look alternately joyful and exhausted."

Most haunting: "Even though she has so much now, Wislandie insists on dividing every snack or sandwich, to give away half to her mother, father, or sister."

The story then closes with her adoptive mom insisting—rightly—that her daughter isn't the only one who's lucked out.

Yet this is really just the prologue. The rest of the real story, which varies with every transracial adoptee and his or her particular family circumstances, is full of complications of race and culture and loss that apparently can't be accommodated in a mainstream news feature.

Here's where have I to ask: Why not? Why can't a daily paper like the Boston Globe, in a metropolitan area that includes a large Haitian immigrant population, tell this story as more than one white family's joy and the frustration of other waiting white families?

At least one caller to a January 20 NPR show, "Where Will All the Haitian Orphans Go?", raised issues of cultural and homeland loss. These were treated seriously by Tom DiFilipo, president and CEO of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, the guest on this edition of Talk of the Nation.

Other sources, such as the ColorLines' blog RaceWire, have grappled with the racial question of whites adopting Haitian orphans. And as one topic on the Haitian Internet Newsletter, "Haiti's Orphans, what are we going to do about it?", puts it:

"Let me ask you a question:

Do you really think that the rest of the world will just fly to Haiti and take all these Haitian kids into new homes somewhere outside of Haiti so they can live happily ever after?

The orphan children of Haiti are Haiti's problem and now is the time to start talking about how we're going to deal with it.

This is our country, these are our kids..."

Discussions about race and culture and international adoption are all over the Internet and in various blog and editorial forms, even in mainstream-press outlets. But you wouldn't know it from this Globe feature about Wislandie.

Interestingly, a number of the online comments to the story so far have been negative, pointing out snidely that there are American black kids waiting for adoption, too. That kind of knee-jerk response flips too far in the other direction, but it's obvious that readers and video-watchers are reacting immediately to the racial difference.

You could argue that daily news features are really people stories. Americans adopting orphans from countries like Haiti or Vietnam (as in my own family) can surely be heart-warming.

Simplifying the emotional storyline, however, by focusing only on getting home to America has political and social implications. It seems to deny that differences of race and culture matter. And I don't think daily news is off the hook for promulgating musty stereotypes—letting anonymous online commenters criticize or go out on a limb rather than reporting on what this white mother, for example, thinks about parenting a black child.

Of course Wislandie is happy to be free of the current devastation in Port-au-Prince, where many families huddle under nothing but bedsheet tents as the rainy season approaches.

Yet what will she think of her homeland as she gets older? Will she make connections with the local Haitian community in Boston and Cambridge? Will she keep speaking French and Creole? Will she realize that Haiti has a rich history and literature, a complicated history, that it is not just defined by poverty and disaster?

That is the international adoptive parenting journey. It is very possible that Wislandie's adoptive mom and dad will help her along the way. In the video, Beth holds the girl close and talks realistically about adjustment challenges and the scene in Haiti.

But not until I read more mainstream stories that dig into white adoptive parents talking about race—and not until I hear more about the links that could be forged between adoptees and the Haitian American community—will I believe that the discussion of international adoption has moved beyond saving those poor lucky kids from a place better left behind in the rubble.

Asian Adoptees, Anime Heroes, and the Racebending Controversy

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

I began writing about the anime-inspired Avatar/Last Airbender cartoons in order to rave about how much everyone in my small family loves them. But I soon discovered that the live-action movie, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, has been cast with mostly white actors in the lead roles.

The controversy has been brewing for awhile, but I'd like to alert other adoptive parents to this "racebending," as it's been called by Asian American critics, especially after a glitzy ad for the movie ran during the Super Bowl. Please take a look at Racebending.com for information about the movie protest.

Who would have thought I’d develop a midlife crush on anime?

It’s true that at a recent showing of the New England Anime Society I felt a hundred years older than the mostly male geek audience. I had to leave within five minutes, unable to sit through the dialogue.

An approximation: “Look at his underpants!” “Ooh, he’s wearing underpants with a heart on them!” (Snigger, snigger.) “Careful, that girl on a bicycle has breasts.”

I won’t claim cartoons like this grip me. I've never been a big animation fan. But The Last Airbender, the epic Nickelodeon series, exists on a different plane altogether.

Whether it's My Neighbor Totoro, the kind of Japanese shorts I saw at the anime festival, or the American-flavored Nickelodeon series, these cartoons are undeniably Asian-themed.

As in Japanese anime, some of the characters have white skin or those big manga eyes. As in Kung Fu Panda, the Airbender cartoons employed mostly white voice actors; sometimes the young heroes sound like they've walked off an iCarly set.

But anyone who's watched the animated Airbender series knows that everything in it, from the character names to the music, is steeped in Asian cultural references. What my son sees in the cartoons are Asian heroes taking charge of the action—heroes who look like him.

That's why I'm frankly appalled that white actors will be playing many of the young heroes in the upcoming movie of The Last Airbender. In a good play on words, critics have called this racial reworking of the movie yet another example of "racebending."

Because my son has just turned eight, I want to celebrate what he so obviously loves about the Airbender series—the martial arts sequences, complete with lightning and ice arrows; the Asian imagery; the teenage heroes—and its particular meaning for us as an adoptive family.

I know I’m on suspect cultural ground here. Yet my son, an Asian adoptee, is growing up in a white American household. The Airbender cartoons are an anime hybrid created by two white American guys with the help of Korean animators—a fitting metaphor for us.

Now here comes a special-effects extravaganza of a movie, one my son will surely beg to see, which is another kind of metaphor. It will symbolize why Asian adoptees often feel like honorary white people.

I do worry about how my boy will put himself together as an Asian American man; I've come to see his fascination with anime and manga cartoons as a way for him to grapple with his heritage on his own terms. But with the Airbender movie, he'll get no help. Directed by the high-profile M. Night Shyamalan, it's in the works for this summer and may soon become a juggernaut. 

Shame on you, M. Night Shyamalan.

My husband and I can never claim we have a personal understanding of racism. We could be accused of ripping off Asian culture in adopting a child from Vietnam. Our family can't be reduced to that, but if I'm mercilessly honest, I have to admit that Asian culture is as appealing to me as it is to other white Americans who dabble in martial arts and yoga, attend anime festivals, and go to Chinese New Year's parades.

That makes it even more important for parents like me to challenge racism, unconscious and otherwise, and to name it for what it is.

When I mentioned to my son that white actors will be playing many of his favorite characters in the movie—including Aang, the last airbender and center of the story—he said, "What? That's weird. That doesn't make sense."

No kidding. Here's a fun YouTube montage from the animated original:

Aang is a bald 12-year-old monk with a blue arrow tattooed on his forehead. He's also a reincarnated spiritual leader known as the “Avatar.” He's the Dalai Lama, not Gandalf. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender first aired on Nickelodeon in 2005. Because we watched all three “Books” on DVD long after it was broadcast, we could see as many episodes as we wanted in a sitting. Every time we’d say a collective "No!" at the end of one—my son always adding, "What a cliffhanger!"—we’d look at each other and hit play for the next. (In case you’re wondering, the Avatar cartoons have nothing to do with the James Cameron movie.)

When the series opens, the Fire Nation is ruled by an evil lord who wants to take over the world. In The Last Airbender universe, benders have magical powers based on the four elements—air, water, earth, and fire. The Avatar is the one person who can bend them all. Aang is very young to become the Avatar. But the Fire Lord is on the march again, and Aang, with the help of his loyal companions, has to learn fast how to bend the other elements.

For those who don't love fantasy, there's no way to avoid the inflated portentousness this gloss implies. It’s manga-meets-The Lord of the Rings-meets Buddhism.

Yet it works. At least the animated version does. Thank God we've watched the cartoons before Shyamalan's epic rolls out. Here's the trailer that ran during the Super Bowl last night:

Impressive as it looks, it seems too bombastic and literal. As for the racebending casting choices, cartoonists Derek Kirk Kim and Gene Yang have written eloquent posts about why this is a problem. Take these excerpts from Kim's post, written a year ago "on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration":

"[I]magine if someone had made a 'fantasy' movie in which the entire world was built around African culture. Everyone is wearing ancient African clothes, African hats, eating traditional African food, writing in an African language, living in African homes, all encompassed in an African landscape...

...but everyone is white.

How offensive, insulting, and disrespectful would that be toward Africans and African Americans? How much more offensive would it be if only the heroes were white and all the villains and background characters were African American? (I wince in fear thinking about The Last Airbender suffering from the latter dynamic—which it probably will....)

But curiously, when similar offenses are committed at the expense of Asian Americans, and Asian American men in particular, this sort of behavior goes mostly ignored by the press and the people involved." 

It's true that outcries of racism by the model minority are generally shrugged off by mainstream America. This trailer from an upcoming documentary called Yellow Face emphasizes why protesting the racial reworking of a kid's TV show is not just "silly" or a waste of effort.

The Shyamalan movie, the first of a planned trilogy, will likely get a big promotional push, especially after the success of Cameron's Avatar. That Shyamalan, an Indian American, went with such casting choices indicates how unconscious racism can be. Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire will play the crucial role of Prince Zuko, but only after replacing the original white actor cast for the role.

Just to be clear: Japanese and Korean creators of anime characters, be they super-ninjas or ghetto-talking African Americans, aren't off the hook for perpetuating racist stereotypes.

These days, there's an endless parade of martial-arts superhero franchises (and action figures and trading cards to buy), but most of this drek never rises above the ridiculously rote. There still aren't many positive, complex images of Asian characters in popular media—people who aren't karate-chopping villains on speeding trains or running nasty industrial cartels.

Which is why it's such a shame that many of the Airbender heroes won't be Asian in the movie.

In the Airbender cartoons we get Katara, a waterbender with healing powers, and her brother Sokka, resident goof and complainer. We get Toph, a blind earthbender who can bowl over bad guys four times her size and sees the world through her feet. We get Appa, Aang's flying bison, whom the loyal buddies ride through the air. 

There are kick-ass evil girls as well as good ones; soldiers who ride bird-horses; a haiku rap contest; even an old and cold soul in the spirit world who steals people's faces.

There are romantic entanglements, far more than in the buddy-plot of The Lord of the Rings. Aang’s cheeks often turn pink—in best anime style—in the vicinity of Katara.

Most important, there's character development and moral ambiguity, especially in the person of Prince Zuko, the banished teenage son of the Fire Lord. Zuko starts off trying to capture the Avatar in order to regain his father's approval. By Book Two of the series, Zuko is in a major tug-a-war of conscience over which side he's on. 

Adults will get more of the satirical references in The Last Airbender cartoons, but I think my son really understands and wonders about the same conflicts I do. To "bend" this story racially in order to appeal to a more mainstream audience is to do a real disservice to the complex questions about history and family the cartoons raise. 

In an early episode called “The Library,” Aang and his companions, along with a professor of anthropology, find a legendary library of all the world's knowledge almost completely buried by sand in the middle of a desert.

Once they enter the library through an upper window, they meet an Owl-like spirit who runs it. The Owl is not warm and fuzzy. This amoral spirit looks like a kabuki-painted demon in a black shawl.

Still, the Owl agrees to let them stay as long as they don't take away knowledge in order to hurt other humans. Sokka, in particular, doesn't keep that promise, and the Owl flies into a frenzy. They flee for their lives, just escaping before the library collapses forever into the sand.

On the way out, however, the professor can't make himself leave. He stays behind and disappears with the rest of the library. 

"Why didn't he leave?” my son asked. “Didn't he die?"

“Some people will do anything for knowledge,” I said.

He didn’t look convinced.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. “Some adults just get obsessed.”

"Why?" His voice quivered. “Did he die?” 

I wanted to comfort my boy then, as if he were a baby, murmuring it will be fine, it’s all right, you will never lose anybody you love. Ssshh, real adults don’t act that way. 

I reached for him, but he slapped my hands away.

“No!” he sobbed.

I stayed with my son as he cried and raged—internally kicking myself. Stupid professor. Except I understood the man’s love of books and his obliviousness, just as my son knows some adults really do disappear.

More recently, he and I have talked about which Airbender episodes are the most disturbing. He doesn’t want to watch something like “The Library” again, and I’ve since wondered if I should have spared him the disturbing parts. But on balance, I'd say no.
 

Birthdays have their own emotional weight for adoptees. My son has just celebrated another one with us—happily, I think. Yet birthdays inevitably evoke missing parents, too, and in his case, a missing race and culture. At eight, my son is full of joy. He may also be excited by the prospect of traveling beyond his white American existence, a desire that churns up guilt and grief.

The point is, his journey will be complex. Shyamalan's movie may ask big questions, too, but he's got a hard act to follow.

Late in the animated series, Prince Zuko visits his family’s summer house on a remote island, discovering photos of his mother and father when he was a small child. In the pictures, they're laughing; they seem happy. Teenage Zuko, estranged from his father, his mother gone, becomes more furious and sullen.

As we watched Zuko burn the photos, my son snuggled closer to me.

“It’s sad,” he said.

I nodded my head against his glossy black hair. “It’s very sad.”

Oh, my dear boy. Happy Birthday.


This post appeared on Open Salon in a slightly different form as "How I Became an Anime Fan—Not a Racebender."  Some of the comments there indicate why racism keeps sneaking in under the wire.

 

All drawings by my son and used with his permission.

The Birds and Bees for Adoptees: Where’s the Buzz?

Guest Post by Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude


Central to all our lives is the question of who we are—the desire to know who came before us and what about them we retain in ourselves. 

Do I have my grandmother’s nose? Who had my shade of blue eyes? On whom can I blame my frizzy mousy hair? Am I hot-tempered because my ancestors were Italian or Irish, or do I brood and go off on long cerebral tangents because they were Russian?

When we look at our biological parents, siblings, and extended families, each of us sees parts of ourselves reflected back. Through the act of sex, genes from each of our parents are transmitted, collide into one another, and then ricochet off to form new patterns.  While not clones—we know, we see, we feel—we are from a common cross-pollinated pool in which we have all been dipped. 

In biological families, we can identify who had sex with whom to produce the people we call our own.

For adopted children, however, this family parlor game of dissecting facial features, body type, aptitude, and temperament cannot be played out. Often, as in my own case—my 11-year old son is a Russian adoptee—adoptive parents know nothing of the ancestry or the biology of their children. Adopted children arrive in our lives fully formed, like the stork delivering the baby, void of reproductive biology or history.

For the single-digit age group, the stork tale is a very serviceable story, up to a point. But pinch-hitting, as is true for any temporary fix, ultimately exhausts its usefulness: the introspection and self-awareness of emerging adolescence inevitably disrupts the story line.

The happy-ever-after fairy tales of Disney’s family sagas, whether about deer, dogs, or elephants, give way to the to the weighted truth of sexual consequences in Juno—from “how did the stork know where we lived” to young teens recoiling at the thought that their parents did “it.”

And, as parents know, talking about sexual intimacy, or “having the conversation,” with your child is awkward, self-conscious, and a rite-of-passage parenting moment best when over. When I mustered the cool to broach the topic with my now 15-year-old biological daughter, she responded, “I know all about that.”

My adopted son, however, recently broached the subject with me. While seeking an answer to a question not out of the ordinary for an 11-year old, what he really wanted was for me to talk about his birth. 

He asked if he had been in my tummy. I had to tell him no.

The biological chemistry of baby-making is the same for every child that is birthed. But for an adopted child the context and subtext are altered. Yes, man-sperm, woman-egg, sex and conception—but with adoption, the parents relating the facts and the child receiving them are not perpetuating familial genetic history from one generation to the next. Instead, the biological tale signifies both a beginning and an end. 

By telling my son he was not in my tummy, I was acknowledging he was not of our genetic pool.  His hereditary history is different from his sister’s, from mine, and my late husband’s. 

Some may think this fact sad or harsh. But in truth, all of us are disparate until we form our own family units and form new lines. My son may not have been biologically conceived by us, but we are now a family. His place in it will be forever woven into the future coda, the story, of our family line. His children will be ours.

Adopting Nick into our family was the beginning of his new life as our son and brother to his sister. But telling my son he was not in my tummy implied he was in someone else’s.

So many times I have asked myself who this woman might have been. What were the circumstances that led her to give up her newborn son, which is all I know about her?  Was she young, old, healthy, sick, addicted, abused, overwhelmed, tall, short, athletic, musical, withdrawn or passionate? What is the color of her hair?

Does my son look like her?

Nick doesn’t ask me those questions, although, when pre-school age, he and my daughter would together imagine what his Russian mother might have been like. Instead, he asks about my husband, who died three months after we adopted Nick. Through these stories, I re-create my husband, a father that Nick never knew. These stories are his compass to manhood. Of his biological father, there is no information.

I tell him, “Daddy was tall, like you are going to be. And you like to tell silly jokes, just like Daddy did.” I also tell him, when he says he misses his father, how proud his father would be of him.

Yes, we are all conceived through sex. But is that collision and random assemblage of genes what binds families or parents to their children? Given the currents of love that surge between my son and me, I say the answer is no.

Sex is fun, mysterious, and one of the perks of our human race. Under the right circumstances, it creates new life. But the sexual act does not dictate the way we love our children, wax maternal, or hover over them like bears with their cubs.

I may not have physically conceived my son, but we did conceive our love for him. The next time he asks if he came from my tummy, I’ll say, “No, you came from my heart.”


Fran Cronin began her writing career in New York, with guest editorials for Sculpture Magazine followed by contributing stories for Technology Today. In addition, she wrote scripts and copy for health and safety print and media campaigns while living in Washington, D.C. She is currently a journalism master’s candidate at the Harvard Extension School. Her most recent article, “Why Do the Russians Make It So Tough to Adopt?” recently appeared in Adopt-a-tude.

The Places That Scare Us

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

A few more thoughts on "Find My Family" and a holiday wish.


On tonight's episode of Find My Family, Tina said she just wanted to know if her birth son was happy and healthy. When she learned he's in his twenties and doing fine, she said, "I could be done right now."

Of course on this ABC show she wasn't done. Tina went on to meet her son Tim. Whether those of us watching Find My Family are birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents, or not part of the adoption triad, we know such cathartic moments often lead to disappointment.

Yet that doesn't make the intensity any less true. I've come to believe that celebrating such moments matters.

Not every adoptive family is a happy one; not every birth parent wants to be found; not every adoptee is "lucky" or traumatized by loss. We all come to this issue with our own loads of baggage.

But most of us are able to handle many conflicting feelings. We can love more than one mother or father. Love is not an on-off switch or the simplistic binary of Hollywood movies or the National Enquirer. What's most transformative about adoption is the way it allows us to extend the boundaries of love; it validates the rich complexity of life.

For me, it's ironic that a reality show like Find My Family presents more emotional nuance than you'll see almost anywhere else on TV. I admit, I was on the defensive when I watched the first episode, after reading dire warnings from other adoptive parents on sites like Rainbowkids. The soapy formula, the tearful hosts, the relentless happy endings put me off before I'd experienced a second of it.

But after the first episode, I felt divided. Artificial as the format seemed—and that glowing "family tree" on a heavenly hillside is still hard to take—it couldn't squelch the feelings of the participants.

As a result, I sought other responses to the show from different perspectives in the triad. The range of reactions to these Adopt-a-tude posts has made for a bracing conversation. It hasn't been an easy discussion for an adoptive parent like me. But it's a necessary one, I think, and I find that my frame of reference has changed.

I'm still concerned about the show's melodramatic pitch and telling edits. Yet despite its flaws, I'm drawn to the undeniable gut impact of these stories. (Click here for my reaction on Open Salon: "Find My Family: Why Reality TV Sometimes Works.")

I want to thank fellow adoptive parent Lisa for her honesty in sharing how she grapples with these issues. I recognize myself in her. I thank Claudia, a birth mother, and David, an adult adoptee, for their passionate defense of the show. The journey I've gone on is nothing to compare with the walk up the hill of those previously lost souls David speaks of in his review; that's something I can only imagine—yet I am able to imagine it now, an unexpected gift.

My wish? That we carry this conversation forward. That we hear each other's pain and accept it. That we form alliances.

"What is it that allows our goodwill to expand and our prejudice and anger to decrease?" asks Pema Chödron in The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

We may not want to train as "warrior-bodhisattvas," in the words of this Buddhist nun, but recognizing how interconnected we are—"to grow in understanding that when we harm another, we are harming ourselves"—makes sense to me. As Chödron writes,

"Our personal attempts to live humanely in this world are never wasted. Choosing to cultivate love rather than anger just might be what it takes to save the planet from extinction.... So we train in recognizing our uptightness. We train in seeing that others are not so different from ourselves. We train in opening our hearts and minds in increasingly difficult situations."

I thank you all for stopping by Adopt-a-tude and helping this op-ed-zine to thrive. May the new year be illuminating, too.