Anyway, the topic for today's conversation is The Top Things Never to Say to an Adoptive Mother. As you can imagine, this is a conversation that I've wanted to have many times with many people in real life. It's awkward to address someone's faux pas in a real-life conversation without embarrassing them or hurting their feelings, so instead I've often imagined a scenario where a group of women (probably at Enrichment Night) get together and are simply dying to know The Top Things Never to Say to an Adoptive Mother, and of course I am more than happy to enlighten them. Obviously this scenario has never played out in real life, but one can dream, can't she?
1. (And this really is the biggie, both in frequency and in level of annoyance) "You got your baby the easy way." Or, said more subtly, "You're so lucky you don't have to go through pregnancy." Can we say, "Arrrghhh!!!" Almost nothing makes me want to clobber somebody over the head more than the variations on these two statements. Instead, I reply politely, "Well, there's no easy way to have children. Otherwise we wouldn't appreciate them so much." In one case, a woman in my ward repeated this statement to me no less then three times over the course of her pregnancy. Now, of course, there's the excuse that she was pregnant and not feeling well and obviously wrapped up in all her own woes. But it still didn't sit well with me. The first time she brought it up, I was polite. The second time she brought it up, I was polite again, all the while reminding her that she simply could not see the challenges associated with adopting because they were less visible and she had not experienced them herself. The third time she brought it up, I truly wanted to shake her into my reality. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I was quite firm in letting her know that adoption is NOT easy.
When most people start to wake up to the realization that it's not easy, they resonate with the idea that yeah, all that paperwork would be a pain. The paperwork is the easiest part. Though as we approach our homestudy for adoption #3, I am honestly wondering how I can get it done. It seems harder than it has ever seemed before. What's hardest for me about adoption is the uncertainty and the abstractness of it. This was particularly acute with our first adoption, where I felt an overwhelming need to feel like and be treated like an expectant mother. Well, that's hard to maintain for two years, which is how long we waited for D. At the time I was feeling emotionally "overdue", I still had 15 months to wait--and believe me, I felt overdue that entire time. Sometimes I felt like my skin was crawling and my head would explode from the anticipation coupled with the not knowing when or if anything would ever happen.
When you're adopting, nobody on the outside validates your experience for you. I remember sitting at a Relief Society lunch where two sisters were expecting their first babies. There was plenty of commisseration and advice-giving from the women around them. The conversation turned to baby names, and people at the table were eager to hear the names they had chosen for their babies. No one thought to ask me if we had any names chosen, even though the discussion was completely relevant to me. I was expecting a baby too, but no one recognized this fact. At the time, this really hurt. I've always said that a normal pregnancy is characterized by the presence of one's baby, while an adoptive pregnancy is defined by the absence of that baby. I think I would also add that a normal pregnancy brings you into the fellowship of women around you...those of us who are pregnant through adoption, on the other hand, often feel unincluded in that sisterhood. Rather than being brought into the almost universal-circle, we have people telling us how "lucky" we are to not be there.
With our second adoption, the emotional angst of the wait was much less than with the first, though there were still many moments of discouragement and anxiety. I was content being a mother and had D to focus on rather than the overwhelming absence of a child. However, we did have the experience of a failed match to bring a certain amount of trauma to our lives. Once again, I felt isolated and misunderstood. The emotions of a failed match much must be comparable to those of a miscarriage--you expect a little one to be arriving, and suddenly they aren't, and you grieve immensely. To others, however, this blip on the path to parenthood seems hardly worth noting. I struggled a lot to see others in my ward being pampered and comforted after miscarriages, while all I got was a 3-minute mention during a phone call from my Relief Society president, a phone call which was actually about another matter.
Once the baby is here, the physical impact of having a new little one is still a challenge even for adoptive mothers. In both instances, I felt like I had been run over by a truck. The fact that there was no recovery from childbirth did not seem to mitigate the physical exhaustion and feelings of being overwhelmed. Adoptive parents often have very little time to make either the physical or emotional transition to being parents again. Having a new baby is a joyful event, but it is also a huge life change, and you're going from 0 to 60 often literally overnight. I have been extremely lucky to have wards that have recognized my need for meals and other such help after having a new child come home.
2. Don't ask me about my child's mother unless you mean ME! Now, of course, a birth mother is a mother--and of course, she is that child's mother just as we adoptive moms are our children's mothers. But most of us hate it when people say things like, "What do you know about his mother?" I always want to retort, "Well, she's 5'8", she has light brown hair, and she plays the organ really well." and see if they figure it out. But I have never dared. I usually reply, "Well, his birthmom (emphasizing that word) _________," and hope they get the hint. I love my children's birthmothers and completely honor their roles as the first mothers of my children. I worry a bit that by asking people to use the term "birth mother", they will doubt my own security with the relationship I have both to my children and their birthmothers. However, for any intent and purpose that matters to the public in general, I am D's and S's mother! My greatest concern about this terminology would be that my children would be in hearing distance. I don't think either one of them, at this point in their young lives, equate their birth mothers with being their mother. Their understanding will increase as they grow older and grow to understand what it truly means to be adopted. But for now all they need to know is that they have a mom and a dad who will be their parents forever, and they have birth mothers who grew them and made sure they got to their family.
By the same token, the term real mother is also an inappropriate way to refer to birth mothers. So what am I, my children's fake mother?
3. Don't ask detailed questions about our children's birth family and circumstances if you are not a very close friend or family member. I will never forget the conversation with a casual acquaintance as I walked D home from preschool one day shortly after S had arrived. "So, do you know if her mom had any problems like drugs or anything?" My jaw literally dropped to the floor. I could not imagine how this could possibly be the business of someone I barely knew. The fact was, we did have some second-hand information about some possible challenges our baby might face, and we were dealing with the implications of that information. But I wasn't about to discuss it with this woman.
One of my great concerns with divulging difficult information about my children's birth history is that the information might be used against them someday. Or, just as likely, the information might be misinterpreted or misunderstood. I don't want people watching my children to see if they turn out according to a certain pattern or making uninformed diagnoses about any problems they may have in the future. Also, some information we have dealt with has been of a more transient nature. The information has affected us for awhile, but life has gone back to normal and we have moved past it. Someone else might not be able to do that.
4. Don't tell us how we should handle our adoptions unless we ask for your advice. It is unbelievable to me the number of people who think that watching some Dateline show or reading an article in a magazine makes them an expert on adoption. For example, there was the acquaintance who was adamant that we should never ever have any contact with our children's birth parents. Her qualifications for counseling me in this matter were that she knew someone in her ward who had a difficult experience with openness. Apparently it didn't matter that J and I were actually living adoption and had both the capacity and the motivation to study, pray, and make our own VERY informed decisions about this.
So now that you've read all this, you're scared to death to say anything about adoption, right? Don't be! We love to talk about our experiences! We are happy to share information with others. We love to hear stories about people you know who have been blessed by adoption too! Honestly, most people have been nothing but supportive, and we appreciate that.
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