You Do Not Know My Family

By Martha Nichols

The Ethics of Adoption Writing

When my husband and I adopted a baby son in Vietnam in 2002, I never imagined I’d have to explain to our little boy eight years later why another adoptive mother had returned a child. But last April, that’s exactly where I found myself, along with everyone else who watched the sad saga of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev unfold.

In early April 2010, Artyom was put on an airplane alone by his American adoptive grandmother and flown back to Moscow. He was accompanied only by a note written by his adoptive mother Torry Hansen, a single nurse in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

According to the Associated Press, the note said that she’d been lied to in Russia about the boy’s difficulties: “After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

The why of a news story like this will always hook us. But as an adoptive parent and writer, it’s become a far more intimate ethical struggle for me.

Within days, I had written an Artyom commentary that appeared on the cover of Salon: “Adoption Fearmongers Take Over.” My focus was on the sensationalized news coverage, including a Nightline report about “the inside stories of adoptions that go horribly wrong.” Yet as the week of Artyom stories roared on, other adoptive parents began confessing their difficulties with problem adoptees, often in specific detail and splashed all over NPR, national TV, and the Internet.

It’s an old conundrum of memoir writing: What right does an author have to reveal private details about the lives of other family members—especially their children? My standard for writing autobiographical nonfiction has long been that I must make myself more vulnerable in print than any relative or friend I write about. So far, I believe I’ve hewed to the ethical side of this personal contract.

But it’s also true that a year after Artyom’s flight back to Russia, I’m doing less writing about my son—or, to be scrupulously accurate, the nature of my writing about him has changed. His views of adoption, in particular, do not seem mine to share...

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

---

Editor's Note: The full text of this piece appears in the April 2011 issue of Talking Writing, in which the theme is "Too Much Truth? The Ethics of Memoir Writing."

---

Aimee Louise Sword and the Press: "Rape" vs. a "Summer Romance"

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude



Try googling “Aimee Louise Sword.” The top hit is a compilation of news stories and commentaries about Sword pleading guilty this week to having sex with her 14-year-old birth son. At the moment, there are "533 related articles.

Yet one of the other top hits will be a ten-month-old story from the Huffington Post, complete with an embedded Fox News video: “Aimee Louise Sword Raped Son She Gave Up For Adoption.” A hit of the same vintage from ABC News opens this way: “A Michigan mother is facing a trial after being accused of having a summer romance with the teenage son she gave up for adoption.”

Unusual and disturbing as this story was when it broke in September 2009, there’s a big leap between rape and summer romance.

Let me be clear: Sexual abuse is never OK. Because parents have the power in a relationship, they are always at fault. Yet there are tricky angles on this story. Sword was not raising this boy in the caregiving sense. She claims to have initiated contact with him through Facebook only after she stopped hearing from his adoptive parents. What happened is repellant; it also pushes all the wrong buttons, just as so many stories about adoptions gone terribly awry do.

Last year, I wrote about the online response to Sword's arrest (click here). The story swirled through the blogosphere with a wild array of facts; some reports said her son was only 10 years old. Most said little about his adoptive parents. While the original news story from the Oakland Press in the Detroit area was a standard journalistic account, almost none of the subsequent commentaries paused to question why Sword might have done what she did.

A "MILF" in her mid-thirties, Sword has become both a pariah and an object of prurient interest. Her MySpace photos still appear all over the Internet. She's also been married and has five other children.

Advocates for birth mothers—or adoption in general—are not shaping this discussion, and that's a bad thing. Some recent media commentaries, like Tracy Clark-Flory's piece in Salon, have at least addressed the fact that reunions between birth parents and children can be fraught with all sorts of intense emotions. The UPI account includes a quote from Sword at her sentencing: "I am remorseful for everything that occurred."

But then we get all the ugliness oozing up through the cracks. A quick review of recent online headlines gives us, among others "INCEST MUM" and "Yummy Mummy Heads for Jaily Waily."

Now she's been sentenced to jail for at least nine years. More facts are on the record, although Sword herself admitted in court that she still doesn't know how it happened. It's not at all clear that she "tracked" or "stalked" her son on the Internet. The UPI story notes in passing that the prosecutor (not Sword's lawyer) said "it was the son who got in touch with her."

Last September, the site You Can't Make This Up did stick up for Sword, noting that a social worker representing her son's adoptive family “asked his permission to find her, because he was getting unmanageable at home….” In this version, he’s a “gangbanger” who may have coerced his birth mother into having sex. She supposedly complied “partly due to guilt, partly out of fear of losing contact with her son forever and last but not least, partly because she was asked by his adoptive parents…[to help].”

Again, we don't know. Some of this doesn't square with reports from her sentencing this week. Although this unfictional.com story is one of the top hits for Aimee Louise Sword, its sources aren't clear.

So we are left with all the scary stereotypes about what happens to adoptees: the son is either a victim raped by a depraved, sexually loose birth mother or an irredeemable gangbanger. There's way too much heat and no light.

We humans will always be compelled by this kind of sensationalism. But the first kneejerk responses linger online in a way they didn't used to. They continue to float before readers' eyes, courtesy of Google, all those 530-plus headlines that trumpet some variation of "guilt" and "sex" and "mom."

I hate it all—what Aimee Sword did and the feeding frenzy that's followed.


This piece also appears in Martha's blog on Open Salon.

"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.

Russian Adoptions: Who's at Fault and What Do We Do?

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


When I first saw the pictures of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev—who is close to my son’s age—in Moscow, after his adoptive grandmother put him on a flight from Washington, D.C., by himself, I wondered what the hell is wrong with us.

Who is “us”? That’s the question. American adoptive parents? Not most of us, by any stretch. The American adoption agency involved, which has now had its license suspended by the Russian education ministry? Again, that’s painting with a broad brush. The Russian orphanage in which by some reports the boy was mistreated? Who knows?

I wanted to blame somebody, though, as did the many commenters on news stories and blogs about Artyom’s fate this past weekend. Adoptive mother Torry Hansen and grandmother Nancy were right at hand, courtesy of the AP. Here are a few comments about the story from Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog:

“This is totally unconscionable and irresponsible.”

“This woman's (I cannot say—‘mother's,’ for she doesn't deserve such a title) behaviour is despicable.”

“This article made me cry. It takes the patience and endurance of Mother Theresa to deal with special needs children. Where did this woman not understand the commitment to a young, troubled child that she adopted into her family?”

Last week, Nancy Hansen decided to fly Artyom (called Justin by his adoptive family) back to Russia because his violent behavior had become too much for them. According to one of the AP stories, his grandmother “chronicled a list of problems: hitting, screaming and spitting at his mother and threatening to kill family members.” He apparently slammed one aunt with a statue when she pushed him to do math homework. (The family was home schooling him.) Hansen says he threatened to burn their home down.

Back in Russia, he was accompanied by a note from adoptive mother Torry Hansen, who is a registered nurse: “This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues…I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues…. After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.''

As of Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was threatening to suspend all U.S. adoptions, calling this “the last straw.”

Grandmother Nancy says she had no idea she was setting off an international incident. She did tell an AP reporter, "The intent of my daughter was to have a family and the intent of my whole family was to love that child."

I hate stories like this, in which a child becomes abandoned over and over again, unwanted by anyone. I hate what this does to me as an adoptive parent of a son born in Vietnam, of the doubts I start to feel about whether I had any right to everything that my family means.

I’m also waiting for more facts. The problem, as usual, is that a media storm has managed to make the situation even murkier, spreading an array of misinformation about international adoption, attachment disorders, and what constitutes “normal.”

Shocking headlines like “Boy from Russia said ‘he’d torch our home’” and “Grandmother: Boy terrified adoptive kin” keep the focus on extreme behavior. Here’s the blurb that introduces the AP report in the Seattle Times: “Torry Hansen was so eager to become a mother that she adopted an older child from a foreign country, two factors that scare off many prospective parents. Her fear came later.”

A distorted look at “the inside story of adoptions that go horribly wrong” aired on ABC's Nightline Friday, including videos taken by parents of children having “meltdowns.” (Click here for the accompanying article.)

This prompted developmental psychologist Jean Mercer to debunk some myths in a Psychology Today blog. She rightly castigates Nightline for running home videos without questioning the parents’ interpretations. In one case, shortly after a pair of Russian sisters had been adopted, the older sister wanders around her American home in tears, clutching a blanket, and crawling under furniture. Mercer notes,

“[T]he parents seem to have regarded it as such bizarre and unacceptable behavior that it needed to be recorded because no outsider would believe it.

“But what do we actually see in this video of a child who has been in the adoptive home for about a week? Let me just inquire how similar it might be to your own behavior, if you had been taken by very large people who spoke a different language, put on an airplane with little comprehensible explanation, and taken far away to a new house, new food, new ways of doing things? Would you be grateful?”

Meanwhile, it’s important to keep the numbers in perspective. According to the U.S. State Department, there have been about 15,000 U.S.-Russia adoptions in the past five years. I’ve heard that in the last fifteen years, it’s about 50,000. As many adoption experts have noted, most of these don’t go “horribly wrong.”

Whether Artyom is really psychopathic and violent is unclear. Even if it were true, shoving him onto airplane is at the very least an act of ignorant desperation. Giving him an American name when he was already six years old indicates a lack of awareness and empathy. The Hansens—not to mention those parents supplying videos of their children for Nightline—appear to have little understanding of what it means to suddenly land in another culture.

Yet something much larger is at play than the actions of two unfit adoptive family members. Based on the official outrage of Russia—following on the travesty of American missionaries trying to hustle Haitian “orphans” out of that country after the recent earthquake—the practice of international adoption is once again under fire.

There are lots of ethical reasons why it should be. In Haiti, a number of the children involved still had biological parents. In many other developing countries, from Vietnam to Ethiopia, there’s always been the risk of money paid for babies to finance a less than savory adoption industry.

Yet there’s the flip side, too, and you see it in Russia and Haiti: social welfare systems that simply are ill equipped and far too under-funded to support the rolls of abandoned children. What you see is poverty and its brutal impact on society’s most vulnerable: children who receive little or no adult care.

Let me say it again: you see poverty, on a global scale, ramped up by the churn of developing economies. The Harvard University Project on Global Working Families, research that surveyed 55,000 people in a variety of countries and is detailed in Jody Heymann’s book Forgotten Families, makes clear that many children have no one to take care of them. Here’s a quote from my own 2007 review of Heymann’s book in Women’s Review of Books:

“Of the working parents interviewed, nineteen percent in Vietnam left their children alone or in the care of an unpaid child; 27 percent did so in Mexico; and a whopping 48 percent did in Botswana, which has almost no publicly funded child care.”

Even the reference in a USA Today story about Artyom—“United Airlines allows unaccompanied children as young as 5 years old on direct flights. Children age 8 and above can catch connecting flights, as well”—chills me.

So maybe we should blame global capitalism and every one of us (that “us”) who participates. Maybe it’s not just the Hansens of Shelbyville, Tennessee. Maybe we should blame general ignorance about international adoption—for example, the various media commentators ranting about the numbers on the rise when in fact they’ve been in steep decline since 2004.

Our son was a baby when we adopted him from Vietnam, from an orphanage in which he seemed very well treated by affectionate staff. He is now a happy and healthy little boy. I say this not to vaunt my own skills as a parent but to add that even my son, who remembers nothing of the orphanage—an orphanage that was far from a horror show—has occasional meltdowns. When he was just a little younger than Artyom, he would cry uncontrollably when I left him at school. My son still sucks his thumb, though he’s working on it.

Loss experienced by young children can be profound and impossible to process rationally. The fact that my mother was hospitalized when I was six still sits in my soul. Sometimes I believe my own loss has helped me to understand my son’s; other times, I think that all humans walk alone.

In my adoptive family, some days we walk in the light. We are together, we are whole. But have we really become a world in which so many children have no safe homes?

Apparently so. At this moment, all I can do is hug my boy close.


This piece also appears in Martha's Open Salon blog, Athena's Head.

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.

No More Lost Souls: An Adopted Person’s Response to “Find My Family”

By David Biddle for Adopt-a-tude

This is Adopt-a-tude's concluding review in a series about the ABC reality show Find My Family, which first aired in the United States this past November. Each episode involves the reunion of an adoptee with his or her birth parents. Click here to watch recent episodes.

Find My Family pushes different buttons for adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families. These differences emerged in the comments to adoptive parent Lisa's post this past Monday. In our second post on the topic, Claudia spoke about the show from a birth parent's perspective. Now David weighs in as an adult adoptee.

We'd like to invite the whole adoption community to keep talking and debating together about the issues raised by this show.


What I hate about reality shows is that the stories are often contrived and artificial. You name it, Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, The Longest Race, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, reality and the human experience give way to gross-out, gamesmanship, and goofiness.

Find My Family is different. There’s real human drama on display here. There’s no question that the footage of adoptees and birth parents learning the truth about long-lost kin is one-take, real stuff.

I can only imagine what watching this show feels like for the millions of adoptees out there still searching for—or at least wondering about—their birth parents. As a successful searcher (we found my birth mother six years ago), I think watching Find My Family does a good job of getting across to viewers the deep emotional issues that adoptees confront as adults in the world.

It has a simple premise: the hosts introduce adopted adults, interview them about their need to find their birth families, and then perform a search for the long lost. Once the object of the search is located, the hosts interview that person as well. The final meeting between the two lost souls—and, believe me, you get a hefty dose of what it means to be a real-life lost soul when you watch this show—is then filmed. Let the hugs begin.

Find My Family is definitely a full box-of-tissues tear-jerker. You cry when you listen to the story of why the adoptee finally decided to begin a search; you cry when you understand how frustrating a search can be with all the dead ends; you cry when the show’s hosts, Tim Green and Lisa Joyner (adoptees themselves), deliver bad news and good news; you cry—sometimes uncontrollably—in the reunion scenes; and you cry during the final scenes as the adopted cavort with newly found siblings and parents in lush parks or quaint middle-class American kitchens.

I may be biased, but in my opinion the adoptees and their birth parents in Find My Family are capable of showing natural emotion on a level that makes even the best actors look like they’re getting paid millions of dollars to be fakes.

Without a doubt, placing the reunion search detective story—that’s exactly what it is—on prime time is an interesting move for a major network like ABC. And it comes at a perfect moment in history for those of us adoptees who believe that we should have more rights to identifying information and our original birth records.

Groups like Bastard Nation and Adoptee Rights are growing more and more militant as states continue to control access to information that might lead adoptees to their birth families. It is very likely that this issue is going to be highly charged in 2010. Adoptee Rights is organizing a national demonstration set for July in Kentucky at the Annual Summit of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

There is no question that the stars of this show are the adult adoptees. Their birth parents are also heroes. The defining moments of the hour come when the adoptees walk up a special hill towards the “Family Tree,” a real tree under which the birth parents (or a sibling) wait. Watching that lost soul climb a long hill towards the answer to life-long questions is powerful, even if the symbolism is a bit heavy.

One quibble I have is that adopting parents don’t have a very big part to play in these tales. We get to meet some of them, but they certainly don’t get center stage. It’s easy to see why, since the drama and existential struggle of adoptees and the parents who had to let them go is so profound.

But still, I’d like to hear at the end what the adopting mom or dad thinks when the child they raised and loved all those years has found a new mom, dad, brother, or sister. Adopting parents are often as emotionally invested in the reunion search as their adopted children.

Obviously there’s some contrivance built into how the hosts tell these stories. Details are sometimes dropped in for dramatic effect. The settings tend to be highly beatific; the film crew is definitely looking for a Hallmark™ feel to scenes (and, not surprisingly, Hallmark is an advertiser on the website). The show’s participants are often perfectly coiffed, wearing heavy makeup.

I only bring this up because what is so appealing about Find My Family is that the producers can’t choose actors or even attractive amateurs. There are only so many people who are adopted and willing to have their stories told to the world on TV. As such, the “stars” are completely real people—your neighbors, co-workers, or classmates.

This is important, because the identity issues adoptees go through are really not that much different than what anyone goes through: Who am I really? Where did I come from? Why do I feel all alone?

In many ways, all people are orphans in the world. We grow up. We leave home. We have to deal with life as solitary agents. Adoptees just have to face that their entire lives.

Find My Family, of course, portrays only the successful and positive stories of reunion searches. For every wonderful, loving re-connection the show depicts there are at least as many—and probably more—searches that don’t end well. I’ve heard too many tales of weird scenes with birth families, and sometimes the trail can lead to graveyards, mental institutions, and other depressing conclusions. Perhaps Fox should one-up ABC and consider offering something along those lines in 2010.

But despite the flaws, Find My Family does an excellent job of getting across to America what it’s like to be an adult adoptee. Here are some recognizable statements in the first few episodes from my own life and the lives of my adopted peers: “I’ve always had to deal with abandonment issues.” “I felt trashed.” “This is the look of Complete!” “Oh my God, he looks like me! This is so weird.”

In the end, this show is going to empower a lot of adopted folks and at least their birth moms to stand up and be counted as examples of fortitude and grace. In this age of high-profile divorces, celebrity adoptions, and philandering heroes, Find My Family is an antidote to the cynicism and edge that continue to seep into our lives.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to let TV enter my life, I’m more interested in plot and character development than I am in being entertained. I’ll take hugs, kisses, crying for joy, and everyday people pouring out their hearts on camera any day over people who make fools of themselves pretending they’re important.

TV should be an adjunct to our individual quests to figure out what life is all about, not an escape hole. Find My Family admirably provides the former, and in this way is truly life-affirming.

A Birth Mother’s View of “Find My Family”: The Best Thing to Happen to Adoption

Guest Post by Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy for Adopt-a-tude

This is Adopt-a-tude's second post in a series about the ABC reality show Find My Family, which first aired in the United States this past November. Each episode involves the reunion of an adoptee with his or her birth parents. Click here to watch recent episodes.

Find My Family pushes different buttons for adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families. These differences emerged in the comments to adoptive parent Lisa's post this past Monday. We'd like to invite the adoption community to keep talking about this together. 

Claudia began posting about Find My Family on her own blog when the show first aired and agreed to do another take for us. A post by an adult adoptee will follow later this week.

After watching the pilot episode of ABC's new reality show Find My Family, as a birth mother, I was truly surprised by my reactions. I had expected to find aspects of the show to be scripted and hokey. I’d expected to feel a sense of "happily ever after" that doesn't always correlate with adoption reunions. I’d expected to be annoyed that ABC glossed over the fight for adoption records and adoptee civil rights.

What I didn’t expect is that the network would pull off the show as well as it has.



I really do think that Find My Family is the best thing to happen to adoption since...well, I don't know since what! Even Madonna being called a "baby stealer" in the tabloids pales in comparison.

After Episode #2 of Find My Family…

Now I’m even more convinced that the show provides the public with a much-needed public education in terms of the reality of being adopted and the truth of how adoption can affect lives.

When I watched the pilot episode, I tweeted and crowd-sourced the reactions. Of course, ABC knew it had a built-in audience based on its Extreme Home Makeover series; people eat up those feel-good sob stories. All they really needed was a Ty Pennington-type dude who came with an adoptee pedigree. Tim Green was bred for the job.

On Twitter, it was obvious that ABC had hit gold. I could almost see the tears pour out as America's collective heartstrings were not merely pulled but yanked. I had expected I would not be able to escape tears. After all, as a birth mother, I don't have to imagine feeling the emotions portrayed in the 23 noncommercial minutes per adoption tale; I’ve lived it since I was 19.

But to realize that others could feel the pain and joy, and see how it was often bittersweet, hokey or not…it won me over.

ABC's Neatly Wrapped Emotional Bomb

The adoption community was all abuzz about Find My Family, but our reactions are expected. Even with many adoptive parents feeling put out by the name of the show and the implication that ABC was devaluing their role—and real concerns that it doesn’t accurately show the difficulties in adoption reunions, that it has an almost rushed feel that goes with a lack of preparation, and other cries of emotional exploitation by ABC to make a buck—there’s a truth to Find My Family that cannot be dismissed.

The people who do go forth and let the cameras into one of the most emotional and intimate times of their lives are real. What they feel and how deeply they feel it cannot be faked, and it shows.

What I hear the "contestants" on Find My Family express are the same sentences I have heard word for word many, many times in the last ten years as I’ve deeply involved myself in learning from the lives of other adoptees, birth parents, and even adoptive parents.

What's more, I know it's real. I have experienced it myself throughout the adoption separation from my infant son and the search and subsequent reunion with him and my family. These quotes from the show ring true to me:

• "That is where I always belonged"
• "I have thought about you every day for my whole life"
• "I don't want to find her, I need to find her"
• "It's my legacy"
• "I don't know who I am"
• "I just want to know"

Oh, I still feel strongly that ABC has an obligation to educate people about the fight for adoptee rights currently happening in this country. I was happy to hear it at least alluded to in Episode 2 when Ashley says "the laws are against me." Maybe with time, the producers will speak the truth about how it is only archaic and unjust legislation sitting on the books that keeps our 6 million adult adoptees from having the choice to find their families.

But even if that does not ever happen, Find My Family is still a very great thing for adoption and adoptee rights.

Show Normalizes the Desire to Search

For too long, the mantra about adoption has been that "so many babies are unwanted and need homes" with a "so many people who deserve to be parents can't" sprinkled in for good measure.

The end result is that we have a society wearing blinders. Many people assume that no matter how you slice it, adoption is a good thing; anyone who feels otherwise is easily dismissed as angry or is accused of having had a "bad experience.” Few who make such assumptions have had true experience with adoption besides what’s trickled down to them through media stories.

Or they’ve had no real, truthful, open dialogue with adult adoptees or birth mothers. I cannot count how many times I have heard, "Well, my cousin's sister's uncle was adopted to a wonderful family, and he has no desire to search, ever."

I know. I get that not every adoptee suffers a primal wound and not everyone has that burning need to search all their lives. But can you guarantee that you all really know what lurks in the deepest recesses of every adopted person's and their birth families' hearts?

Not everyone spills out his or her most private thoughts over eggnog at a tree-lighting celebration. I have told some pretty bland versions of my adoption experience when I haven't felt like exposing myself so emotionally to even the dearest of friends and family.

Find My Family Finds a Truth

But now, with this pithy, scripted, should-be-sponsored-by-Kleenex show, Find My Family is letting America not only see inside what it is like to have adoption loss and separation but also the pure joy in a journey to repair those rifts.

By showing the same happily-ever-after formula weekly to Americans and by making them cry vicariously on their couches, ABC is building sympathy for the struggles of adoptees and their biological families. Find My Family is proving a means for more communication, openness, and understanding.

Adoption is such an isolating experience. All too frequently, we go on a personal journey, often not of our own choosing, but we feel that no one else has lived it. Because there are so many different variables—personal situations, emotional make-up, the overall outcome of the experience, others involved, even where one is on the timeline of life—our feelings differ a lot.

Yet Find My Family validates what so many folks do feel but are afraid to say. It provides positive role models for the whole adoption-reunion experience. We see families accepting whole branches of severed family trees with open arms. We see tears of fear and joy. We see acceptance and understanding. We see that the desire to search is human and the need to know universal.


Claudia Corrigan D'Arcy spends her life online. When she is not running social-media campaigns at her job, she is writing about adoption issues, the need for adoption reform, birth mother's informed consent, adoptee rights, and anything else that could be covered in life as a birth mother. The best places to catch her are on her blog Musings of the Lame or Twitter.

Attachment: “Love Is Just a Starting Point”

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude


Attachment disorder is a big bugaboo in the adoption community. In one post on Adoption.com, a writer wonders what the difference is between “attachment disorder” and “reactive attachment disorder”:

“I have seen this on several different discussion groups,” she writes, “and it’s been bothering me. Parents are willing to accept that their child has attachment issues, but when it is diagnosed as “full blown RAD”, then they panic.”

Sometimes there's no reason for the panic. The first night I spent with our son in Vietnam, he was strangely quiet for a five-month-old baby. My husband and I managed to coax a few smiles from him, but we also videoed his difficulties rolling over to show to doctors back home. Two months later, by the time we were on an airplane heading to the United States, he'd perked up and started crawling.

He wasn't a crier—such a good baby! the uninitiated would coo—but our little guy let loose a wail when we first stepped into the foggy cold outside the San Francisco Airport. A friend with us, an experienced dad, reassured me there was nothing wrong: "He's just pissed." Looking back, I can see that my boy's angry sobs were a very good sign.

Still, after our first weeks together, I only felt like his favorite nanny. I was not yet mom. I arranged for a social worker from the Early Intervention Program to come for a visit in order to evaluate our "attachment issues." Within moments of observing us together in our house, she laughed. "Every time you talk or move, his eyes follow you," she said. "His attachment is fine."

And she was right. But bonding with a child is a process, not a button-push.

How often do adoptees or foster children end up with a clinical diagnosis of attachment disorder, reactive or otherwise? Traditional psychiatric sources cite its prevalence as 1% of the general population of kids under five but claim that attachment disorder is far more common among orphaned children. How common is the question.

Available government statistics about adoption disruptions and dissolutions—one measure, theoretically, of attachment problems—put the rate at anywhere in the United States from 25% among older children at the time of adoption to 5% of planned adoptions from foster care. But sampling varies widely from state to state, as do the populations studied. In any case, little research has been carried out to determine how well adoptees with this diagnosis ultimately adjust.

Like so many aspects of adoption, there's scant evidence to clarify what's going on. Adoption industry experts offer soothing claims about the infrequency of attachment problems, but most parents can tell tales, often in hushed tones, about some kid who's emotionally checked out, unresponsive to touch, or prone to violent outbursts.

These anecdotes are scary. Add a highly charged piece about a terminated adoption like Anita Tedaldi’s “My Adopted Son” in a recent New York Times’s blog, and fear and loathing tend to rule the debate. Tedaldi bravely details her own inability to bond with her son, but she leaves hanging the question of whether this might not have happened, even with all his manifold problems, if he'd been her biological child (she already had five biological daughters at the time of the adoption).

Sometimes personal stories are the only things that convey a complicated set of decisions or events. Yet the knee-jerk response to attachment disorder can obscure the ways families actually live with it. The media misrepresents the fear, too, because attachment disorder is not only suffered by adoptees in Chinese or Romanian orphanages or said “orphans” in Hollywood movies. Children raised in their biological families can also suffer from it, especially in traumatic circumstances.

I’m grateful to a former student of mine, Fran Cronin, for allowing me to tell a piece of her family’s story. I believe a more complex view of attachment disorder—and an honest discussion of the challenges faced by adoptees with this diagnosis—are more helpful for children than the overly rosy version promoted by the adoption industry.

Cronin, a widowed single mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with two kids—one a teenage biological daughter, the other an eleven-year-old son adopted from Russia—says she began the adoption process by thinking, “if I love my child enough, all will be right with his world.” As she’s since discovered, “the love is just a starting point.”

Cronin’s son was only five months old when he joined her family, but he made no sounds until a whimper at seven months. More weeks passed before he finally cried. She describes a testing process now with her son, who has been diagnosed with attachment issues, learning disabilities, and a shifting series of labels that indicates how hard it is to pin down what's due to post-traumatic stress and what's organic.

Whenever he throws things or swears at her, she thinks he’s actually asking, “If I’m really bad, are you going to give me up, too?”

For Cronin, getting professional help with her son—and for herself—has been a life-saver. She’s had to learn to stay calm and to not argue back. Otherwise, she kept getting “sucked into his same angry world,” she says.

Yet this same “tough child” has also learned empathy. His grandmother, Paula Cronin, says she believes much of his bad behavior is driven by fear. It’s an emotion he knows so well that when she herself has felt “seriously frightened…, [he] was instantly at my side, holding me tight, staying with me and talking to me until I calmed down.”

Perhaps attachment disorder isn’t a single, monolithic diagnosis but a state of being for children. Such a child might feel too frightened at times to reach out to anybody; at others, his empathy might fill an ocean. That doesn’t make it easy. But a son like Fran Cronin’s isn’t lost to human society or a victim of circumstance or stuck with a label.

“I didn’t raise you to go to jail!” She admits to yelling at him in heated moments. Yet such emotional engagement—offering backrubs and screaming frustration, as Cronin does—probably seems more genuine to her son than pretending sweet perfection.

So here are some questions for readers: What do you think about attachment disorder? How do you feel about the challenges for adoptive families—and the misperceptions about attachment disorder in the adoption community and media? Most especially, do you have a complex family story of your own to share?

For those struggling with these issues, check out the website for ATTACh, the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children.

Birth Mothers Lose Again: The Media Storm Over Aimee Louise Sword

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

This just in, from Salacious News Service, Inc.: A 35-year-old woman had sex with the son she gave up for adoption ten years before. The boy's age and name have not been released, but we assume he's a young teenager. Maybe really young. Some of our seasoned investigative reporters have asserted that he was ten years old at the time. Others have called it a "summer romance." And oh, by the way: she stalked him on the Internet, even though the adoption agreement she'd signed stipulated only minimal contact with her birth son. Some experts say the boy may be emotionally scarred for life.

Aimee Louise Sword was, in fact, arrested at the end of April in Waterford Township, Michigan, on one count of third-degree criminal sexual assault (two other counts have since been dropped). She is now out out on bail. You can read variations of the story via the links above, with some sites hyping either the incorrect "mother has sex with a ten-year-old son" angle (Coed Magazine) or using the word "raped" in the headline (Fox News).

When the story is portrayed this way, it's gross, it's awful—what else can be said? But in yet another sensational and virally spread news story about adoption, we get way too much information about whack-job Aimee's MySpace status updates—where her mood is "strong"—and her quotes of Lil' Kim. (Earlier on Saturday, September 12, the link to her MySpace page, under Aimee Pope, still functioned; now it gets you "This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.")

Almost nobody's saying, hey, wait a minute, does this have anything to do with the typical birth-parent-reunion? There are almost no qualifications in the early news accounts along the lines of "Sword by no means represents the vast majority of birth parents." And last but not least: what about all the missing details and reasons for why Sword might have done what she did?

Something is very off about this story, and I don't mean just an age-old taboo being broken. There's a long hike between "summer romance" and "rape." Most of the early news reports said nothing about the boy's adoption situation or his adoptive parents. Far too many online outlets made what seem to be deliberate errors about the boy's age and omitted other key facts.

A commentary from the site You Can't Make This Up sticks up for Sword, noting that the son was 15 and that a social worker representing his adoptive family "asked his permission to find her, because he was getting unmanageable at home and they hoped his real mother might be able to set him straight."

For the moment, let's put aside the baggage of "real mother" and the thinking that implies about the magic touch of biological parents in helping disturbed youth. This piece calls Sword's son a "gangbanger" who may well have coerced his birth mother into having sex, not the other way around. She supposedly complied "partly due to guilt, partly out of fear of losing contact with her son forever and last but not least, partly because she was asked by his adoptive parents, the social workers and her son’s shrink to make an attempt to bring him to his senses – or he would face juvenile detention."

So which version of the story is true? The answer is likely a mix of the "facts" used to spin this sordid tale one way or another. The problem with truth in news these days, especially as it does the rounds on the Internet, is that the first kneejerk versions stick in readers' heads. And when it comes to an attractive woman, a teenage boy, and incest, the kneejerkers are rarely feminists or adoption advocates.

The sources of information in You Can't Make This Up at unfictional.com aren't stated, although comments from one of the first reports of the story in the Oakland Press, a local Michigan paper, do appear. There's also a link to another report in Mlive.com ("Metro Detroit Local News & Talk") about some commenters coming to Sword's defense.

The real point is that this awful story, which involves at least one disturbed woman and child, not to mention all sorts of shadowy circumstances, has been circulated far and wide. In the days ahead, maybe some reporters will interview other birth mothers condemning Sword. Maybe a few writers will look closely at the complicated position of birth mothers in American society. At the very least, I'd like to point out that such stories do a grave disservice to birth parents, especially because we hear far less from them than we do from adoptive parents and adult adoptees.

But for now, with this turn of the stereotype wheel, it's birth mothers as sexually depraved, because why else would they give up their babies? And the follow-on: domestic adoptees all turn into gangbangers. Another turn, another celebrity, and we'll be back to those grasping adoptive parents who choose the cutest baby that money can buy.

Or, if they don't like the child, maybe they'll just murder the kid. Salacious News Service has brought us a number of recent stories about adoptive moms killing their children, including a nine year-old quadriplegic, whose body was found stuffed in a storage bin.

Aimee Louise Sword is quite the MILF (her MySpace photos have been circulated widely, too), and she's stirred up an Oedipal storm. But she's just one more for the collection of Adoption Freaks, which occupy the chair next to Octomom in the current media free-for-all.

This post also appears on Athena's Head, Martha's Open Salon blog as "Sex with a Birth Son: The Storm Over Aimee Louise Sword."

Twisted Angelina: How the Media Gets Adoption Wrong

By Martha Nichols for Adopt-a-tude

I love Angelina Jolie. She's the unapologetic mom of a mixed brood of adoptees and bio-kids. She's not married to her partner (yet), and she's a poster gal for humanitarian aid. She's the hottest adoptive mom around.

The problem? The media, of course, and all the heat and light journalists bring to adoption—especially international adoption—because celebrities are involved. Much as I admire Angie's chutzpah and Brad Pitt's weary saintliness, the Brangelina enterprise offers a very skewed picture of how adoptions come about and what life is like for the average adoptive family.

This is not news to anyone in the adoption community. But I'm continually amazed by the misconceptions pumped by the press.

First off: International adoption is in sharp decline, and the number of people adopting from other countries is small. Last year, immigrant orphan visas processed by the U.S. State Department plummeted by 24 percent from the peak in 2004. Talk to any adoption expert—agency heads, academics, editors at Adoptive Families magazine—and that person will say the international numbers are going down, down, down.

Yet on “Why Did You Opt for an International Adoption?”, a call-in show on NPR’s Talk of the Nation last April, host Neal Conan didn't lead with the dwindling numbers and only made a passing reference to the downward trend at the very end of the show. [Correction made on 9/5/09] Why adoptive parents adopt internationally instead of domestically remains a good question, but this show revealed little about the difficulties of adopting through public social services. No mention was made of private domestic adoptions.

This is NPR, mind you. A recent article in the UK's Daily Mail showed a grinning Emma Thompson with her "adopted refugee son" Tindyebwa at his university graduation. Much was made of her family's selflessness in helping Tindy, a former child-soldier from Rwanda. Then the reporter writes, "Adopting Tindy also helped the actress, who had tried and failed to have more children after undergoing IVF to conceive daughter Gaia, now eight years old."

Apparently Thompson would never have contemplated this if she didn't have infertility troubles. In this scenario, the pain of losing one's family in Rwanda somehow equals failed IVFs. And the reporter focuses on Thompson the celebrity rather than the adoptee who has a far more dramatic story to tell. (See the blog Harlow's Monkey for an honest take on what it means to be a transracial adoptee.)

Adoptive families occupy a strange niche in the public imagination—no question—one that has more hot-button energy than our numbers warrant. But the strangeness of it all is stoked by journalistic laziness, which stokes the stereotypes, which stokes the movies.

Even in sweet little Away We Go, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's indie movie about prospective parents on the road, there's a scene with a big adoptive family that looks like the Rainbow Coalition. The adoptive parents are mid-thirties max; so how did they get all these kids so fast? Are they foster parents?

Most of this movie is played for gentle laughs; I wouldn't expect a treatise on contemporary adoption policy in something so feather-light. It's the unexamined stereotype from the McSweeney's folks I question—oh, that multiculti, fantabulous brood!—especially when juxtaposed with the revelation that this adoptive mom is still deeply grieving her last miscarriage.

So all those kids are just second-best compensations, huh?

I’d like to think the fascination with adoption is not just about Madonna’s latest ethical screw-up. I'm hopeful that the media focus, misguided as it can be, also represents our expanding sense of what it means to be a family. Adoption offers so many transformative possibilities: men can be mommies, too, without the fiction of biology to keep women barefoot and breastfeeding. Families can be as variegated as a garden.

But I suspect the non-adoption public is curious about all those China dolls and at-risk Tindys for less noble reasons: Can parents ever love a child who looks so different?

In "A Woman in Full," Vanity Fair writer Rich Cohen interviews Angelina Jolie and offers her answer to that: "I asked if there is a special bond between a mother and a child she has carried as opposed to a child she has adopted. She said, “No,” thought a moment, then added, “I had a C-section and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.”

If you haven't been touched by adoption, as we like to say in the adoption community, do you believe Angie? Really?

I do. I love my son, who was born in Vietnam, with such intensity that I know the mom hard-wiring has kicked in. More miracles: The bonding that happens between child and parent, the utter normality of it.

This post originally appeared on Athena's Head, Martha's Open Salon blog.