The Awesome-ness of Being an Adoptive Mom

I know that sometimes I can be all dramatic or mopey about being a parent by adoption. But honestly most of the time I'm quite happy with it. I don't know whether I grew into my role as an adoptive mom or the role just suited me to begin with, but it's working for me right now.

For the sake of a little balance around here, I present ten things I love about being an adoptive mom*:

1. My children are learning, first-hand, that family isn't just about circumstances of biology. It is also about the people we choose to love and the commitments we keep.
   
   
2. It's fun to confuse the nurses at the doctor's office when you tell them you have two children, zero pregnancies.**
   
   
3. Ditto the strangers who can't figure out which two children match up to you at the playground.
   
   
4. My husband and I were able to equally participate in every aspect of childcare, from feeding to babywearing, from the very beginning and it's led to a wonderful emotional and logistical balance in our household. No one got a head start in bonding or the extra responsibility that comes along with it.
   
   
5. If the baby-birthing moms in my playgroup are a representative sample, I am glad I can laugh hard without peeing a bitty bit.
   
   
6. I've come to believe in the inherent resiliency of children and it has allowed me to let go of so many things I think I otherwise would have tried unnecessarily to control.
   
   
7. At the same time--and this may seem like it contradicts #6, but it doesn't--witnessing my children's transition away from their birth parents led me to a more nurturing, attached parenting style than I probably would have let myself embrace had I birthed them. I'll never know the mother I would have been had my children been born to me. But, knowing myself, she may likely have missed out on what have been some of the most meaningful moments of my parenting life thus far, as I've stretched myself to understand and meet my kids' needs. I like the parent adoption has made me. (And I got to use attachment as an excuse to hog the babies when they were wee newborns.)
   
   
8. I am more empathetic to people grieving ambiguous loss and finding themselves on paths they did not expect to take in life. In many ways, unplanned pregnancy and infertility are two sides of the same reproductive coin.
   
   
9. I have no expectations, secret or otherwise, that my kids inherited some favorite trait or talent from my or Todd's family line. I discover and delight in their unique personalities together with them as they emerge.
   
   
10. As a mom sharing motherhood in a mismatched, non-genetically-related, happily messy extended family created through open adoption, standing up to persistently narrow cultural paradigms of family and parenthood and saying with no apologies, "We're a family," is one of the more punk rock things I've ever done.
    

And why not a bonus #11? I would have never have met any of you awesome people from all sides of the triad who are writing online about adoption.

How about you?

* You all are smart cookies, so I'm going to skip the whole "these things may not be universally true nor exclusive to adoptive parenting" thing, mkay?
** Seriously, though, in this age when surrogacy, adoption, and step-parenting aren't exactly rare, you'd think they wouldn't be so consistently befuddled.

What Happened to Just Hiding Them in a Napkin?

Like every third person in our part of the country, I have a Sigg bottle full of water that floats around with me throughout the day. I think they appeal to our regional belief that by spending money on things like overpriced water bottles we can achieve good health (yay for drinking water!) and save the Earth (boo to plastic!). I'd like to say I diligently wash it out with hot soapy water every evening, leaving it clean and ready for the next morning. But truthfully, I just keep refilling it day after day until it finally occurs to me one that a responsible adult cleans her dishes.

All that to explain why, when I came in to the kitchen yesterday from doing yard work in the sun, I chugged from my water bottle knowing it was still partly full from the evening before. Which is how I discovered--as my mouth filled with a horrifying amount of tiny chunks--just what Puppy had done with the carrots he was supposed to be eating before dinner the day before.

One-Sided Secrets

Both of my children have been and are, in different ways and to varying degrees, secrets. Not in our world, where their presence has been felt in every corner of our lives. But in the worlds of their birth families, where there is a patchwork pattern of those who know and those who don't, those who acknowledge and those who won't. Some because of deliberate efforts to hide it from them, others simply because they came along after the adoptions and haven't been told yet.

I don't begrudge the patchwork holes or the choices that created them. I have no idea what it's like to be in that position, having a family member who was placed or facing condemnation for being a first parent. And when I try to imagine, it can seem overwhelming. So, no, this is not about judgment. It's about my struggle to understand how to mesh the secrets in other people's lives with the openness in ours.

When we started on our way to becoming adoptive parents, we heard one thing over and over from seemingly every expert and social worker: secrecy is bad. Openness--not just contact but an embrace of adoption as a normal part of family life--was set out as the antidote to the lies and forced divisions of recent generations. Adoptees never told they were adopted, women hidden in maternity homes and told to forget, first families and adoptive families kept apart for no real reason. The secrets that kept old stigmas so persistently attached to being adopted; for if there is nothing bad or shameful about adoption, why keep it so hush hush? We were told we had a responsibility to show our children we rejected those ideas by the way we talked about adoption and integrated their birth families into our lives, by not hiding adoption away. We weren't told what to do when we weren't the ones keeping the secrets.

I asked an agency worker about it once during our counseling, what to do with the uneasiness I felt over secrets which were out of my control. I can't remember now if we were discussing a hypothetical or real situation. "We encourage birth parents away from secrecy when it's not a question of safety or legality, just like we do with adoptive parents," she said to me. "But ultimately it's their decision and their timing. And they will have to explain their choices to their children one day."

It's a comforting thought in the abstract, that it's not our responsibility to explain other people's decisions. But it's of little use when you're the one with a child on your lap asking why they've never met a certain birth family member or why we can't visit someone where they live. We may not have to explain, but we do have to answer. How do you tell them their existence has been deliberately hidden from some people without making them feel that it is somehow their fault?

Nor has it been of much comfort in recent weeks, after someone in one of our children's first families decided to finally share the truth. Sadly, it was shared in an effort to wound another--which it did. And the resulting whirlwind has nothing to do with us and yet everything to do with us. Because here in our home sits the child who was discovered and lost in a single moment. And the anger is directed our way.