Now that we are well into fall I am finally catching my breath to sit down to write a newsletter to you all. It has been a busy time. My youngest child just went off to college and I now have more time to reflect on the journey of raising and launching the two children that my husband and I adopted so many years ago now. Whew! It’s been a scramble all the way-learning and educating myself on their needs, trying to keep one step ahead on all the things I was completely unprepared for and naive about when we decided to form our family through adoption. I thought I would talk about some of those things today.

Myth #1: You are giving a child a better life, or “saving a life” when you adopt a child.
Who is to say that the life we offer a child is better than the one they might have had with their birth families? What we offer is a DIFFERENT life more often than not. Sometimes it may be better for them, but sometimes not. No matter what though, by adopting our children we have also participated in them experiencing a profound loss, that of biological family and culture. This is something I have really struggled to reckon with and I think it is a really hard thing for adoptive parents to face. In our wish to love we have also been a part of pain. That’s a challenging paradox from which to parent. If we cannot hear the ways in which our children express this grief because it causes us too much pain, we are letting them down. This is a crucial part of adoptive parenting that is very different from biological parenting. It takes strength to hear that not only are you not the solution, but you are part of the problem. THEN you can be part of the solution.

Myth #2: Environment is the most important influence in a person’s development.
I have been stunned by the degree to which genetics inform who we are. This I have learned through adoption. There are obvious qualities that are passed through genes like hair and eye color, race, etc. However, it is through my daughter’s reunion with her birth mom that I have learned things like: they both make the some face in reaction to a situation they don’t like, or that they both do not like to talk about things when they are upset. While I share common qualities with my biological siblings, I think I always attributed that to growing up in the same environment rather than our biological inheritance. This reality confirms the experience of “biological bewilderment” that adopted people report feeling in their adoptive families, an otherness that is clearly rooted in differences at a deep level.

Adoptive families face the challenge of acknowledging and traversing these differences. If, as an adoptive parent, you insist on your similarities rather than your differences, you are erasing this deep emotional truth for your child and silencing something that is hard, but important to acknowledge so that it can be expressed and not repressed. Adoption is so much about identity and identity erasure. If we need to erase our children’s identity so they can be like us, a part of us, we miss the opportunity to find out who they truly are and more importantly, for them to find out who they truly are. If they are prevented from finding a positive and unique identity of their own they are at greater risk for acting out in destructive ways as a means of killing their pain and finding another kind of identity, a negative identity.

Myth # 3: Adoptive families are just like biological families.
Anyone who has lived adoption knows this is a preposterous statement. Biological families do not have to deal with loss as the bedrock of their very formation. They do not have to bridge the gap of biological difference. They do to have to navigate a world in which people project their ideas and idealizations about adoption onto them. They do not have to raise children who are asked in the school yard, “Why didn’t your real mother keep you?” and then negotiate all the damage that does. They do not have to live as a disenfranchised group, rarely mentioned in many basic forms for medical and education services. They do not have to agonize about how to do the family tree homework assignment that schools keep insisting on assigning with no sensitivity to how that feels for adopted children.

Myth #4: Your budget for raising a family formed through adoption will be the same as for a biological family.
With all the issues that present themselves to adoptive families it becomes clear fairly quickly that services that cost money will be required to help everyone get through in as close to one piece as possible. At the very least, good adoption-aware therapy needs to be part of the budget. In addition, children coming from deprived environments are likely to have special needs that will require stamina and financial resources to manage. You need to be a strong advocate and work hard to provide.

As I write these thoughts I am aware that I am speaking to an audience of people who are already deeply involved in adoption either as parents or as other members of the adoption constellation. I know most of you know exactly what I am talking about here so this might be construed as preaching to the choir. However, I think that we receive so little validation for our real struggles and that they are so minimized by those who do not understand, that it’s important to feel acknowledged for what you already know but often do not get reflected back to you. I hope I have done some of that here. I know we could each write a book about our experiences and of course some of us have! On that note I would like to recommend two new books that are out:

The first is: It’s Not About You…… a new anthology in which I have a chapter.

​The second is: You Don’t Look Adopted by Anne Heffron, a wonderful memoir/biography/reflection on being adopted that I think should be the new manual for all people, not just adoption-connected people, to read to understand the adopted people in our lives. We all know someone!

Response to the New York Times Article on Korean Adoptees Returning to Korea

It is hard to imagine that any adoptive parent could read Maggie Jones’s article about Korean adoptees returning to live in Korea without a tsunami of emotion. To her credit, Jones raises some of the most difficult and important questions that arise regarding adoption, especially international, transracial adoption. She also does an even-handed, soul-searching job with regard to her own experience as an adoptive parent who has adopted transnationally.

Unfortunately the article’s title is sensationalistic, causing it to be misleading. It implies that an entire generation of adoptees has returned to Korea when in fact about 500 have taken up permanent residence in their birth country. I wonder if the title was her choice or that of the New York Times editors.

That said, where there is adoption, there is loss. Where there is diaspora, there is hurt, anger, and longing. Where there is transracial adoption, there is inevitably a painful gap in understanding between white parents and racially different children who leave their white homes each day to navigate a racist society.

When we speak of adoption over the past six decades during which time approximately 200,000 Korean children were adopted out of their birth country, we are looking at multiple histories. We are looking at the history of a country, the history of adoption, and the history of each individual involved.  The truth is nuanced, not black-and-white.

In order to listen to these histories and the wisdom they have to impart, it is useful to take a deep breath. As an adoptive parent reading this article, one needs to face the fear that one’s child will leave to return to his or her birth country and/or family leaving behind an unimaginable void filled with the bitter sense that one has given everything only to receive the news that it is not enough.

As parents, we cannot give our children all that they need. As adoptive parents, we can give our children many things, but we cannot restore the identity they lost when we claimed them as our own and shared what we have to offer: our love and our own cultural identities. What we can do is listen to their feelings about their experience and work as hard as we can to keep an open heart, not take it personally and not take it as rejection. Being relinquished for adoption has caused our children to feel rejected and so sometimes they will want to make us feel that way as well so that we can understand.

I remember going to the St John’s University biennial adoption conference in 2012 entitled: “In the Best Interests of the Child?”  This is a conference that sheds light on a range of adoption practices and provides a forum for adoptees to speak the truth of their angry conflicted feelings about their histories.  There I met many international adoptees who had taken back their original names. I listened to adoptee’s speeches of outrage at their losses and their adoptive parents’ inability to hear and see them. In the middle of it all, I realized that by giving my white son, adopted from Appalachia, a name from my Russian heritage I had robbed him of his identity. And in that same moment I understood that in trying to claim him as a member of my own tribe, I was offering him my love and inclusion. Epiphany! This is the double bind of adoption.

The history of Korean adoption contains elements typical of most international adoption: a need spawned by a political and economic crisis, lack of support for mothers to keep their children born either out-of-wedlock or into poverty or overpopulation, and a demand for babies in first-world countries with greater resources. What began as a solution to needs on both sides became corrupted by demand and profit instead.

Here is the tricky territory of adoption. There is no doubt that many birth mothers around the world have experienced pressure, if not coercion regarding the relinquishment of their children. These pressures have been culturally and economically driven as much as profit driven by the adoption industry. Uncovering these unethical practices is good because they must be stopped.

There are also children who have been abandoned and in need of homes throughout the world. For some birth mothers of these children, there is relief and help in the option of placing their children for adoption, the pain of the loss notwithstanding. It is also unfortunate that the abuse in adoption practices will now make it harder for these children to be placed in homes as adoption is closing in many countries.

Any adoption entails loss. In international adoption there is not only the loss of birth mother and family, but also the adoptee’s loss of birth country and culture. Just as actual birth parents may not be the wished for ones, so also a birth country might not match the adoptee’s fantasy. This is a specific instance where there is a collision of their fantasy and reality. Those who have returned to Korea in the New York Times article, particularly the women, are faced with gender issues and the fact that adoption is not favored in Korean culture. 

Jones accurately reports that the advice given to adopting parents in the  early days of international adoption, which began with Korea, was very different than the advice adopting parents receive now. It seems quite ignorant to us now, but people actually were advised to play down difference and in effect be “race blind,” as though that were possible. Asian babies, especially girls, were viewed more as cute little dolls than as people who would encounter bias. This was particularly true in all-white areas like the Wisconsin town in which the Korean adoptee in the article Laura Klunder grew up. Her rupture with her family is indeed sad and frightening to an adoptive parent. The erasure she experienced because of her mother’s refusal to see her race and her father’s rejection of her anger, also explain her need to break free in order to find herself. The tattoo on her arm of her case number as an infant is a protest against the objectification she felt as a commodity imported into white America from Korea.

On the other hand, the story of Benjamin Hauser, another adoptee in the article, is quite the opposite. His parents go to visit him and his brother who have both returned to Korea. They have been able to respect their children’s decision and have not reacted to it as a rejection. They have kept their connection as parents and honored their children’s choices.

The truth is that all children leave. We cannot decide where they go. If they go back to their birth countries searching for what they have lost, we can make the choice to support them as their parents, reinforcing our love and connection. How we understand this need is so important for maintaining the integrity of the relationship we have with them.

Today, adopting parents are counseled to honor the culture their children come from, look for diverse environments to raise children of other races in, stay in touch with other families who have adopted from the same country as practiced by those of you in LAPA. These practices alone are a world apart from the advice given to the parents of the adoptees in Jones’s article who have returned to their birth country looking for a home and an identity they feel they never had.

Interestingly, this community of “KADS” has formed their own expat family. Perhaps it is among themselves that they feel the most comfortable and are able to find a reflection for their identity.

Today also, international adoption has all but ended, perhaps as a result of the unethical practices that have been exposed. Adoptee outrage about loss of culture and identity has added to the dialogue. Thus, as people raising children born abroad now, you may be bringing up the tail end of a social experiment that is perhaps coming to an end or stopping for a period of time. You will be faced with your children’s and your own feelings about their adoptions as they grow and mature. You will be challenged to hear their losses and their questions about why they lost not only a family but a country. To truly understand them, those of you who are white  will need to step outside of white privilege and examine racism in and around you. You will be challenged to grapple with the social injustices that made your children available for adoption and your own private wish to love a child and have a family. Maggie Jones asks us to do all these things in her article. These are not easy things to do. They require courage and honesty. However, in the end, these are some of the greatest qualities to live by and to impart to our children.

*This was written in response to an article by Maggie Jones entitled “Why a Generation of Adoptees is Returning to Korea,” which appeared on January 14, 2015, in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

When asked how he dealt with despair Eli Weisel responded: “You deal with despair by helping others in despair.” It spoke to me as a traveler on the journey of adoption, when despair about my children’s pain has felt near unbearable.  I hope by sharing it I can help others.

            I am going to try to talk about this despair as openly as possible without intruding on my children’s privacy. Their lives are their own. So please excuse me if there are patches of vagueness.

            Many have written about the struggle adoptive families face as a child reaches adolescence. The search for identity is even more fierce than that of other adolescents. The anger at the perceived rejection by birth family sometimes turns against the self and against adoptive parents.

            In adolescence the desire to search for birth family often comes more front and center. In the age of the internet it can be accomplished often with great ease. However, the fantasy of what this contact will bring and the reality of what it begets are often, if not usually, two different things.

            The story we tell adopted children, that their birth family could not take care of them and wanted them to have a family that could is poor consolation to an adolescent who is asking, “Who am I?”

            When I speak of my despair I refer to the feeling of impotence created by the fact that all the love I have to offer as an adoptive parent does not replace the unknown family or prevent or stop the hurt of unknown losses. As adoptive parents we can only hold our children through their feelings about it all, re-mourn our own losses in the process and stand steady as the winds of adopted adolescence whip around us. Adoptive parents find themselves heartbroken over the often self-destructive behaviors of their children. How can their love have not healed such pain?

            When an adoption has been closed, as in the case of my children, all members of the adoption story- children, birthparents and adoptive parents- replace unknowns with what they imagine. Children imagine birth parents. Adoptive parents piece together shreds of information from the time of placement to give their children some information about themselves and the circumstances of their adoption. Birth parents are left to imagine and wonder about the children they have relinquished with little or no information about their whereabouts or well-being.

            All parties carry narratives that contain small bits of truth from the moments leading up to and through the adoption. Layered upon this truth is the embellishment created by wishes, fantasies, longing, anger, hurt and fear. By the time the child has reached adolescence these stories have developed a life of their own in each person’s psyche.

            Imagine then the mind-blowing experience of matching each of these narratives to reality. The unknown that it has taken years to process becomes the known that will take more years to process.

            It was my children’s struggles with how to make sense of these narratives, and of their differences from us, their adoptive parents, that prompted the decision to search for their birth families. This was supported by the profound changes that have occurred in the discourse surrounding adoption.

            Openness is now understood as serving the best interests of the child, a different view than when we adopted. An adopted colleague suggested that to search while children are still at home and can be supported in the process would be much better for all, rather than letting them do it on their own after the age of eighteen, which was also the advice we received back in the ‘90’s.

            The searches yielded quick results. We found both families and initiated contact with two distinctly different outcomes, one joyful reunion and one painful rejection. Each child has a new journey to navigate, for better or for worse. What they have now is more truth that challenges them to re-write their stories with this new information.

            As an adoptive parent one hopes that the truth that emerges, whatever it is, will help. However, after having one’s mind blown open, one has to put it back together. The romantic notion that finding and having contact with one’s birth family will address the loss is a bit simplistic. Everyone has still lost something and perhaps gained something through adoption. Reconciling this takes time to integrate. As I walk this road with my children I am reminded once again that there are no easy answers in life and certainly not in adoption.

I run a support group for adoptive parents, all of whom have adopted foreign born children. They had a strong collective response to the article by Kristof regarding the Reuter's expose of plight of "re-homed" children entitled "When Children Are Traded" 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/opinion/kristof-when-children-are-traded.html?hp&rref=opinion

Concerns fell in three major categories. First, as parents working hard to attend to traumas their children experienced in orphanages and foster care abroad, they felt deep concern regarding agencies’ failure to prepare parents appropriately and provide follow-up services. Many families bring home children with an inadequate understanding of the developmental delays and behavioral problems that result from children spending the beginning of life in institutional settings and being separated from birth mothers and subsequent caregivers.

Second, the statistic that 10-25% of adoptions don't work out has no citation. This is a dramatic and somewhat dubious statistic, even more so because it is deeply disturbing and gives adoption very negative press. Are we to believe 1 in 10 or 1 in 4 adoptions "don't work out" not exclusively international adoptions of older children, just "adoptions" ? When the Times publishes data like this without giving sources it  it does adoptive families everywhere a disservice.

Third, tying the issue of foreign adoption to domestic policies such as food stamp programs, funding for education, etc misses the point entirely. While these are important issues, the questions that rehoming raises do not lie in this arena. Most immediately, it raises the issue of quickly finding a way to regulate and stop this child trafficking in our country. There are many actions that need to be taken to do this form legislative to better adoption education and preparation. The current Hague Convention rules, designed to stop baby trafficking in adoptions from abroad, need to be amended with an eye to getting children placed in homes as early as possible, thereby limiting early traumatic experience and attachment issues. Prospective adoptive parents need much more pre and post adoption support and education. Additionally business practices in adoption need to be reexamined and revamped. 

Happy national adoption month! As I read about various events honoring adoption this month and check out the many blogs on the subject I am struck by how much adoption has changed since my husband and I set out to adopt our first child in 1989.

It's now almost twenty-three years since we adopted my son and almost fifteen since we adopted my daughter.  As I reflect on all the change that has occurred since then it is mind-boggling. What has happened in the world of adoption is such a powerful reflection of these changes.

When my son was born in 1990 adoption was still mostly closed. I remember that California was beginning to have open adoption. There was no internet. Nobody had a website. There was no Google. There was not the huge access to the vast amount of information and opinions that we have today. There were no blogs!

Adoptive parents were given standard advice: Tell your children they are adopted. Tell them they can search for their birthmothers when they get older, preferably at age eighteen. Birth parents were mostly invisible. Adoptee grief was tucked away behind the wish that everyone would be happy and the assumption that all would have a better life created by the "solution" of adoption.

We are now rocking on the sea of anger at these presumptions. This is creating dramatic and lasting change. Change never comes without pain, just as adoption does not come without loss.

There are many common features to most adoptions: loss, grief, fantasies of lives not lived, anger at abandonment. These are all difficult feelings to deal with and overcome. It is easy to become stuck along the way and even easier to assume that, because there are many common experiences, there is one "correct" way to feel about them. This strain in the current narrative of adoption forecloses on the great variety of emotion and experience that all participants in the adoption have.

We need to make space for many voices, most especially the voices of change. Adoptees are working to open records and claim their full identities. Birthmothers are gaining a voice and power in the decision to place their children and maintain relationships with them. I would like to raise my voice for the changes that adoptive parents are experiencing as the world of adoption opens.

I notice that, as the voices of a hurt and anger in both adoptees and birthparents have taken their justifiable place on the stage of adoption, there has developed at the same time a tendency to disparage adoptive parents. While this is not always the case, it occurs often enough to be identified as a theme that deserves to be challenged. 

I remember my shock at seeing adoptive parents referred to in some places as "adopters." The adopter seems to be someone who only wanted to parent a child for their own selfish reasons, oblivious to the child's loss. As we challenge the narratives of the "chosen baby" who can only be grateful he or she was adopted and the insistence that adoption is "best solution" for the children it touches, I would caution that we not swing in the other direction and vilify the many parents who have adopted their children after suffering their own losses and have walked the heroes path to raise them.

I adopted my children in the last years before the changes that are now occurring, that is to say in closed adoptions. As the adoption world has opened I have been challenged to rethink what I was told over twenty years ago. In that process, my husband and I have helped both children search for and find their birth families with two dramatically different results. Again, no two situations are the same! In order to do this, I have had to soul search and let go in ways I never imagined years ago when we were given the advice I refer to above. Much to my surprise, it has opened my heart in ways I never imagined and brought into our lives a new extended family for one child that broadens our world and theirs. For my other child, questions were put to rest, but the birth family did not want connection and my child was challenged to grieve again. 

I think these two results of search and reunion serve as reminders to us all that no two situations in adoption are the same. Biological connection gives us different kinds of connections, not always positive ones. When it does it is amazing and when it does not, it can be very hard, but also freeing. As we ride the tide of change that is opening us all to each other it is so vital to hold in mind that extreme positions and assumptions about the meaning of our adoption experiences do not allow us the room to have our own individual stories and to learn and grow from them.

Link to video on adoption: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nZDp64tFo0

I run a support groups for adoptive parents. One morning in August one of my mothers asked that I connect  everyone by e-mail while we were on summer break. With everyone's permission I set an e-mail chain in motion. What followed were rounds of e-mails filled with the incredible wisdom and love of mothers searching for answers for their foreign born children adopted from institutional settings and foster care. Their outpouring of support for each other was filled with thoughtfulness, generosity and compassion.

The first e-mail came, a cry for help: a mother struggling with her three year old daughter, just home from Russia for seven months. She describes her child as crying over everything, defiant and yelling, and saying no to almost every request. She feels worn out and is wondering if she's losing her mind. What followed were exchanges that yielded a treasure trove of suggestions that I share with you here:

Things that have worked:

Physical exertion: get out to playgrounds  to climb, run, ride her trike, etc Swimming is great. Any kind of heavy work - like lifting heavy cushions, etc.

Lots of structure, with not too many activities in a day

Unstructured, creative activities for periods within the routine, including art. The chance to "process"  activities and relationships in imaginary play or drawing is still really important

Working on feelings materials to teach what faces look like with certain emotions, working with her to identify with words her own feelings. Allowing anger, but not letting it disrupt routines.

SLEEP - One of the most critical behaviors to manage. The ritual of lying down and resting often led to sixty minutes of sleep in mid-day until kindergarten, and it clearly helped her to manage herself. And we have a really early bedtime to this day - lights out at 7:15 - because we notice if that slips, her behavior does too.

Incentives, not consequences

Similarly, time-ins, instead of time-outs. I still don't like to leave her alone when she has a tantrum (although sometimes I do). There is something about her needing to be reminded of our connection and love that steadies and calms her more than anything else (most of the time).

Consistency of care with grown-ups - we found that switching babysitters as seldom as we could was a really good thing, and new people still jar her

A body sock. This tool hugs the body and calms the child. It can be found online.

Occupational Therapy is enormously helpful for kids who were under stimulated in institutional settings and who suffer low impulse control

Somatic Experiencing is a therapeutic modality that is helpful for children dealing with traumatic beginnings.

Parenting Your Internationally Adopted Child by Patty Cogan is an incredible resource book

Remember: nobody likes their child all the time!

“Sonya found her birth mother on Facebook,” my daughter volunteered one day when she was twelve.  I felt the ground shift. Oh? I tried to say as evenly as possible as I steeled myself about what this might mean. Facebook, the internet, these did not exist when she was born. Nor was open adoption as commonly encouraged and practiced. 

“Can I look for my birthmother too?” was the next logical question. In this moment nothing I had ever been told about about how to handle this question felt of any use at all. I was stunned into the realization that yes, she could search for and possibly find her birthmother quite easily. Would I join her and how was the question. How should I answer it thinking on my feet in this same state of bewilderment. “Yes, I can help you do that,” I managed to get out in barely audible tones.

Over the last two years I questioned and struggled silently and not-so-silently, but privately. What would this mean now as my daughter was on the cusp of her teen years. How would introducing a third person, a second mother, impact the pushes and pulls between my about-to-be adolescent and me? I feared the worst. I hoped for the best. Mostly I wanted to help her and if this would help, I would do it.

Her birthmother was not on Facebook, but the internet does not stop there as we know! First a picture from a driver’s license materialized, then an address. I sent a letter. The wait was excruciating. I feared what would happen if we did not hear.

The e-mail arrived one Sunday morning three weeks later. “Thank You” was the subject heading. There was gratitude, fear, caution. I breathed relief, but also fear. A rupture could be mended, but so much work to do!

The e-mails flew back and forth woman-to-woman, mother-to-mother, then child to birthmother. “I’ve changed a lot since I was born,” started the first e-mail from my daughter.

A year and half later, as we prepare to go to see her, emotions run high. I have trusted my bond with my daughter through this process. Now I fear losing her. Now a fourteen-year-old, she told me not to come because “you are weak and will cry.” Her birthmother is equally nervous and emotional. My daughter has no idea of how hard the two of us have worked together to make this happen.

As I weather this storm of emotion I imagine the sky will clear as we travel through this journey. It is an act of profound faith to release a child you have adopted and mothered to discover another mother. For now, I’m whipping in the wind of uncertainty and unknowns.

Is it possible? Have I really been a mother for twenty-two years? I always thank my son for making me a mother, a dream I chased for four years before I found him, born in Tennessee, air-lifted to New York City to a life so different from the one he would have had.

“He is so lucky to have you,” people always say. I am so lucky to have him. I tell him, “You are my teacher.” Born with more problems than any one person deserves to have—severe infantile eczema, ADHD, learning disabilities, asthma—he has had many struggles, as have my husband and I. 

When they brought my son to us on a dark, rainy evening in the hospital parking lot in Tennessee I gasped at his beauty. His birthparents did not want to meet us, too saddened by the loss and unable to face the moment of relinquishment. The lawyer brought him to us. I pressed him to me marveling at his perfection. He came with a package of diapers and a case of formula- no operating instructions!

We drove into the night, not knowing where we would stay, having gone straight to the hospital from the airport. We came to a “Family Inns of America.” How perfect. For a mere fifty dollars a night we had the honeymoon suite, complete with kitchen and Jacuzzi. More perfect! I remember the sound of him sucking down the first bottle we fed him. These are moments you never forget! The sound of his life force brought tears to our eyes, as did the relief of the search for our child being over.

This is how we began our life as a family and the wait for his birthparents to sign the papers for us to adopt him five days later. Drunk with the sleeplessness of having a newborn, we drove around the area, taking in the Christmas trees adorned in bows, the beauty of the Smokey Mountains and twang of the soft southern accent in Tennessee.

This is how adoption went twenty-two years ago. They signed the papers, we went home and began the task of parenting. We did not discuss open adoption. We did not stay in touch. Together we have encountered grief and loss, both his and ours. It has forged deep bonds. 

Would it have helped to have an open adoption with contact and information that we did not have? We will never know, but as I read of all the change and openness that now exists in adoption I know it would have made it different and certainly eased the loss of biological connection for him.

On the eve of his twenty-second birthday my son has just been offered his first job opportunity. I am very proud. It has been a hard won battle to arrive at this moment. We all have something to celebrate! And we will!