My New Teen and the Thoughts She Inspires on Adoption

When I met her, she seemed so far from this moment. She was at once a tiny wisp of a child and a solid soul, far smaller than her 22 months, but far clearer on her needs and wants, what she would surrender and what she would fight ardently to gain. She called me "Mamma" so easily. I wanted nothing more than to hear that title over and over again.

It would be easy, on this her 13th birthday, to consider my nearly all grown baby in verse after verse of pure poetry. She deserves that really. She is such a wise young lady, so lovely. She has those dimples that possessed me from the moment I held her, those eyes that sparkle like onyx and tell me everything I need to know about her. She is responsible beyond her years, sometimes too responsible, sometimes taking on the tasks and concerns that really belong to others. At this relatively young age, she will willingly practice her violin for several hours a day, alternating with her new attempts at playing cello, finish her school work without me ever needing to ask, do her chores with only the slightest of an eye roll, and read for hours on end. She is a delightful conversationalist when she is feeling extroverted, a loyal friend, and fun companion.

See? Poetry.

I almost hate to do this, but there is more. There is just so much more to parse when I reminisce on this birthday. It is never as simple as looking back on how much my sweet daughter has grown.

She was born into abject poverty in Haiti, lived in several orphanages from 14 months until we brought her home at 38 months, and has very little relationship with her family of origin (beyond the exchange of letters and pictures). There is nothing romantic or poetic about that and the older she gets the more it troubles me. Did we do the right thing by adopting her and her brother and taking them out of Haiti? I mean, did we do the right thing for everybody involved? I know we did what makes us the happiest. We love her so much our hearts often feel so full they ache. We know we made our little world a better place by bringing her into our family. We truly believe that she is healthier, safer, and better educated than she might have been otherwise. But did we do the right thing? Was it right for everyone?

Mother Jones recently published a provocative article about a challenge to our international adoption system: that a population of evangelical Christians are promoting adoption as a forceful tool for proselytization (Please read that as a criticism of the evangelical Christians in question and not all Christians, evangelical or otherwise**). Nothing in this article surprised me. I was, however, shocked by the reactions to it. Many people honestly have no idea that this is happening. Others don't see the problem if it is. That is perhaps why I have finally chosen to break my own relative silence on this auspicious occasion.

We experienced the problem first hand. Our adoption process was an education in corruption, religion at its worst, racism, and child abuse. While we waited for our paperwork to go from department to department, before we knew what was happening, but long after we had bonded with our children, we were admonished to "beat the Haitian out of" our children, to follow the Pearls and their abusive methods in parenting, and to affirm the notion that the tragedies that befall Haiti are due to their "Satanic practices and intellectual inferiority." At one point, we were locked into the iron-barred patio of the Americans managing the orphanage and made to listen to a letter written by the American evangelical pastor and his wife who owned and ran the orphanage about how they were "the only God your children have ever known." Shortly after that, a member of the orphanage board refused to speak to the local social worker we were working with to salvage the adoption because, in his words "As a man, I am your superior. I don't do business with women."

Our first response to all this was to find our children's first parents and ask them if they knew what it meant for us to adopt them and if that was what they wanted. Though they affirmed that it was and signed papers stating as much, I am still haunted by the idea that they might not have fully understood. What if they'd been lied too so greatly in the name of cultural annihilation and Christian conviction that anything we might have said would only serve to confuse them more? What if they had been made to believe that they really had no choice? Or more frighteningly, what if they had been brainwashed into believing that to deny the desire to find a way to parent their children instead of placing them for adoption would condemn them to hell? That they should do this in the name of Jesus? That not doing it made them unfaithful Christians?

Being considered an unfaithful Christian in Haiti these days, as some Christians** fight each other to save the most souls, is a fate worse than death, or more to the point, than losing a child to America.

So I battle, especially as I mull over my kids' birth stories, with the way this international adoption occurred. Who did we inadvertently deceive in our ignorance and eagerness to parent these children? Who did we hurt? There is no way to remedy what has already taken place and I can't conceive of the notion of causing greater loss by reversing anything. Nearly ten years after bringing them home, there have been deaths and tragedies that make even a modicum of reconciliation nearly impossible. Add to that that holding these opinions renders us outcasts in the community of people who have adopted from Haiti. Against our best intentions, the very nature of international adoption in Haiti has segregated them from their culture with a greater force than we have been able to fight. Essentially, by nearly saturating the international adoption scene in Haiti, the evangelical Christians** who are adopting-to-save have made it impossible for those of us who did not to integrate into the culture in Haiti and into the culture of families with children adopted from Haiti in America.

Our kids exist in the in-between. That is not fair to anyone. They should feel comfortable returning to Haiti someday, whether to visit or live (one considers it an option; one is frightened by the very idea, despite our best efforts to diffuse concerns). They should get to enjoy reunions and relationships with local families formed through adoption from Haiti (the last reunion we attended, in early 2010, was severely marred by the repeated conversations where parents stood with their arms around their Haitian children, sharing how sure they were that God had used the earthquake to punish Haitians for their many sins.).

I know of one family (their own public struggle with these issues has given me the courage to share our story) that has remained in Haiti after adopting. I wonder if they have made the best of the adoption situation in Haiti by doing this, if their route is perhaps the best for everyone. Their children can remain close to their first families and steeped in their birth culture. They can also affect change in adoption legislation from the Haiti side and work towards greater stability and understanding for parents who might be swayed towards adopting through the unethical use of spiritual guilt. They can carefully consider the needs of families of origin and help to remedy situations caused by poverty and oppression.

Of course, that one family, or even the families out there like ourselves who wrestle with adoption ethics, particularly with regards to adoption for the purposes of proselytization, are not enough to cull the trends that concern us. I think greater reform is required than can be achieved by a few families and a few blog posts or articles. How that might look is perhaps a topic for a future post. Truthfully, I do not even know myself.

What I do know is that on this 13th birthday of my eldest daughter, I am at once gratefully indebted to her first family for letting us parent her and woefully ashamed of the adoption system that might have let it happen with far too many casualties along the way.



**I hope readers can read this with an open mind and heart so that change can come. I write it as a self-identified Christian and do not mean to include all Christians in this analysis.

My daughter is almost three in the photo above.

Here are some links to other posts I have written about our adoption:
On adoption laws in Haiti post-earthquake
On faith and adoption
Some adoption myths
Our adoption day, part 1, part 2, and part 3
20 things I wish I'd known about adoption
A story of my eldest's athletic prowess and where it all began in Haiti

"Book of Mormon": A Delightfully Irreverent Religious Experience

I tore my meniscus running up several flights of stairs to make curtain for "Book of Mormon".

Totally worth it.

The Book of Mormon might be crude and raw, but it is never snarky. I went in knowing very little about the production except that I should not take my children (a concerned neighbor offered that advice) and that it was created by the "South Park" people. I have never seen "South Park". Animation freaks me out.

There are various layers of offense that one could take from "Book of Mormon". A sexualized baptism comes to mind. Jesus with a penis. A song that takes anger at God to a whole new level.

If you walk, or hobble as the case may be, away from "Book of Mormon" only having taken such offense, you have missed the point.

Truly the story and the profound observations it makes could have starred any religion. Imagine the hilarious tableaus they might have created with the story of Christianity. Have you ever read the Bible? There are some wild stories in there. In my opinion, Mormonism is merely the vehicle used to relay the important messages.

With that, here is what I took from the brilliantly irreverent "Book of Mormon":

1. The basis and rituals of a religion do not matter. What matters is whether the religion moves you to do good or bad (Cue admonishments from people who would rather see a person like me "saved" than see a world free from hunger and war).

2. Starving people at war will not be healed by a cute, native phrase, nor are they "such a colorful, happy people". These are the lies that we tell ourselves to feel better about the fact that we, people of faith, are doing very little to really cure these ails.

3. Getting people to convert to ANY religion will not stop poverty, hunger, AIDS, misogyny, racism, war and the like. It might make you, the evangelist, feel better about yourself and your place in heaven, but it does nothing to make the world a better place.

4. People of any faith do well to laugh a little, especially at ourselves.

5. Scrotums are even more funny when set to music.

I hope to see the musical again when I do not have to sit through it in agony (of knee, not spirit). I need constant reminders of its messages. And I need to see the magnificent Elder Cunningham perform his magic again. I might have a serious crush on him.

View on YouTube


*This post was written under the influence of pain-killers.

The Happiness Fallacy

Note to readers: You might notice my lack of more regular writing. As this is a blog chronicling the educational journeys of my children, they have carte blanch authority to forbid any post they do not want publicized. They are all older now and more aware of their own identities. So they veto a lot more posts. This one made it through the filtering process.


I have come to the conclusion that we have it all wrong, the notion of happiness as our goal in life. It's too blurry a goal, not to mention entirely self-serving.

In raising and learning with my children, I confess that my greatest delinquency has been considering their happiness above all else. Now, with three pre-teens (one dangerously close to 13), I can see that such a goal has led to an embarrassing amount of ergophobia (fear of work) around here.

I am not entirely to blame. The combination of smart phones and Google can own a chunk of it, with their ease of use and rapid-fire responses rendering an afternoon perusing the reference section of the library obsolete (It took me 5.4 seconds, for example, to learn from Google that a fear of work is called "ergophobia".).

And there is the general absorption (a la The Secret et. al.) of the idea that the vaingloriously named "First World" deserves happiness above all else and over all others.

Recently my kids went through a battery of educational, psycho-social, and emotional testing as a part of a program at the local university. Regarding my youngest, she who is known on this blog as Blueberry and who has wanted nothing more in her life than to grow up to be a doctor, the Ph.D. student tester said she was too morbid, too concerned with blood and gore. Every Rorschach picture was, to my daughter, representative of a medical trauma of some sort, usually one resulting in the need for neurosurgery (neurosurgery being my daughter's current speciality-of-choice). Every story she told from picture prompts morphed into fictionalized tales of trips to the emergency room. Even her interpretations of pre-written story blurbs involved an undercurrent of medical need.

"It is not healthy," the tester said, "for an eight year old girl to be so obsessed with medical trauma. We advise that you put her into school to normalize her."

Defensive, at the very least, I retorted, "Would you offer the same advice had she come into your office and talked obsessively about unicorns?"

Indeed, she would not have. "Unicorns are an acceptable and much lighter obsession for an eight year old girl," she explained.

Oh hell no! A Ph.D student working towards the ultimate goal of assessing the educational needs of American youth did not just tell me that my highly-driven, lofty-goaled, science-obessed daughter would be "happier, more normal, and well-adjusted" if she could just switch her obsession from neuroscience to unicorns (not that there's anything wrong with unicorns, of course; my best friend's a unicorn).

Let me ask you: Were you ever to require the services of a neurosurgeon (insert hand crossing oneself and a side double spit for good measure), would your first question be, "How happy were you as a child?"

The fact is that my daughter is not at all light. She is intense and myopically focussed on her passion, a passion that causes her genuine angst ("Why CAN'T we do a brain transplant for brain stem injuries yet?"). That there is a multi-year process to sludge through before she will ever be allowed to cut into a real live human brain eats at her. That hospitals won't allow her to volunteer on the pediatric neurosurgery floor to better tap into the experience of a child with a brain tumor rattles her existential sensibilities.

But her lack of bubbles and perk do not negate her normalcy. If anything, it disproves the notion that our ultimate goal in life should be happiness. From the age of two, this child of mine has thought far more about medical science than happiness. This is neither the result of nurture nor her environment (which includes a quick-to-gag, faints-at-the-sight-of-blood mother who pushes herbs over prescriptions). It is pure nature. It is who she is.

And by pushing happiness, I fear I have left her with the impression that she might not have to work hard to achieve these goals.

My eldest daughter is, by nature, my hardest worker. She sometimes laments the fact that she was not born in Ancient Mexico, where she would "get to" grind her own corn with a metate y mano (Google search for proper term: 8 seconds). Recently, to put her in step with this natural proclivity to work hard, we amped up her educational and musical pursuits. Basically, she works her butt off. And I have felt kind of guilty about it. "But is she happy?" I wonder. Recently, at the end of a long, laborious day, she closed her last book and exclaimed, "God, that feels good! I LOVE the feeling at the end of day when I am finished with all that work! It's so satisfying."

Mamma WIN.

I suppose if I am to sum up these thoughts (I might have worked harder to be more concise, but it didn't make me happy to do so), I'd have to conclude that happiness is too elusive a concept to be a goal in life. In neurosurgery, as in so many other parts of life, angst is quite possibly the most useful and necessary emotion (A neurosurgeon who yearns for a cure to brain cancer is far more efficacious than one who wants to be happy).

My new goal, as a parent and educator, is to help my children develop whichever identity best suits their passions: angst-ridden, hard-working, comical, perseverant, etc.. If they end up happy in the process, however happiness looks to them, then we can celebrate the gravy atop their existential sandwich.

But happiness is not the goal. The goal is to be who they are in a world that needs them and their passions.

Playtime

Top 20 Things I Wish I Had Known About Adoption Before I Adopted

I recently cobbled together a list of wisdom and advice I wish I had gotten prior to forming a family with children (by any means: adoption, foster care, step-parenting, birth, etc.).  Since our family was formed through both adoption and birth, though, I thought I'd add the top 20 things every parent should consider before adopting as well:

1.  Adoption is a wonderful way to form a family.

2.  No matter how simple or rosy your adoption might seem, all adoption is predicated upon loss.  Even if you are the lucky one-in-a-million to "catch" baby in the hospital and you celebrate with the birth mother as she joyfully signs parenting rights over to you, your child will be affected by the adoption.  Your child's birth parents and extended family will experience loss.  You will feel the sting of not having carried your child.  Everyone will miss the medical history if there is none available. You will have to deal with the emotional scars of adoption.  Even if it doesn't look like there are any scars, there are.

3.  Make sure you are surrounded by supportive people who will shower you with all the rituals that traditionally come with forming a family with children.  The two showers we were thrown made us feel like we were a real family (despite the many messages out there that we were not).

4.  Some people will treat you like you are not a real family.  Our first social worker -- I said SOCIAL WORKER -- was pregnant.  She constantly communicated to us that while she was forming a family, we were apparently playing house.  When she did a home visit, 8 months pregnant, she stopped at the nursery and said, "Oh...hmmmm...I guess I wouldn't recommend setting up room for a child since, you know, you might not get one."
     Before firing her, I asked, "Do you have a nursery set up?"
     "Yes," she said, pointing to her swollen belly, "But, you know, mine's a sure thing."  Ouch.

5.  Set aside two to three times more money than the agency tells you you will need for the adoption.  If you need it, it is there.  If you are lucky enough not to need it -- college fund!

6.  Make absolutely sure that somebody is there to visit/greet you when you bring your child home.  If you adopt internationally, make sure people are waiting to welcome you at that airport.  If you are coming home from the hospital or a foster home, make sure there are people who will come by and (appropriately) ooh and aah with you over your newest family member, whether the child is a few days old or 13.  You need this.  Trust me.  We arrived from Haiti to an empty airport.  The fact that we had just become parents did not feel special to us at all.

7.  Most people, when they inquire about your children, really do have good intentions.  Some are just curious.  Some are considering adoption.  Some have already adopted.  Some are grandparents awaiting a grandchild through adoption (we meet a lot of these).  Some are from your child's country of origin.  Many are innocently curious children.  Be kind.  Give them the benefit of the doubt when they are asking questions -- until they have proven that their intentions are not good.

8.   Occasionally, you will meet people whose intentions are not good.  Feel free to tell them it is private, ignore them completely, or in extreme cases, ask them an equally rude question.  Once a lady pointed at my kids and asked, "Where did you get those and how much were they?"
     Hoping to educate her on the language a bit, I responded, "They joined our family through adoption."
     She pushed, "I can see that, but what'd you do to get them?"
     I asked, "Are you considering adoption?"
     "No," she responded incredulously, "I just want to know where and how you got 'em."
     Sobering up to the situation, I asked, "Do you have children?"  She nodded yes.  I rapidly retorted, "Were they born vaginally or did you have a c-section?  When you conceived them, what position did you use?  How much was the hospital bill?"
     She walked away and the checker plus the 2 other people in line at the supermarket all applauded.
     That was the only time I can recall where I felt the need to be rude in response to an adoption question.

9.  Respect your child's place of birth and family of origin.  While it is important to be honest if they come from a family or culture with big challenges, always be respectful.

10.  If you are adopting because you believe the child you wish to adopt is a heathen or going straight to hell without your help, DON'T.  If you are repulsed by the potential child's cultural heritage and are adopting to save them from it, do not adopt.  That is not love.  That is not respect.  In doing so, you strip the child of dignity.  

11.  Before even beginning the process, know this: you are in this for the long haul.  If your child develops in a way you did not expect, you are still their parent.  Do not assume that you can do anything with your child through adoption that you would not/could not do with a child from birth.  Yes.  Adoption can be difficult.   As I mentioned, there are always scars.  Sometimes those scars can be incredibly challenging.   You need to know that before you sign on the dotted line.  If you would not "return" a child born to you with a severe disability, don't expect to "return" a child from adoption who is emotionally scarred.  If your child needs a level of support that you cannot provide by yourself, it is your job to find the necessary resources AND continue to support the child as a parent should.

12.  At some point, no matter how much you have reenforced positive adoption language, your child, most likely a 'tween, will scream for their "real mother/father" when angry with you.  It will sting.

13.  Likewise, if your child is not able to have a relationship with their birth family, they will fantasize about living with them -- and the fantasy will often times look better than their real life.

14.  Numbers 12 and 13, as well as other painful scenarios -- like your child running away to find their birth family -- are perfectly normal.

15.  Normal, age-appropriate challenges will be both punctuated and informed by your child's adoption.  Often times, that which punctuates and informs those struggles is 100% unknown to you.  This is hard on everybody.  As difficult as it is for you as the parent, though, imagine how tough it is for your child that you and they don't necessarily know what they have been through.

16.  The lack of medical information, should that be an issue, is a challenge for the parent.  For many children, it is confusing at first (0-7 years), then embarrassing (8-11 years), then devastating (12+ years).

17.  Any amount of loss that you are feeling because you did not carry your child in pregnancy, did not know your child from birth, etc. is multiplied by a great deal for the child.  While you sort through your own loss, recognize that their's is greater.

18.  Most of your friends and family will not fully grasp the labyrinth of emotions involved in adoption.

19.  Find people who do fully grasp the labyrinth of emotions involved in adoption.

20.  Adoption is still a subject that requires some careful treading in many circles.  People will tell you that the issue you are facing is a normal, age-appropriate issue.  That may well be true, but adoption adds another layer and you, as the parent, must be prepared to dig in and work through the issue with your child.  Other people will respond to adoption thoughtlessly (the grandparent who treats children who were adopted differently, the teacher who points out your child any time adoption is a topic, the neighbor who is uncomfortably nosy).  In choosing to adopt, you are also choosing to be both your child's protector and your child's advocate.  You will be responsible for educating the uncouth teacher and nosy neighbor.  It is your job to have the difficult conversation with the thoughtless grandparent.

BONUS: There are some significant myths about adoption that you will have to sort through BEFORE you adopt if possible.  I have written about them here.

God in Schools

This idea that we have taken God out of schools has me somewhat baffled.  If I am a Christian, don't I believe that God is everywhere?  Doesn't God dwell within each of us and shine through our love for one another?

I worry that the real issue is that people want to be able to make a show of their version of God in schools.  This confuses me too.  Didn't Jesus tell his disciples to pray quietly and without show?  Yes, I believe He did, which means that Jesus most likely prefers that we not put on a show of our faith in schools (or anywhere else).

The party line I hear towed is that we need to return to the good old days (when God was allowed in schools).  First of all, those days of which many speak weren't all that good.  Well, I guess they were pretty special for white, Christian boys of affluence.  They were iffy at best, segregated institutions of racism, sexism, homophobia, materialism, and anti-everything-but-Christianity at worst, for everybody else (I like the way this blogger put it).  Secondly, nobody has removed God from anything.  That's just not possible, what with God being omnipotent and all.  Whether the person sitting next to your child at school attends before school prayer meetings or not does not impact God's presence in school.  Nor does it mean anything about that child's faith.  And you don't get to judge him for it. You don't get to touch the log in his eye.  Worry about your own. That's the rule.

I hear the tone with which I write and it does not thrill me.  I feel frustrated and somewhat alarmed when people insult the God I love by presuming that humans have control over where and when God is present.  The God in which I believe is always present -- even in modern day schools.

Period.