Adoption Book Tour: "Found" by Jennifer Lauck

Today I am participating in an adoption book tour of Found by Jennifer Lauck, organized by Lori at The Open Adoption Examiner. Found is a companion to Ms Lauck's earlier memoirs (the acclaimed Blackbird, Still Waters, and Show Me the Way), re-telling some of the same events then continuing on through her reunion with her first mother and, more broadly, her search for wholeness, peace, and identity. It's a raw and powerful story about her memory of loss (loss piled on loss, in this case: losing her family of origin due to closed adoption, losing her adoptive family to death, losing trust and safety when she is betrayed and abused by those who are supposed to take care of her) and the many ways (Tibetian Buddhism, motherhood, reunion) she found restoration.

As part of the tour, I was sent a few questions to answer. To continue to the next leg of this book tour, please visit the main list at The Open Adoption Examiner.

Catching Up on the Reading Challenge

I have been plugging away at this year's adoption reading challenge, but have been terrible about posting reports. Here are three more of my challenge books:

I don't pretend to know anywhere near as much about international adoption as I do about domestic adoption. (What I do know mostly comes from newspaper articles and what I've gleaned from your brilliant brains online.) This book pulled together a lot of different strands. There Is No Me Without You by Melissa Fay Greene is the story of Haregewoin Tefarra, an Ethiopian woman who stumbled into caring for hundreds of children left without families who could care for them because of the AIDS crisis. It bluntly shows why international adoption cannot be discussed in a vacuum or in black-and-white terms--or solely through the lens of personal narrative. It is one small piece of a much larger picture of enmeshed injustices, crises, and global power struggles. Things we all know, but which aren't often presented so coherently. Totally engrossing; I stayed up late while on vacation to finish it.

Author Mei-Ling Hopgood was born in Taiwan and adopted by a couple in the U.S. when she was seven months old. In her early 20s she reunites with her (very large) Taiwanese family. Lucky Girl is the compelling story of their reunion: figuring out relationships and boundaries across national and familial cultural differences, thinking about self-identity, and grappling with how what she learns about her origins fits into that.

Paula McLain remembers living in a series of foster homes with her sisters in Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses. I was less enthusiastic about this memoir; I found myself wishing she'd turn the same critical eye on herself as she did on the other people in the book and dig into her own motivations and reactions some more. By the end I felt like I knew a lot about what had happened to her and not as much about her. But it was still worth reading.

I have to admit I've been slacking on the fiction piece. I signed up for the six non-fiction/six fiction books challenge track deliberately to get myself to search out some excellent adoption-themed fiction. But I've been dragging my feet on that. When adoption fiction goes bad, it's just really, really bad, you know? But I still have several novels left to read, so if you have a recommendation, please share!

Reviews: "The Irresistible Henry House" and "The English American"

Jenna started an Adoption Reading Challenge for 2011. I'm constantly adding adoption-related books to my to-read list, so knocking off twelve (as the challenge called for) seemed like no problem. Bring it on!

Then I read a bit closer and realized it wasn't just twelve books: it was six non-fiction and six fiction. And I really don't like adoption-themed fiction. At least not most of the stuff I've read to this point, some of which did little more than make me want to hurl it against the wall.

But it's called a reading challenge for a reason, yes?

I'm behind on writing up my reviews, so here is what I read in the first two months of the challenge:

A little burst of articles in January about the practice baby phenomena brought The Irresistible Henry House to my attention. (For several decades in the early twentieth century, many college had practice houses as part of their home economics programs, spaces in which the (always female) students tried out skills they were learning. Some included the so-called "practice" babies: children from local orphanages who lived in the practice homes and were raised by the students as part of their classwork for a year or two, then placed for adoption.)

Henry House is a 1940s practice baby, cared for by a rotating group of students for his first two years. Only instead of then being sent back to the orphanage to be adopted, he is kept in the practice house to be raised as the (unofficial) son of the rigid, anxious head of the home ec program. The disordered attachment of Henry's early years follows him into adulthood, scuttling his relationships. And the secrets and lies other characters maintain about his origins and history unsurprisingly ruin lives.

Author Lisa Grunwald has said in interviews that she started out wanting to write a non-fiction book about what happened to the practice babies, but turned to fiction when it seemed like there just wasn't enough material to warrant a whole book. I found myself wishing she had stuck to writing an article instead. The dramatization just didn't work for me, especially the longer the book wore on. The further it got from the practice baby years--which are only the very beginning chapters--the less it held my interest; the characters were wafer-thin and there's a Forrest Gump-esque feel as Henry bounces through different Baby Boomer cultural milestones that felt forced. It's definitely a cautionary tale in support of honesty and openness in adoption, not to mention not pushing mothers into unwanted relinquishments in the first place. But little about Henry and the way the attachment stuff, really the core of the book, was portrayed rang true to me.

For February I picked up The English American by Alison Larkin.  Like her novel's heroine, Larkin was born in the United States and adopted into an British family as an infant. In her adulthood she reconnected with her birth parents, moved to the States and launched a stand-up career with an act based on her adoption and reunion. The English American isn't autobiographical, but she drew on her own experience to give life to the characters and story.

Pippa Dunn--the titular English American--is in her late twenties, unhappy with her job and feeling aimless. She makes contact with her first mom and jumps into reunion with both feet, even impulsively moving in with her birth mom in the United States and working for her art organization. Then, of course, things get complicated as more of her birth parents' and others' less perfect selves come to light. Plus there is a love story for good measure.

The English American is chick lit, so some of the plot twists--especially the [spoiler alert] big romantic closing scene and unexpected professional success [end spoiler]--aren't exactly shockers if you're familiar with the genre. Some of the characters are a tad shallow and [spoiler alert] I wished the adoptive parents weren't quite so great or the birth parents quite so off-putting in the end, [end spoiler] but Pippa is complex, believable and funny. She shares her changing feelings about her adoption in an engaging, relate-able way, from her struggles over identity and loyalty to her feelings of not quite fitting in to the family she loves. It's an enjoyable read and a good introduction to basic adoptee rights issues (i.e. open records) and other adoption themes for people who aren't likely to dive into the world of adoptee blogs or memoirs.

So there you have it: one "bah" review and one "yay" review. Next up: I let myself read a memoir for March as a reward for tackling two adoption fiction books in a row.

Book Club: Lifegivers

Book club time again, this time organized by Lori! This time around I read Lifegivers: Framing the Birthparent Experience in Open Adoption by longtime social worker and open adoption advocate James Gritter. I've found him to be one of the best at giving a basic philosophy of open adoption. Although he and I differ on some points, I've appreciated his insistence on child-centeredness and the high standards he sets for all of us--adoptive parents, first parents and adoption workers--who bring these adoptions into being. (I picked up his newest adoption book recently and I'm really looking forward to talking about it with you all.)

Lifegivers was aimed at adoption professionals, to help them reframe first parents in their adoption practice and bring them out of the margins of adoptions into a center shared with their children and their children's adoptive parents. Gritter dismantles the unfair concepts of birth parents as The Other, whether that Other is undeserving sinner, unapproachable saint, little more than a baby-maker, or dysfunctional person to be kept at arm's length (or further) from adoptive families. He shares what he's heard from years of listening to birth parents talk about their ambivalence, grief and regret and how those intersect with their open adoptions and ebb and flow over time. Finally, he offers up an ideal model of how birth parents can be affirmed and respected as an ongoing part of their children's lives.

Speaking as an adoptive parent, I think it's a worthwhile read. The chapter on creating an adoption process that values expectant parents as equal participants would especially be good for prospective adoptive parents (and expectant parents!) to read while in the agency/facilitator research phase.

I have a few questions to answer that were posed by other book club participants:

Adoption Book Club: The Blind Side

I'm an incurable procrastinator, have been all my life. And here I am again, squeezing out my contribution to the adoption book club organized by The Egg Drop Post before I fall asleep. For this first round we read The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, currently in the news because of the movie, the Oscar and the starlet with the cheating husband.

Books About Open Adoption for Grandparents

DrSpouse asks...

This is completely irrelevant to your post, but I'd really appreciate recommendations on open adoption books for prospective adoptive grandparents - we are working up to telling our (mainly my) parents (mainly my mother!) about our adoption hopes...

I'd love to see an anthology some day specifically about grandparents in open adoptions: reflections from first and adoptive grandparents as well as adoptees writing about their relationships with them. They each have their own unique challenges and opportunities in open adoption--that are different from the ones the parents face--and I believe it would be so valuable for them to find commonalities and possibilities in other grandparents' experiences.

In the meantime, here are my recommendations:

For grandparents--or anyone else--looking to understand more about the whys and whats of open adoption, an excellent primer is Making Room in Our Hearts by Micky Duxbury. Ms Duxbury is an adoptive parent who interviewed a ton of open adoption participants, many more than two decades into the adoptions. It's thorough, grounded, realistic but also decidedly optimistic. I wrote a little more about why I liked it a couple of years ago. If you're scoping out open adoption books, you'll likely see it recommended a lot because it's one of the (a) newest and (b) best currently available.

For extended family members who just can't grasp why open adoption can be a mixed bag of happiness and struggle for first parents ("Why should she be sad? The baby is so happy. And you still let her see him!"), I recommend Birthparent Grief by Brenda Romanchik, a first mom herself and longtime advocate of open and ethical adoption practices. It's a slip of a book, really a booklet or a extended pamphlet. It's written for first parents, but serves as a good window for the rest of us. Think of it as a distillation of the most insightful first parent blogs in your reader. It, as well as the other pocket guides in the series, can be useful for family who are having trouble seeing things from the first parents' perspective. It also gives insight into reasons first parents sometimes back away from contact, which can often be really hard for grandparents--who feel like they would hang the moon for their beloved grandchildren--to understand. Beth has copies of this set and speaks highly of them. Don't be put off by the 1997 vibe on the website. If you mail in the order form and a check, you really will get a book. (There is an excerpt here.)

Finally, we come to the extended family members who are completely convinced that open adoption is the most ridiculous idea in the history of adoption, ever. It pains me to do this, but in those cases I suggest the pink book. It is a crappy piece of outdated propaganda in which adoptees are always children, all the triad members are happy-dappy, and open adoption solves every possible problem. However, propaganda can be useful in extreme situations--like outspoken grandparents who won't shut up about how open adoption will ruin all your lives. The strategy here is to hit them hard with the positives and only the positives. I'm not above targeting the message to bring them into the fold, then fleshing out the nuances and realities after I've got them on our side. It's better than avoiding them for your kid's entire childhood.

There you have my recommendations for grandparents, from the reasonable to the starry-eyed to the belligerent. If anyone has come across some others that have been helpful for the extended family in your world, please do add them in the comments.

(And best wishes to you, DrSpouse, as you gear up for the "we're adopting" conversation! My mom is still embarrassed about what she blurted out five years ago...)

Worth Reading

I'm slowly making my way this week out of a haze of painkillers and, well, pain (I had shingles! Which I didn't even think was possible until you were elderly! And it was horrible!). So deep thoughts (and linear thinking in general) will have to wait.

In the meantime, I wanted to mention a book that coincidentally has come up half a dozen times online and in daily life in the past few weeks. Making Room in Our Hearts by Micky Duxbury is currently one of my go-to recommendations for anyone looking for a primer on open adoption.

Some of my favorite things about it:

• The author interviewed lots and lots of folks living out open adoption, including whole triad groups. Because it was written recently, she was able to include stories from open adoptions which are now decades old. I don't know about you, but I eat that stuff up.

• It is very practical and grounded. Duxbury is realistic about the limits of open adoption, but ultimately quite optimistic about its possibilities.

• It is much better at including voices of first parents (fathers, too) and adoptees than some of the other popular open adoption books.

• She is adamant about people needing adequate pre- and post-adoption support, which I think is so crucial and so often overlooked. Knowing what kinds of services we deserve enables us to speak up for ourselves.
  

Duxbury is totally on my list of people I want to hear speak in person someday about adoption.

I loaned my copy of Making Room in Our Hearts out last year and, sadly, it never returned to me. Isn't there an expression about only gifting books, never loaning them?

I'm Just Discovering These

I ordered this little series of pocket guide books a while back for Ms B. Several were on the agency's suggested reading list and I thought she might appreciate them. She doesn't do the internet (I know!), so I didn't think she would pick them up on her own. They arrived earlier this week. I've been flipping through them and they're really good.

You can read the descriptions of the four guides at the Open Adoption Insight website, but they're sort of expanded brochures on some of the major issues for first parents in domestic adoption:

• What is Open Adoption? -- Advocates for fully open adoption and emphasizes the importance of honesty, respect and flexibility. Touches on some of the philosophy behind child-centered open adoption.

• Being a Birthparent: Finding Our Place -- Discusses of some of the unique challenges birth parents face and the ways in which becoming a birth parent is a transformative experience (for better and worse).

• Birthparent Grief -- Acknowledges the huge loss that results from adoption and defines some aspects of the resultant grief. Resolution isn't described as "moving on," but rather as integrating the loss of a child into your life in a sustainable way.
  

• Your Rights and Responsibilities -- An overview of expectant parents' legal rights throughout the process, but also their responsibilities to themselves and their children (like honesty, being well-informed). Covers a whole range of issues and questions--all those things that so many first parents have said they wish they had known to consider.

The material is upfront about the lifelong loss inherent in adoption, but not fatalistic. The focus seems to be living with grief in a healthy way. From my perspective they would be entitling (in a good way) for first parents in open adoptions because they are so affirming of the unique contribution they can make to their kid's sense of identity and wholeness. I appreciate that they're written by a real-life first mother who has actually been through what she's writing about (the always insightful Brenda Romanchik). Although geared toward first parents, I think anyone close to adoption could learn from them. I could see the grief booklet or the open adoption booklet being useful for family members who are struggling with the whole openness thing. We've all got an aunt or grandfather who just can't figure out why we open our hearts to our kids' first parents, right? The grief booklet actually gave me some new insight into some things K has said recently, too.

I just wanted to let you all know about them as potential resources, if you hadn't heard of them already. (I'm probably the last one!) Nothing replaces in-person counseling but the written word is powerful in its own way. I am the sort of person whose epiphanies often come in the quiet of my room with a book on my lap. And I figure even if these are things Ms B has already talking through with her therapist and/or social worker, it can never hurt to have the information in another format.

19 Hours

I was 33 when we adopted DJ, and I thought I knew what a broken heart looked like, how it felt. I didn't know a damn thing. You know what a broken heart looks like? Like a sobbing teenager handing over a two-day-old infant she can't take care of to a couple she hopes can.

Dan Savage, The Commitment

T and I went out for dinner on Saturday to prepare for our meeting with Ms B tomorrow. Over Indian food we discussed adoption ethics writ small--not legislation or international treaties but the dozens of small choices we'll make this week and perhaps in the weeks ahead. We sorted through our priorities, reaffirmed our limits, brainstormed ways to communicate our values to Ms B and the agency case worker. I heard us slipping into the pattern of honest yet carefully chosen words we'll all be using on Wednesday.

I read Dan Savage's The Kid this weekend, a little break from real life. (Because clearly the way to avoid being antsy about your own adoption process is to read about someone else's.) It is one of the most honest accounts of a domestic open adoption that I've read from an adoptive parent's perspective. Which meant I was cringing, laughing or on the verge of crying through most of it.

I once read an interview in which Savage said he and his partner were debating whether or not to adopt a second time. There were multiple reasons for their hesitancy, but one was not wanting to relive the experience of leaving the hospital with someone else's child. In his own words from The Kid, "No one warned us about the moment when you pick the baby up and walk out of the room, leaving the birth mom sobbing in her bed. We were unprepared for all the planning and check-writing and seminar-going to end in a moment of such blistering pain."

I read that section again and again before finally putting the book down. The details didn't match what happened when we picked up Puppy. It was a sidewalk, not a room; no one was sobbing outwardly. But none of that really matters. It doesn't change the fact that driving away from K with her/our baby in the back seat felt at that moment like one of the most terrible things I've done to another person. I've come across more than one parent who has considered not adopting again or going a different adoption route because the thought of being a witness to the physical relinquishment a second time is too troubling. I understand their position, and I respect them. It's because I respect them that I've struggled inwardly to understand why I am doing it again. How do I watch someone's heart break then willingly be party to it a second time?

T and I took some time last year to talk over all our different options, from foregoing siblings to pursuing a different type of adoption to saying health-be-damned and going for a bio kid. They are those crappy kinds of conversations in which there are no right answers. We went into our first adoption with some sense of the ethical trickiness, but none of how impossible it is to change the very nature of relinquishment. All the openness in the world doesn't mitigate the blistering pain, it just makes the adoptive parents witness to it. With adoption the way we did it there is no way to distance yourself. We were caught off guard by how it divides everything else into before and after.

Some people say they could never do what Savage did, what I did. They could never be the one to carry a child away from its mother. What it came down to for T and me was this: if our children are adopted, then that moment happened whether or not we were there. Whether we adopt from the state system or internationally or in a private adoption, that moment of blistering pain still happens. Maybe it's a kid being pulled into foster care, or a young parent dying of AIDS, or a father leaving a baby in a public place to be found, or a new mom leaving a hospital empty-handed. But someone's heart still broke. By virtue of adopting we are indirectly party to that; it is just a question of how many steps removed we will be.

It's more complicated, of course. This is just one tiny piece of what it means to do an infant adoption in the U.S. The reality is that there are ethical issues in all forms of adoption--they are just unique to each form. For us, working inside a culture we understand, in a system we have experienced first-hand, in the process we think allows us the most control made more sense than navigating something new and unknown. Ethically tricky, yes, but the trickiness we'd be best equipped to handle. Once we decided to adopt again, using a different form of adoption just to avoid that experience didn't seem right.

So tomorrow Ms B becomes a flesh-and-blood person to us (and us to her). It is one thing to prepare for a hypothetical situation with a hypothetical person. It is quite another to look into the face of a woman who is considering placing her child with you and have some sense of what awaits her if she does.

Whatever happens, tomorrow will be an interesting day.

"Making Room in Our Hearts"

I am on a short trip for work right now. Missing the family but kind of loving the personal time. Yesterday evening I ambled through one of my favorite bookstores, sitting down several times to leaf through books which caught my eye. Funny how the things that once were timewasters now feel like such luxuries.

One of the books I took back to my hotel room and stayed up late reading was Micky Duxbury's Making Room in Our Hearts. It's an excellent, realistic look at openness in adoption. It hit a note of authenticity that I don't always find in open adoption books--there was a familiarity to the families' stories. And it's always refreshing to read something that approaches openness not as a choice, but as a standard. Absolutely worth reading for anyone considering domestic adoption or thinking about openness.

Now that I've finished it, it's silly to let it sit on my shelf. Why not share it with my adoption friends? Our little city has a decent public library system, but it just isn't large enough to carry a lot of niche books. (One more reason I'm itching to move to the biggish city to the north of us.) Because of that, it's been hard to get my hands on a lot of adoption titles I'm interested in reading. They're not the books that get passed around the Thursday playgroup, you know? I'm sure some of you are in the same boat I am. So if you're interested in reading Making Room in Our Hearts, shoot me an email and I'll send it to you. I only ask that you mail it back to me when you're done.

ETA: Review up at Open Adoption Support.

The Girls Who Went Away

Last night as my TiVo® recorded the Cold Case episode about the maternity homes of the 1950s and '60s, I climbed into bed to finish the true-life version told by Ann Fessler in "The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade."

I am not a gifted enough writer to describe how heartbreaking and disturbing this book is. Its stories have settled themselves deep within my heart. Fessler provides an excellent overview of the history of American maternity homes and the social trends which contributed to an incredible increase in the number of children surrendered for adoption in the decades following World War II. The true soul of the book, however, is in the first-person stories of the women who placed children for adoption during that period. Fessler does a fabulous job of stepping back and letting their stories speak for themselves.

And, boy, do the stories speak. They yell and scream and cry and shout and tear at you with the truth of what it is like to be told you do not deserve to raise your own child. It explodes the persistent myth that first parents can just walk away after relinquishing and return to life as if the pregnancy had never happened. "Signing the papers" does nothing to sever a mother's connection to her child.

One of the dominant themes in the women's stories is the feeling that they didn't have a choice. Though on the suface it may have seemed that they willingly signed the papers, in reality they had been left with no other real options by their families, boyfriends, or social workers. Many times women were lied to when they asked about their legal rights, or threatened with expensive bills for the maternity home if they refused to surrender their child.

It's tempting to say that things are different now. Contraceptives and abortion are legally available. Single parenting is more accepted. There is not as much secrecy in adoption. But so much has not changed. As long as sexually active women--but not their partners--are called "sluts," as long as "welfare mom" is still a political slur, as long as financial stability is considered an indicator of parenting potential, as long as a pregnant teenager is still something to gossip about, many first mothers will feel that they did not have a choice. Even when great care is taken to eliminate potentially coersive tactics used by agencies/lawyers/adoptive parents/etc., there is still the weight of society bearing down on them. As an adoptive parent, it's difficult to express how uneasy that makes me.

(by Ann Fessler, The Penguin Press, 2006)