A Different Kind of Love

It’s Valentine’s Day and the mind and heart turn naturally to discussions about love. So I went looking for adoption related articles (having slept late today and having a long day away from home today) to create a blog for such a special holiday. I found this 2007 The Guardian piece – LINK>A different kind of love by Kate Hilpern.

It begins with a question that I often see come up in my all things adoption group. Does a mother love a child she has adopted in the same way as she might love a birth child? And why is it such a taboo to ask?

One adoptive mother answers – ‘If something tragic happened to my adopted daughter I’d be devastated, but I wouldn’t die. If something happened to either of my two boys who I gave birth to, I feel I would die,” says Tina Pattie. “I don’t love my daughter any less, but it’s a different kind of love. With my sons, my love is set in stone. It’s that ‘die for you love’ that would never change, no matter what. With Cheri, it’s a love that develops and grows. It’s more of a process than an absolute.” And to my own thinking, that might be why a love for the child too often fails in an adoptive situation.

The article goes on to note – Ask most adopters whether they think their love for their children is any different than it would be if they had their own offspring, and you can generally expect a resounding no. Very likely, they’ll be offended it even crossed your mind. But in families such as Tina Pattie’s – where there are both biological and non-biological children – it’s a question that is put to the test. It’s a question that gets to the very heart of what it means to be a parent.

“I don’t care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood,” wrote Rebecca Walker in her recent book, Baby Love. “Yes, I would do anything for my first [non-biological] son, within reason. But I would do anything at all for my second [biological] child without reason, without a doubt,” added the estranged daughter of the renowned author Alice Walker. Understandably, her comment has attracted a lot of controversy.

Tina had always wanted three children, so when she was told it could jeopardize her health to have a third baby naturally, she persuaded her husband to adopt. Her preference was for a baby, but there were none available and they were offered a little girl five weeks off her fourth birthday. “I was totally and absolutely shocked to find that in the early years, I felt no love at all for her,” recalls Tina. “It didn’t even feel right to say she was my daughter. The word ‘daughter’ describes a relationship, a connection – things we didn’t have.” There was no one point at which Tina began to love Cheri, now 17. “It was a drip, drip, drip kind of process. Now, I love her a lot. I’m really proud of her and close to her, but it has taken time,” she says.

Tina has spent a lot of time “unpacking” the disparity in her feelings for her children. “I think there are several things going on. First, she wasn’t a newborn baby, like my sons had been. There’s nothing quite like a newborn baby. Second, when you get a stranger in your house, you’re not going to love it straight away, you’re just not. Then there was the fact that Cheri was a hugely damaged and difficult child. Even now, I wonder that if she’d been sweet and easy instead of angry and violent whether it would have been different. Instead, I turned from a calm, patient mother into a monster. I’d never felt rage like that, ever. But even in the blackest moments, when there was no connection between us at all, there was never a question that I would give up.” This is not at all uncommon, adoptive children have trauma, it is unavoidable.

There is more with other stories on a related theme in The Guardian article, if you are interested.

Adoption Disenfranchisement

I was attracted to a Medium article today with the title LINK>Understanding Adoption – Epistemological Implications by Shane Bouel today. The image hits a deep place. It was created by Thoughtless Delineation – AI ART. Just today, I posted “There are 2 good things in life – Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Action.” I am borrowing from and adding my own insights and understandings to the article linked above.

However in reading the linked article I find reason for deeper contemplation – “All social behavior is guided by values. Thus the study of social behavior can never be value-free if value freedom is interpreted in the sense of the absence of values because the values of the society under investigation form a part of the social facts to be studied by sociology.”

He goes on to say – “Knowledge and power are linked. In order to reveal the nature of the knowledge/power nexus and its relationship to the process of adoption we must not only ask what we know about adoption but more importantly, ask how we come to know what we know about adoption.” He is actually talking about adoption in Australia but I expect what he has to say applies here in the United States as well.

Adoption is a social construct. The understanding of adoption by those considered experts – social workers, mental health professionals and policymakers – places them in a powerful position as the creators and arbiters of knowledge related to adoption. Their understanding of adoption has a particular influence on the way it is presented and represented both theoretically and as practice. Therefore, some understandings are a result of distortions of the knowledge process. These distortions are products of validating certain kinds of knowledge by promoting certain narratives and silencing others.

Statements about the real nature of adoption become everyday knowledge for most people, especially those with no direct experience of the practice. The habit of understanding social phenomena like adoption with our personally unquestioned beliefs (because they are scientifically legitimate) instead of first attempting to understand the nature and origin of those beliefs is especially evident when we take a holistic view of the experience of being adopted as expressed by many adoptees.

Some would have us believe that the primary motivating force behind much excluding, value-free social research has been conspiratorial, that it has been little more than a premeditated and conscious desire by the powerful to control the less powerful. However worse is the acceptance, legitimization and application of objectified, positivistic notions about the real nature of adoption. These deny us access to the multi-level experiences of those (adoptees and birth parents) who have been subjected to it. Moreover, blind faith in the power of positivistic social science has further resulted in the institutionalized devaluing and belittling of those suffering its effects. Those individuals who have been, in some way, consumed by the process and who have spoken out loudly about their experiences have been viewed as little more than emotionally charged, angry and therefore irrational persons out of touch with reality.

Not only has the individual affected been blamed for the socially created, contradictory, unintended and unwanted effects of the adoption process but they have also been systematically alienated, ridiculed and stigmatized. Adoption has been portrayed and presented as given, unalterable and self-evident and as a consequence, it confronts the individual as a historically and scientifically justified, objective and benign process and therefore, it is undeniable fact. The biography of those consumed by the process is apprehended merely as a reactive, subjective personal episode, separate and distanced from the institution of adoption. Many affected persons experience adoption objectively as coercion and in many cases worse, as an oppressive force.

He has much more to say. It is time well spent to read his worthwhile essay.

Single Moms and Parenting

One of the most important “missions” in my all things adoption group is to support and encourage single moms to attempt to parent their baby rather than reflexively giving the baby up of adoption. Fortunately, that is more acceptable during the last couple of decades for a woman to be a single mom, than it would have been earlier in our collective history.

Several questions were asked of those who had made the choice to keep and parent their baby –

What is/would be/would have been the deciding factor in choosing to parent your child?

Of course, finances are a huge issue. But is money enough?

Better enforcement of revocation periods?

More/better emotional support?

Believing you are worthy enough to deserve your child?

Safe and affordable housing?

Yes, all of this helps. But what is the single factor that would be enough to tip the scales one way or the other?

Some of the responses –

Family and friends helping and being involved and better mental health care.

As someone who parented: A job that paid $15/hr that was full time during daycare hours. Literally that was all I needed. The most basic thing we should be fighting for: the right to be fairly compensated for our work. For me it was a labor rights issue, 100%. Why are jobs like this so hard to come by? The flip side would be: affordable childcare that matched the hours of your job.

Another one shared this was an issue for her as well. My exact problem right now. I’m unemployed, single mom of 4 kids and while I qualify for daycare, I can’t find one near me that has space for all my kids and is open for reasonable hours. 90% of daycares I find close at 5:30pm. My experience is service industry and retail. These jobs usually have varying work schedules and very low pay.

Yet another issue – I am a single mom raising my 4 children. The 2 fathers claimed the kids on their taxes and collected all the stimulus money. It took me 2yrs to get my tax return back because I had to file a paper return.. And I don’t know if I will get any of the stimulus money. The child support orders are ridiculously low. $600 a month for all 4 kids, IF I even get the payments. It’s rough.

This one found it a struggle but felt lucky as well – I was extremely lucky that the owner of our daycare knew the father of my child because his mother worked there years ago, so she gave me the toddler rate instead of the infant rate. She knew he wasn’t contributing. I was also extremely lucky to have found a mobile home for under $1,000/mo because the landlord was just an all around good guy who didn’t want to take advantage of single people and seniors. My job was a $24,000/yr salary, which meant that my paychecks were static and not variable, which made it easier to budget. I didn’t have much left over at the end of the month, but I managed to save $25 a month until I felt certain we were not going to be homeless again. Literally the bare minimum, but I spent most of my working life living on or below that and I was amazed by how little it took to change everything. We did great on this. She added – I agree that daycare should be subsidized and paid for by the government the same way school is. It doesn’t make sense to have you starting out paying the equivalent of a college tuition just so you can work.

It’s the myth – that adoption means everyone’s happy and doing well.

One shared why she didn’t go through with adoption and credits our all things adoption group as well – When he was born and that was it for me. I wasn’t letting go. And I would do anything and I mean ANYTHING in the world to make it possible. So for me it was that. However. I had a daughter that was going through cancer treatment, I didn’t feel it was fair to her. Those feelings washed away when I had him, I knew in my heart she needed him too. I definitely needed the support of my family. At the hospital I cried all night, My sister woke up and asked me if I was okay and I said “I cant just give him away, I can’t let him go” she said “then don’t “. And called all my family and they made it possible to bring him home providing all of the necessities we needed. Had I felt I had this support before the hospital in keeping him, I would not considered adoption all the way up to giving birth to him at the hospital. Honestly I still would have kept him after his birth at the hospital. I was definitely in mama bear mode. He’s 3 now and I update about every year in this group. Had I not been here, who knows if I would have gotten talked into letting him go by the hopeful adoptive parents -or not. But she definitely tried. She went on to share that her daughter was completely surprised. She said “you finally got me my very OWN BABY?!” She thought he was for her lol I love seeing them together, they are so cute.

Another woman shared – Not feeling good enough and finances were the primary reasons I placed. Instead of receiving encouragement, my past traumas were used against me as evidence that I wasn’t “ready.” I was made to feel like if I parented I was doomed to ruin my child’s life. The single one thing that would have tipped the scales for me though would have been honest information about the trauma adoption causes adoptees. I was VERY concerned about my daughter’s emotional well being. I was promised that my daughter would be unaffected as long as she was placed by three months. I DIRECTLY asked about the emotional consequences of adoption on my daughter and I was told there are none. I was told adoptees have no more problems than anyone else and most are “grateful” to have been given a “better” life. I really wish that some one would have told me that all first time moms are scared. That it would be hard but it was doable. The one single sentence that could have convinced me to parent though is “Adoptees are 4x times likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees.” I had struggled a lot with suicide before than. If I knew that adoption would could cause my daughter to feel suicidal like I felt, there’s no way I would have placed. I could have never intentionally done that to my daughter.

The response to this by the woman who first asked the questions was this – I didn’t ask this question to feel validated, but your answer has made me feel so validated. Because adoptees are always told to shut up and be grateful, and to stop being bitter and angry. For the most part, I refuse to speak to prospective adopters because they’re so full of themselves that they insult and demean me in order to preserve their fantasies. And how can you know what to believe when the people in power tell convenient lies? They benefit from you believing the lies. You’ve made me grateful (genuinely, not being snarky) that this group has given me the chance to tell expecting moms that if I had had a choice, I would have grown up in poverty with my mom. I would have endured whatever deprivation necessary, just to have my mom. Everyone else acts like I’m living in some stupid fantasy world. Thank you for telling me that what I want and would have wanted has validity, and that it would have aligned with what you wanted.

And closing with this one – I never would have considered adoption if I’d had an adult that was willing to help and support me at the time. I got pregnant as a minor and the only people who reacted supportively were other minors, and I was already living on the street, so it didn’t seem like navigating being a parent would be possible for me. I stopped responding to the agency after my school’s social worker started helping me set up appointments and apply for assistance and I found someone with an empty spare bedroom. She helped transfer me to another school nearby that had a parenting program for teen mothers where I was able to catch up and graduate on time. All I really needed was one adult to vaguely care in my direction.