Harlow's Monkey

Opening the gates

The other day I posted a link to an article about some families who discovered the children they adopted from Ethiopia had not been orphaned as their adoption agencies had told them. When I read the article and the comments that followed, I was truly disgusted by the completely awful comments directed towards the families profiled in the story. Most of the worst offenders - no, I should say almost ALL of the worst offenders - were from other adoptive parents. My heart was breaking for the families in their stories. Not only are they dealing with one of the worst imagined scenarios - that their child might have been fraudulently placed for adoption - but then their own community turns on them.

This article has generated a lot of hits on the blog and I've been following some of the thoughts adoptive parents are expressing on their blogs and forums. One thing I saw really struck at me.

An AP blogger wrote about how reading this article made her look at her own daughter (adopted from Ethiopia) and made her realize that she hadn't been really dealing with the reality of her birth story. That she had fallen so in love with her child that she sometimes forgot that she hadn't given birth to her. That she realizes the pitfalls that being an internationally and transracially adopted child will affect her daughter and she's scared. Yet, despite the fears, she was going to face them head on and, as she wrote, "open the floodgates."

I was really heartened to read this.  I felt like this made everything I do worthwhile. And since I have so many adoptive parent readers, I wanted to pose a challenge and some future scenarios.

The fears are often: What if:

• my child resents being adopted?
• my child grows up to be critical about adoption?
• my child grows up and doesn't love me or consider me her "real" parent?
• my child rejects me
• my child has a life of pain because of the adoption

These fears are often what makes adoptive parents cling tighter to living in dichotomies, burying their heads in the sand, and putting on the blindfolds. Which can be easier to do when they're younger.

But what if you think of things less in terms of what you can control in order to shelter and hide the truth from yourself and your adopted child and to avoid the pain for right now, and more in terms of what you can begin to discover together now that might strengthen the relationship in the future? Plants don't bloom when they're suffocated and sheltered. Especially when they've been re-potted or re-planted to a different place. It takes a lot more work to take a plant native to Zone 2 and have them successfully thrive in Zone 4.

I've said it many times before but I think it's always worth repeating. Adult adoptees eventually find out if their parents hid the truth from them or tried to shelter them from the truth about their histories. We also learn pretty quick when parents can't deal with racism. That makes us wonder why in the heck we were adopted if our parents were so afraid to deal with racism and issues of birth families and birth countries. I think it's pretty clear that a relationship that seems built on lies does not bode well for the future.

Think of it this way. You are emotionally investing in your future relationship with your child. Be honest with them. Don't hide information. Deal with the ugliness that comes with adoption. One of the things that bums me out the most is how much our society just can't deal with the truth that adoption is about LOSS, LOSS, LOSS. That doesn't mean all adopted people are emotional wrecks. But it does mean that the child's first family was torn apart for some reason and everyone involved will have to deal with the ramifications of that.

Most parents are so overwhelmed and focused with the day-to-day parenting issues that it's convenient to leave these big ethical issues pushed to the side.

I'm challenging you to push them back in.

Don't just nickel-and-dime your way into these issues. Remember, you are investing in a more honest and healthy relationship with your child, who some day might stand there, arms on hips, staring you down, demanding answers. Invest now so that those answers are about why you won't let them borrow the car on a Friday night, rather than why you lied to them about their adoption  history or why you didn't deal with racism.

I rarely comment on adoptive parent blogs, but in this case I did. I encouraged the parent to open those floodgates. She was worried about all the scary things that might come with that; but then again, I saw it differently. I saw it as a way to open the gates to more honest and trusting relationship in the future.

***
If any of you were wondering, I did not link to the blog I mentioned because I did not want to inundate her with hits on her personal blog.

Oh mercy.

From People

Details are emerging about David Banda's prospective sister once a Malawian court investigates Madonna's application to adopt an orphaned baby girl named Mercy James – who, despite some reports, is not from the same orphanage where the pop star met David.

Madonna met Mercy James, now 3½ years old, at the Kondanani Children's Village, when she visited Malawi for the first time in October 2006. She expressed interest to adopt Mercy then but instead adopted David Banda, now 3, from Home of Hope orphanage in central district of Mchinji on the border with Zambia.

Read the rest here. Or don't. The article is as brief as her home study process.

A Korean Adoptee reflects on a legendary "teacher"

From the LA Times

Jane Elliot, the woman who made (controversial) history by creating an exercise in her 3rd grade classroom to teach her classroom of all-white students about race following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is featured in this article by former managing editor of KoreAm Journal, Corina Knoll. I first met Knoll many years ago when she was a student at a local college in my state at an adult Korean adoptee event.

I sometimes teach a class titled "Racial and Ethnic Comparative Analysis" for a social work BSW program in Minnesota, and the film "The Eye of the Storm" that documents this exercise is one of the films I have the students watch in my class.

In this article, Knoll talks about the impact Elliot made on her own life.

Jane Elliott has blue eyes.

The years have turned her once-brown hair a bright snowy white, and at 75 years old she's rounder, maybe shorter, than she used to be. But eye color doesn't change.

Elliott, an Iowa teacher, made deliberate use of that in 1968 when she created a now-famous exercise for her classroom of white third-graders. It was the day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and she was struggling to explain the concept of racism.

She hit upon an idea: For an entire day, she conducted her class as if the brown-eyed children were superior to those with blue eyes. Elliott eventually made headlines, appeared on "The Tonight Show" and became the subject of multiple documentaries.

Three decades later, my high school sociology teacher played us snippets of a news program about the "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" exercise. For a 16-year-old Korean adoptee growing up in Iowa, the most fascinating aspect was this: Elliott had made history in Riceville, two hours from my hometown.

The daughter of white parents, I grew up in a predominantly white city, attended an overwhelmingly white school and interacted mostly with white friends. The subject of race in my community was hidden, buried under rhetoric that insisted we remain "colorblind."

Elliott was the first white person I ever heard who admitted to the privileges of whites, acknowledging that visible differences affect how the world perceives us. Her words sparked a hunger in me for more.

This part of the article really touched me.

I think about a Midwestern girl who wasted years yearning to be white, who believed life would be easier, happier, better, if her brown eyes were not almond-shaped, who wavered between feeling insecure and invisible, and whose heart leaped upon learning of the blue-eyed woman who spoke of white privilege and institutionalized racism.

Did Jane Elliott's work make a difference to me? Yes, so much so that I felt the need to seek her out just to let her know. Elliott listens, then turns away and sighs. "Yeah," she says softly. "It was worth it."

And suddenly, we are two Iowans, remembering the pain of a connected past, one of us fulfilled to have met the woman who pointed the way toward a brighter future.

Please read the whole article.

Two links

An adult Indian adoptee is deported to India, 20 years after her adoption to the US.

Adoptive parents arrested in Egypt.

Wow.

Take a look at what Noraebang wrote, about  a new tv show on ABC family that features a Chinese adoptee.

I wouldn't be surprised if my favorite NYT blogger Tama Jan0witz was a consultant to this episode.
/snark.

Classifying children as "orphans" to facilitate adoption

In January 2008, Terri Hambruch embarked on a journey to Ethiopia that looked like it was going to change her life. Twenty months earlier, the woman from Golden, B.C., had adopted a six-year-old girl named Dassie, whom the adoption agency said was an orphan.

During this trip she had to reconcile the notion that she might have to give back this new love of her life.

Dassie, with adoptive mom Terri Hambruch. (Courtesy of family)

The quandary stemmed from a conversation Hambruch had with Dassie who asked, after she learned enough English, "Why did you adopt me?"

Terri told her she was an orphan and her parents were dead. "You needed a mom and a dad, and we needed a daughter, so it was a good fit.

"And she said: 'No. My family's not dead.'"

That prompted Terri and her husband Chris to hire a researcher in Addis Ababa to verify Dassie's claim. The child's mother was readily found, which led to the 2008 journey where Terri discovered that Dassie's mother had willingly relinquished the girl with the hope that she would have a better life in Canada.

"It was a huge sense of relief," said Terri. "If she hadn't placed her for adoption, we were prepared to do a repatriation."

Still, Terri Hambruch was upset because she had wanted to adopt an orphan. "I believe international adoption is the last option for a child. If there is anything else that could be done to keep a child in their country, in their home, then that's what you do."

It turns out the Hambruchs are not alone in receiving false information about their Ethiopian adoption. Several Canadian families say they have been misled by documentation they have received from the Canadian Advocates For Adopting Children, based in Minnedosa, Man.

The families claim that CAFAC has informed them their child is an orphan when the parents in fact exist. They also say that sometimes the children's ages are wildly off and the health of these kids varies greatly from what they have been told before travelling to Addis Ababa to pick them up.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Do yourself a favor and skip the comments to the article. They are full of very ignorant statements about international adoption and were incredibly disturbing for me to read.

Oh geez.

Not again.

All I can say is, I'm glad my kids don't like Hannah Montana OR the Jonas Brothers.

Hellooooo...are there any tween idols left who haven't made the Asian eye-slant?!?

Sigh.

The forgotten voice

I often talk about how the adoptee's voice is silenced and marginalized, but I believe that the women (and men) who lost their child(ren) through adoption have been marginalized and silenced to a much greater degree. That is why I recommend this very powerful essay that every adult adoptee and every adoptive parent should read.

Breaking the Silence: On Living Pro-Lifers' Choice for Women

The arrows point the way

A Reuters article reports that Madonna wants to adopt another child from Malawi. My favorite quote from this article:

Madonna said she wanted to keep him connected to his homeland.

"It is a big priority for me to educate my son about the world, but always to stay connected to his Malawian culture," she said.

"He has a big map of Africa in his room with lots of arrows pointing to Malawi."

Read the rest of the article here.

Wall Street Journal "All in the Family"

I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now with my friend Sarah, and we are reading this new article in the Wall Street Journal about adoption in China. Sarah remarks that it's interesting that there is a one-child policy for biological children but no limits on the number of kids you can adopt.

All in the Family: Adoption Comes Home to China

Every evening after that, Ms. Koh visited the orphanage after work to care for the baby. She called her Portia, after the heroine in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice." In Chinese, she was Bao-sha -- bao for treasure and sha for the first character in Shakespeare's Chinese name.

Samantha Sin for The Wall Street Journal

Mui Koh and her adopted daughter Portia at home in Guangdong province

Two months went by and Ms. Koh's love for the baby grew. Then the orphanage warned her that unless she adopted Portia -- now perfectly healthy -- the baby would be adopted by someone else.

Ms. Koh was stumped: "I didn't even know the concept of adoption at the time," she says.

No wonder. While China is known overseas as a place many go to adopt babies, until recently adoption was uncommon among Chinese families themselves. That's partly because of limited financial resources, and partly because the country's Confucian culture emphasizes family and filial piety.

Read the whole article here