This isn't the family I thought I'd have

One decade ago we became parents. I am so tired.

Talking to the therapist today about the grief and therefore guilt that go along with adoption. People who are raising other people’s children often grieve over the loss of the genetically related child they didn’t/couldn’t have. And then they feel guilty over it, thinking (perhaps) that the feeling of loss means that the adopted child isn’t good enough or something. People really get hung up on that biological relationship thing. I suppose it’s pretty deep in our species survival hardwiring. But I don’t have it all that strongly. I would be crazy with it if the world needed more people, but as things stand I think there’s more than enough procreation going on. And as for my particular genes, I think my siblings and cousins have done more than their shares to keep the family line going. I have 12 nieces and nephews, and I also have five cousins who are doubly related to me because my mom’s sister married my dad’s brother. And those cousins have passed our grandparents’ genes on to another dozen or so kids.

Anyway, adoption wasn’t a last resort for us. It was a choice between different family-building processes. So we didn’t have months or years worth of failure trying to breed our family. We never had any imagined child who combined the best of each of us. So we sidestepped a big part of the emotional issues that many adoptive parents have to deal with.

Unfortunately, another part of parenting which isn’t necessarily about adoption does bother me. And maybe Pauline, too, but I won’t speak for her. What bugs me is that this isn’t the family I always imagined I would have. I think it’s more about having special needs kids than about the fact that they’re adopted. We don’t play together, laugh together, enjoy spending time together much. The stress level is too high, and I’m too depressed and frustrated.

The family I grew up in was unusual in how close we were, I guess. And how functional, in the sense of being the opposite of dysfunctional. Friends have said I grew up in some cross between the Waltons and the Brady Bunch. Of course, it wasn’t all sweetness and daisies all the time. I have scars from a fight I had with one of my sisters, who had sharp nails and knew how to use them. We squabbled and argued and fought because we were siblings. Dad’s job was sometimes stressful, money was tight, Mom didn’t exactly love housework (and we caused an awful lot of it). But none of us ever got into any major trouble, we all did pretty well at school, and we were dragged to church every Sunday. We lived in a nice house, not huge but enough, with a very good yard to play in. My parents did everything in their power to make sure we were in good schools. We wore hand-me-downs and shopped at K-Mart, but we always had everything we needed. And most of all, we had the security of knowing that Mom and Dad loved each other and loved us. My parents have been married for more than 50 years.

We had fun playing board games and eating popcorn by the fireplace. We went sledding together in the winter. Getting McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner was a rare and exciting treat. We rarely talked back to our parents, well, maybe my mom wouldn’t agree with that. But never in a million years would any of us have treated my parents the way my children routinely treat us.

Which makes me realize that I haven’t written much about the kids and their various issues. Stay tuned.

Becoming parents

There is no logical reason to choose to become a parent. There are certainly emotional ones, and likely good moral ones, and such strong cultural and biological ones that most people never even think twice about it. But if you sit down and think about it rationally, it’s awfully hard to come up with a logical reason. I suspect most parents out there never had to answer the question, ‘why do you want to do this?’ But we were asked that question more than once. For that matter, we looked at our careers and our bank account (yes, a joint account) and asked ourselves the same question. And the only answer to “Why do you want to have a baby?” is “Because we want to be parents.”

There are a lot of blogs out there about people going through the adoption process, people wading through mazes of bewildering paperwork and people looking for babies and waiting for babies and going on exotic trips to faraway places to get their children. There are heartbreaking stories of adoptions that fall through, of scams and baby selling and children growing up in orphanages while their parents struggle to get them home. This is not one of those blogs.

We did some of that. But I have to say we were extraordinarily lucky. Our agency supported us, provided a very educational transracial adoption seminar and a wonderful social worker, and in a remarkably short time placed our three-day-old son in our arms. The next year we repeated the process and brought home a beautiful baby girl. Our friends were all on the waiting list for a girl. We were thinking number two should be a boy, but we told the agency we’d be happy either way. We were chosen by a birthmother who didn’t know the gender of her baby. And it turned out that Pixie is as female a child as anyone could hope for.

We debated child number three. I had always wanted four kids: two boys and two girls. Pauline wasn’t as set on four, but did want at least one more boy. We wanted a brother for CharlieClyde in our female-headed household to sort of balance things. But having been there twice, it seemed neither of us was really keen on returning to the newborn-baby scene. And, we thought, there are potential advantages to adopting. Perhaps we could find an older baby boy or a toddler, and skip over that exhausting, sleepless stage. Back to the agency. Reality check: nope, older babies and toddlers don’t typically become available for adoption. It tends to be newborns or older kids or sibling groups. The director of our agency suggested international adoption if we wanted a toddler. Oh, don’t think so, we couldn’t afford that. But again…

We did our research. We talked to adoption agencies with international programs, we talked to other gay couples who had adopted internationally. We learned about the legalities. We did more on the internet this time around since it was 2002 or ’03. And we learned what potential international adoptive parents learn: the process can be long, complicated, and expensive, many countries demand both proof of marriage and proof of Christian church attendance, and a lot of places want you to go to the country at least once. ‘Long’ we didn’t really want since we wanted our kids pretty close in age, especially if the brother we were looking for could really be much good for CharlieClyde. ‘Complicated’ we figured we could handle, ‘expensive’ we obviously couldn’t. Proof of marriage was an obvious problem, and proof of being Christian? We weren’t exactly involved with a church enough to get the pastor to vouch for us.

Since we already had two Black kids, we were looking in parts of the world where the population is Black: Ethiopia, Haiti, South Africa, you get the picture. We were disgusted to find how many people would rather let a child starve to death than let him live with us. We considered lying to Haiti, pretending to be a single super-Christian Mom, but decided it would be too stressful, and not the way we wanted to begin a relationship with our child. Some of the people we talked to at international adoption agencies were sympathetic, but not willing to jeopardize their own standing with the various countries to help us (and our potential child). Some didn’t even want to talk to us. We had many long talks with a social worker at an agency that worked with South Africa. God bless Nelson Mandela, nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is written into their constitution. But ultimately we could not figure out how in the world we would be able to travel to South Africa with the two little kids we already had. The social worker agreed that the rules were written with first-time parents in mind. We tried to figure out whether just one of us could go there, but I think it was supposed to be both of us, and the more we talked to the social worker the less it seemed like we would be able to do it financially or logistically.

I’m not sure how much I believe in such things, but I would have to say that the Hand of God intervened on our behalf at that point. We were talking to the director of our original agency, and she mentioned someone she knew who had just started an orphanage in Monrovia, Liberia. We looked up the person (who I will call Mary) and her organization, contacted her, and began to find out whether this was how our next child would come to us. The first time I talked to Mary she had me in tears with her stories of the little ones in Monrovia, and I don’t cry easily. Picture everybody’s reactions to the news stories of the babies in Haiti for the past couple of weeks, and then you’ve kind of got the idea. Liberia was just ending 15 years of war, and there were 60,000 orphans in Monrovia alone. Mary’s orphanage could only care for 60. I told her I would take all 60,000 of them.

Mary’s organization had a Christian slant, and we were concerned about coming out to her. The irony of that never goes away. We debated for weeks, I think, before coming up with a plan. My best friend from high school grew up to be a pastor in a liberal thinking branch of Jesus’ people. I asked her to call Mary and inquire whether she would be open to lesbian parents. Mary’s response couldn’t have been better. She said, “Sure. Do they want twins?”

Twins had not really been under consideration. For one thing, we weren’t sure we were going to be able to afford to adopt one at that point, so certainly doubling the cost wasn’t an option. But mostly it just hadn’t really occurred to us.

West Africa has the highest rate of fraternal twinning and multiples in the world. Why? I don’t think anyone knows for sure. Fraternal twinning is genetically influenced, though, and I suppose somewhere has to have the highest rate. Unfortunately for all those twins and triplets, a poverty stricken family is stressed by the birth of one baby, two or three at a time are impossible to support. Literally, as in they don’t have any way to feed them. So it seemed that Mary’s orphanage was loaded with twins, triplets, and sibling groups as well as all the singleton babies and children. Did we want twins?

Parents who get pregnant don’t usually have to make all the decisions that adoptive parents have to make. Not only one baby or two, boy baby or girl, but all kinds of health choices as well. Would you accept a child with a cleft palette? With drug exposure? With physical malformations or disabilities? The questionnaires you have to fill out are mind-wrenching.

But the idea of being able to finish our family was definitely appealing. We were getting tired of what we called ‘the diaper and stroller stage.’ Mary’s agency was all about getting starving babies into good homes, and she was able to work with us on the financial aspect of doing two at once. Besides, twins are so cool. I always wished I were a twin. Twins! We were expecting twins!

In another post I might go into detail about our first set of twins, who died before we could bring them home. The infant mortality rate in Liberia at the time was about 50% in the first year. Yes, half of babies born didn’t make it to their first birthday. I don’t know what the statistics look like now, but they are that bad in so much of the world. It’s hard to imagine living with that. Anyway, we then accepted a match with another set of twins, five months old when they came to the orphanage. Not quite nine months old when Mary got off the plane and brought them to us. Again our process had gone amazingly quickly and smoothly, considering everything that can get messed up dealing with all the various bureaucracies, agencies, governments, lawyers, and international politics. We talked to Mary for the first time in the fall of 2003. Samson and Delilah arrived home at the end of July, 2004.

In Our Beginning

In the 1990s we were living in a very different world. That’s ok, we were different people then with very different lives. Pauline and I spent most of that decade in a process of coming out; a different process with different people in our lives. The process was made somewhat more difficult because we were both elementary teachers, a job which of course our society entrusts only to the most honorable and trustworthy individuals with the utmost in traditional Judeo-Christian morals. Children are so vulnerable that having a lesbian or gay teacher will turn them gay, or something. Or maybe gay people are different only in who they have sex with, therefore we would have sex either with the children or in front of them? In other words, since prejudice is irrational it is often justified by religion and shrouded in righteous indignation, so coming out under the wrong circumstances could have lost us our jobs.

I don’t remember when we decided to have children. I have always assumed I would have children, and I have always wanted to be a mom. Having a female life partner didn’t change that. I think Pauline felt the same way. I know that by the time we bought our first house together in the late nineties we had children in mind. We knew that we couldn’t be closeted with children, and buying a house together will speed up the process of outing yourself, as well.

When you can’t make a baby with your spouse the old fashioned way, you have to stop and think about other options. With the typical tunnel vision of most couples (gay or straight) we dreamed of ways to get both our genes into the kid. Maybe my brother could donate sperm for her, and her brother could donate sperm for me! Could we ask a brother or cousin to donate sperm? Uh, no. Well, we need sperm. How about asking a close friend? You can always ask. They can always say no. Ok, then, a sperm donor who seems to be as much like us as possible. My God, or as we say in this decade, OMG, do you know what that costs? We had the money for about six months of inseminations, but what if it didn’t work? We could very well be out of money with no baby to show for it. (What about insurance, you might wonder. Didn’t cover any of it unless you were hetero, married, and medically proven to have fertility issues.)

We did our research. We looked at donor catalogs. Now that’s a weird experience. If I had to fill out one of those family medical history forms, it wouldn’t look so great. I wouldn’t choose me to be a donor (or my brother, come to think of it). And somewhere in there it occurred to me that if Pauline had a baby with donor sperm, that child would not be in any way genetically related to me. In effect, I would be adopting the child. In reality, legally, I would also have to adopt the baby. Hmm, those costs had to be figured in, too. But with adopting someone else’s baby, a baby who needed loving parents, we could spend the money we had and know that there would be a baby at the end of the rainbow.

We did our research. We talked to adoption agencies, we talked to the state’s department of family services, we talked to other gay couples who had adopted. We learned about the legalities. We did what we could on the internet, but remember this was the late nineties. No Google. And we learned what potential adoptive parents learn: healthy white babies are hard to come by and cost more. We came to the conclusion that our best bet was an agency which had been founded by a lesbian adoptive mother, and which focused on the placement of African American babies. Transracial adoption was a new term for us.

So it came down to this: take a chance at growing our own, white, baby or adopt a Black baby.

We wanted to be parents more than we wanted a Mini Me running around the house. Pauline and I had taught in areas with racial diversity that most white Americans never see. We considered ourselves to be enlightened and liberal. The babies we were thinking of adopting would likely come from a community similar to ones we had worked in. We knew the medical risks that a baby can have from having a mother who lives in a low income, high stress area. Who better than us, we thought, to give such a child everything they might need? We were educators, after all. And clearly, all children matter, not just white ones. Would it be harder being an interracial family? Sure. But if we didn’t adopt one of the children who really needed a home, that other prospective parents might not be able to accept, what family would that child have? If you were a Black child in America, would it be better to have white lesbians for parents or to grow up in a seriously messed up foster care system with no real family at all? Not only were we sure that we would have a baby by adopting, we were sure that we were morally superior than people who were overpopulating the planet by breeding more of their own.

Our families did not exactly agree. At least, some members didn’t. One sibling said “I’d rather slit my wrists than be a Black kid being raised by white lesbians.” Another’s first reaction was, “Why can’t you adopt a Vietnamese baby?” There isn’t going to be a post-racial America for a very long time.

Welcome

Adoption is so much on people's minds lately, with all the Haitian babies on the news. And with the lawsuit on gay marriage going on in California, gay and lesbian families are getting quite a bit of attention, too. But I started poking around a little bit, and realized that there aren't many blogs that bring together our family's experiences.

We are a white lesbian couple who have adopted four Black children, two domestically, two internationally. To varying degrees, three of our children could be labeled "special needs."

We adopted our first child just about ten years ago. We worked with a wonderful private agency in a large city which was supportive of gay and lesbian parents, a rare find a decade ago. Our first son came to us straight from the hospital when he was three days old. Our second child, a daughter, also came to us at three days old. Our third adoption was twins, a girl and a boy, born in Liberia at the end of the 15 or so years of civil war there. Our twins came home to us when they were almost nine months old.

At this time I have decided not to identify us by name on this blog to protect our children's stories. See above for the nicknames I am going to use for each of the children, for my partner, and any other people I end up talking about.