Lessons of Adoption Can Be Difficult, But Have Widespread Applications
This week's article is taken from Adopted Child, Volume 17, Number 9, September 1998.
by Lois R. Melina
Adoption reaches us in ways we never imagine when we first welcome our children. Adoption teaches us about grieving, about our ability to control events, and about relationships. Through adoption we face our prejudices, our fears, and our expectations of ourselves and our children. Adoption is a lens through which we look at our world. It clarifies some aspects and blurs others. In the end, the lessons of adoption are lessons on love.
Adoption is not second-best
I smiled inwardly when my friend talked about her plan to have a baby. The baby would be born at the beginning of the summer so that she could finish teaching and be back in the classroom in the fall. She would carefully follow advice about conception so as to maximize her chances of having a girl. The baby, she hoped, would have her curly hair rather than her husband's thin, straight hair. Careful selection of music during the pregnancy and birth would mold the child's taste in music as well as her temperament.
I remember having thoughts like that.
Adoption reminds us that we have less control over our lives that we often think or want. Infertile adoptive parents progress from wanting to determine the sex, birth date, and genetic code for their child to just wanting a child. Along the way, we evaluate all those factors that seem essential to us at the beginning of our drive to reproduce, gradually letting go of the ones that are less important. We examine factors that still seem important to figure out why.
Why do we want a child with an IQ at least as high as ours? Why do we want a baby? Why do we want a healthy baby when a biological child could be born with disabilities or chronic illness? Though we know much about a biological child is beyond our control, we hang onto the illusion that we can control enough factors to at least increase the odds of getting what we want. We selectively ignore the risk factors in our own families, or perhaps we are not afraid of them because we have already learned that we can live with them.
Ultimately we must confront the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. Is this a child who is likely to not have something our biologic child probably would have had, or is this a child who will enrich our lives with his or her unique, unknown qualities?
The phone call reported the premature death of an acquaintance who had many talents and achievements--and had struggled with depression. At the time, I was still struggling with the relative importance of raising a child with my genes versus someone else's. It occurred to me that parents get little comfort from the knowledge that they have passed on their abilities and aptitudes if they do not also pass on their joy for life.
For some people, the fact they adoptive parents do not get what they wanted when they began the process of reproduction, i.e. a child with their genetic code and perhaps even specific inherited traits, leads them to conclude that we have settled for second best. Even some adoptive parents and adoptees draw this conclusion.
What we learn when we analyze this is that adoption, for most of us was a second choice, but that does not mean it is second best. We didn't get what we wanted at first. We didn't get what we first thought we needed. However, we have found our second choice to be as enriching and as satisfying as we expected our first choice to be.
Eighteen or so years after we welcome our children home, we realize that if we had been able to exert control over the formation of our family, we would have missed incredible experiences and never known some extraordinary children. We would have missed the amazing discoveries of children whose biologic composition showed us a different way of approaching challenges or looking at the world; whose genetically determined traits and abilities took us down different paths than we had known before. Without adoption we might not have realized that loving our children is not about loving the best parts of ourselves as reflected in our children, but about cherishing them as individuals with unique qualities.
Some people find spiritual implications in these discoveries. The idea that they could have been so off-base in determining what they needed, and that some higher power intervened, creating the crisis of infertility followed by the adoption of a child whose coming into their family appears to have been almost accidental, invites examination of concepts like blind luck, serendipity, destiny, karma, and God's plan. Having been so generously rewarded when they let go of control, adoptive parents may find that adoption has opened them up to other kinds of unknowns and allowed them to trust in that higher power.
Connections and loss
One of the first concepts presented to adoptive parents these days is that children grieve for the losses they experience in adoption. How primal this loss is, how deep the wounds, what its lingering effects, and how it is healed are questions still being debated.
It's one thing for parents to hear in an orientation class about the pain that an adoptee feels when she realizes her birth mother "gave her away." It's quite another for parents to see the child they love aching because she thinks she must be truly unworthy if her own birth mother "gave her away."
Committed to meeting our children's needs, we realize we cannot take the hurt away. We cannot pretend it didn't happen. We cannot compensate for the loss simply by being there or by giving more than the birth parents would have been able to give. We feel left out because this is about our child and someone else--someone we may not even know. Yet it may feel like this is about us and our failure to be everything our child needs.
Of course, we may tryt to distract our child from the pain, minimize it, or make her feel guilty or ungratful for having it. However, if we can acknowledge it, and recognize our role is to provide solace, we can learn much from our child's grief.
We can learn that children do have feelings. They are not emotionally shallow. Nor are they stronger emotionally than adults--able to rebound quickly from trauma. Rational explanations work not better to reduce a child's anguish than they do with adults--we continue to hurt even though we may intellectually understand that no personal injury was intended.
We can learn that feelings cannot be plotted on a balance sheet, with the emotional "gains" from a single incident, or an entire lifetime, compensating for the losses. We are entitled to an emotional response to each separate event. We cannot reduce the pain that comes with a child feeling abandoned by her birth mother by pointing out how much better off she is in his adoptive family any more than an adult's pain is reduced when, for example, a relationship goes sour and a well meaning friend tells her how good freedom can be.
"I wish I were in Korea, but if I were in Korea, I wouldn't have you, "a young girl said to her adoptive parents.
We've heard the maxim that when one door closes, another door opens, and that idea characterizes adoption. At every junction, there is a door that opens, but that would not be open were it not for another pathway being closed off. Whichever door is chosen, the other must close. Adoption reminds us that no matter how attractive one door might be, there is loss involved in choosing it. That loss doesn't diminish the experience of the door we go through; nor does the experience we choose make up for the loss.
We can spend a lifetime wondering about the doors we did not go through, whether through our choice or not. We help our children not bu pointing out to them how much they would have regretted the other doors, how inferior those paths, or how much they would have missed had they not gone through the door they did. We help our children by helping them learn that we can grieve for what was, missed, but we much still move on and embrace what is ahead. This is the lesson of infertility as well.
As parents, our understanding of our children's adoption-related grief can sensitize us to the validity of their feelings in other situations. Soon we begin to wonder how much of our child's grief over a friend who has rejected her is tied to her feelings of being rejected by her birth mother, or whether she is feeling the loss of her adoptive grandmother more because she's relating it to the loss of her birth family. Is every loss complicated by the losses of adoption, or have we become overly sensitive to grief issues, inadvertently making them seem bigger than they really might be?
What we may realize is that no matter what the age of the person, or whether he was adopted or not, what really hurts in life is being rejected or abandoned, and what's really frightening is the thought of being rejected or abandoned. We want to be wanted. We want to be valued. We want to have the choice of having that relationship, because the alternative could be that we are left alone. And while we all may crave privacy and appreciate independence, we all want the option of intimacy.
A family on earth
Adoption expands our relationships. We start be questioning how a child not biologically related to se can be a member of our family. Then. perhaps. we find ourselves feeling connected to the child's birth parents. Maybe we actually know them. Many adoptive parents today meet their children's birth parents prior to the adoption. Some develop a close relationship while other relate to each other more as distant friends.
Those of us who have not met our children's birth parents have nonetheless thought about them and perhaps craved the opportunity to reach out to them, assuring them that their child is thriving. In some cases, we feel a deep spiritual pull towards these birth parents, recognizing that though we may be unknown to each other, we have somehow all been involved in the creation and development of a remarkable human being. A profound connection like that cannot be easily dismissed.
As our children grow, we see glimpses os what we conclude is the influence of biology. Sometimes this challenges us--we want to credit environment for what we like in our child and blame biology for the rest. We learn, though, that our child is a complete package--to love part of her we much love the whole. This surrender to unconditional love is all that more incredible because it does involve accepting something beyond us.
The drive to become a parent is the human drive to reproduce ourselves. The basic instinct is survival of the human race. Beyond that is the desire to create a physical embodiment of the love that we share with another human being--a child who will meld the best of each of us into one person, and carry that into future generations.
When we lose this opportunity to immortalize our love, there is a deep loss which all infertile couples feel. However, when we accept a child with another genetic heritage as our child, and love that child as the unique mix of environment and heredity that he is, we achieve immortality in a different way. This act of love illustrates the idea that when we reproduce ourselves through adoption, our selves include all humanity.
When the adoption is international or transracial, that concept is even more significant. We cal call ourselves parent to a child with a different racial or ethnic heritage because all of humanity is ultimately related.
Again, we can take that lesson into the rest of our lives. What we have in common is greater than what separates us. And our capacity to love others, including people who seem to be very different from us, is much greater than we often realize. Blood is thicker than water, but who has water in their veins?
"Would you love me more if I have been born to you?"
How could any adoptive parent answer that question? We cannot imagine loving our children more than we do. But, more important, we would not be the same had we done through different doors. Our children would not be the same had they not gone through their doors. If it had been possible for the child with his unique DNA to be born to us, we would still not be the same people.
Being a family
Adoption causes us to examine the cultural notions of family. Because an adoptive family is formed through a legal process, the culture that controls the legal system defines what is an adoptive family according to cultural beliefs. We have seen singel men struggle to be allowed to adopt because the culture expects women, not men, to be nurturers. As nurturing roles for men have become more prevalent in the culture as a whole, men have faced less discrimination in adopting.
We have seen Caucasian parents face barriers to adoption African-American children. While much of the resistance has come from the African-American community, multiracial families still seem to confound the culture. Wen parent and child apparently defy the lingering cultural taboo of racial intermingling, strangers feel they are entitled to an explanation. As this taboo breaks down, transracial adoption becomes more accepted.
Gay and lesbian parents, women over 40, and unmarried couples face closer scrutiny before being able to adopt because at first glance they do not look like what our culture expects a family to look like. Even families whose relationship is called into questions by different hair color must explain their validity as a family.
When we adopt, we must explore how people who are not biologically connected can call themselves a family. If it isn't biology that binds us, what is it? Sometimes we look at the marriage model and realize that when we marry we create a family of two people not biologically related. Surely we can do the same with a child. The difference is that we create a family through marriage after we meet and fall in love with someone.
Though couples with arranged marriages learn to love each other, most of us do not want to take that risk. But adoption is an arranged family, with children going to parents in ways that sometimes seem random. It takes a leap of faith to believe that we will learn to love a child when we have not met him and know that we will not find familiarity through genetic traits.
Because we know that our relationship with our child is completely dependent on our interactions with each other, adoptive parents tend to put a lot of effort into being a family--into building relationships that some parents assume will be there because the biologic connection is there.
We bristly at the term real parents when the implication is that these are the biologic parents. We know that biologic or not, real relationships grow when parents are available--physically and emotionally, when children's physical and emotional and spiritual needs are met, when experiences and thoughts and fears are shared. We know that a piece of paper saying we are the legal parents of a child will not create trust or provide security. If they think about it--and many do--biologic parents realize that DNA doesn't do that, either. The difference is that having never had to examine what makes a family a family, some parents mistakenly assume that closeness is the automatic result of living together.
Just as welcoming a child is an array of firsts--first bath, first feeding, first time he slept through the night--letting go of a child is an awareness of potential finality--maybe the last camping trip, possibly that last time together on a birthday. There is the sadness of parting, but letting go is simple an extension of meeting the child's needs.
When a 7-year-old needs to learn more, we send him to first grade. We calm our nerves by reminding ourselves that we have done everything we could to prepare him. When it's time for children to leave home, parents and children both recognize that the next stage in development requires physical separation. We calm our nerves by reminding ourselves that for the past 18 or so years, our son or daughter has turned to us in times of need, when frightened or confused, and when delighted. We expect phone calls reporting roommate dissatisfaction, low finances, pride in accomplishment. And we know know that is a sign that even apart, we are still a family.
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