Mommies Here!

Okay, so this time I need your help because I wasn’t sure how to respond when I tripped over this week’s adoption moment.

I was speaking with an adoptive mom who happens to be a very notable infertility to adoption specialist about a lot of my issues, including my mother’s death, my tensions with Nadia over the years, and my fears about adoption. One of the questions that I had was about donor egg cycles.

Let me explain…

I have to admit that I’ve never considered doing a donor egg cycle. Besides the prohibitive out of pocket expense, I really wanted to get pregnant and have my own biological child to maintain a genetic connection with my deceased mother. After three failed IVF cycles and countless IUIs, I’m willing to move on to adoption, but I must admit that I was curious about the appeal of donor egg. So I asked this specialist, “Tell me more about your experience in treating women and families who have conceived with donor eggs. I’m really just curious because I don’t know that much about it.”

She told me some interesting facts about how children who were born from anonymous donor egg cycles are often very curious about their siblings, as opposed to their biological mothers. She said that donor eggs cycles allow for in vitro bonding between mom and baby. And like donor egg cycles, they allow for individuals to have more control over the genetic makeup of their child.

And then she went on to say, “You know, you have access to a better gene pool.”

“Excuse me?” I said. Because I thought that either I misheard her or maybe she had made a poor choice of words.

“Well,” she continued, “many children who are put up for adoption in this country are born into poverty and into very unstable, economic situations and their part of a cycle of poverty.  You know,” she went on “most of kids in special education in New York City are adopted.”

And I really didn’t know what to say to her. I really didn’t know how to respond. I can only say in hindsight I wish I had told her that what she said made me really uncomfortable and that I don’t believe in social pathology narratives. I don’t believe that people who are poor are inherently deserving of their plight, nor do I believe that genes are the sole reason why poverty exists but, unfortunately, at the time, I wasn’t in the emotional position to develop a strong, cogent, response.

I felt as if she framed the discussion as adoption vs. donor egg, which is weird because she’s an adoptive mom, but   I’m not sure where her kids are from.

Any advice?

It wasn’t too bad, even though I had been dreading it for a few months.

Last night Nadia and I dined with Dad and we planned to tell him the big news–about our plans to adopt. I was nervous because he is a 77 year old conservative Christian with very definite views on how life should be lived. And that’s the reason why, during our three year journey, I never told him that I was trying to get pregnant. I always suspected that he would have a big problem with our usage of assisted reproductive technology, and I just didn’t feel like testing the waters in the midst of feeling so vulnerable. But, lately, I’ve been feeling like I need some more support.

 On the other hand, he has surprised me on numerous occasions. For example, he totally adores Nadia treating her like a daughter (sometimes treating her better than his own daughter!) Then there was the time that I told him that I was studying to be an interfaith–not Christian– minister and he told him how proud he was.

 Would this be any different?

 So, at dinner last night, actually over dessert, I took a deep breath, braced myself and said, “Nadia and I are planning to adopt an infant.”

 And he looked at us and said in a gruff tone, “So where is this baby coming from?”

 And I said, “well, you know about the birds and the bees don’t you?” in an attempt to be funny, but my father wasn’t in a laughing mood. My joke fell flat. He didn’t even crack a smile.

 I thought to myself, “Here we go.” The old man will never accept a child that’s not directly from his bloodline.

 ”Well, Nadia and I are working with a private attorney to identify a birth mom.”

 “Isn’t it really, really difficult to get an infant?” He said.

 “Not really,” I responded.

 Then there was a silence for a few beats.

 ”Congratulations, “he eventually said. “Keep me posted.”

 For my Dad, that’s downright enthusiasm.

 Whew!

 Acceptance.  

 Exhilaration.

“We don’t give up our babies,” she said.

These words were spoken to me by a very, very dear friend who is an African American senior (senior=older than 65).

She said this in response to me telling her about our decision to adopt after three years of trying to conceive. I was talking to her about the pain and heartbreak of letting go  of one dream and the mixed feelings I had about building another.

During our conversation, I asked for her help. For many years, she had worked with young  African- American and Latino mothers and I thought that she may be able to help us with our adoption outreach.

As I’ve mentioned before, Nadia and I have decided to pursue private adoption, which means that a birthmom (or dad) will have to chose us from thousands of families who are also pursuing private domestic adoption. So I consider Nadia and me the equivalent of  a needle in a haystack.

Anyhoo, back to my friend.

Given her connections  to birth moms of color, I was asking her to be on the look out for women who may be looking for birth parents. And her response was “we don’t give up our babies”

“Huh?” I replied.

“Yeah, we don’t give up our babies.”

I waited two beats to process my reaction to what she was saying.

One. Two.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in my 30 years of working with young mothers, I learned that African Americans and Latinos don’t put their kids up for adoption.”

I took a deep breathe.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

This time I wasn’t going to let this go. I don’t think I gave the best response but I’m not ashamed of my response either.

“In my limited experience with adoption”, I began, “I’ve learned  that there were many, many African American and Latino children that were put up for adoption. So many in fact that domestic transracial adoptions have really exploded in the past 10 years.”

There simply are not enough families of color that are in a position to or open to adopting a newborn or older African American child.

I found some stats  but they pertain mostly to foster care. I wasn’t able to find stats on the number of African American infants adopted last year, but based on the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), in 1998  approximately 64% of children waiting in foster care were of minority background; 32% are white. Out of all foster children waiting for adoption 51% are black. 

I know that my friends point is not adequately addressed by the stats above. Obviously, having a child forcibly removed from your home and put into child into foster care is not the same as voluntarily creating an adoption plan for domestic infant adopti0n, but I think that the data overwhelming shows that African American children desperately need stable homes. Adoption planning is one option to providing that kind of stability.

Additionally, in my experience, I’ve encountered several agencies that have created separate programs for African American  and bi-racial kids to deal with their demand for adoptive parents.  Some agencies even have different pay scales to encourage waiting couples to adopt what are referred to as “biracial” ( in this case, children born with African American genes mixed with another ethnicity) or “full African-American”, kids with two African American parents, like myself, which happen to be the  kids least wanted in this world.

So my dear friend was dead wrong. But her reaction speaks to the fact that I that there is a lot of shame and ignorance about what’s really going on with African American domestic adoption, particularly in communities of color.

In the coming months I plan to do more research on African American infant adoption. Because the truth of the matter is that we “do give up our own” for myriad reasons and, thankfully, there are people out there who are anxiously waiting to embrace them mind, body and soul.

As I told you in a previous post, before our social worker arrived for our home study, Nadia and I feverishly cleaned and polished everything  in our house like never before.  In fact, we took a page from Dan Savage’s book The Kid, and even though I have some problems with the book, I am reading it as a companion piece to my current reality.   The bit about his approach to his home study sums it up perfectly.

 Savage writes, ” After we sent in our completed application, we got a call from Ann, who was going to do our home study. The day before our first appointment, Terry and I took steps to deceive Ann, misrepresent our relationship, and conceal the truth about our living arrangements. We cleaned.”

I don’t think we misrepresented our relationship but we did clean (uncharacteristically) like  mad women and we changed the pictures in the guest bathroom, just for her. Prior to her visit, Nadia had hung lesbian pulp book postcards in the bathroom; they were really funny, kitschy kind of visuals like this:

We had about four of them mounted on the large bathroom wall and the week before our social worker’s arrival, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, maybe we should change these photos”. The day before her arrival, Nadia said the same thing, so we decided to switch those postcards with ‘natural women”  because these were the only things we had in the house which would fit the picture frames. They look something like this:

I guess they are more dignified.

When, the social worder arrived arrived, the first thing she did was ask to use the restroom. Nadia and I both gasped and held our breathes. Upon her return, the first thing she said was, “I really like the photos in the bathroom.” Nadia and I exhaled and looked at each other like we had just scored a home run. Yes!

So overall it went really well. We sat at our dining room table, she pulled out her laptop and proceeded to type our answers to the several questions, including such topics as: our education, employment, how we met, our marriage, our thoughts on discipline and child rearing, our religion, feelings about birth parents,  and why wanted to adopt.

Everything went really well, until I told her how I had been trying to get pregnant for several years. Then, she said, “and what happened when you tried to get pregnant?”

And I wanted to cry and tell her about the whole horrific tale, including my fight with my insurance company and every gory detail about each failed IUI and IVF cycle, but I didn’t. I just said, “it didn’t work”. And, fortunately, she moved on. Whew!

Nadia was squeamish when she asked about health issues and she had to tell her about her thyroid cancer  (and her complete remission) and her new mild type I (yes type I) diabetes diagnosis.  To become certified as adoptive parents, we both have to get medical statements from our internists, and Nadia has hers already but our social worker wasn’t satisfied with that. she wants Nadia to get a letter from her endocrinologist stating that her health will not get in the way of an adoption. Basically, it’s not big deal, but I think that for Nadia those 3 to 4 minutes were excruciating. Poor thing.

I guess, you could call our soical worker Chatty Cathy because she talked a lot. She talked about day care, child rearing, and the NYT’s piece on surragcy. The upshot is that, ultimately, she made us feel very, very comfortable and I started to feel excited and hopeful about the ‘little one’ who will eventually grace our home, whom I’ve secretly started to call “Little Wing.” I told her that we hoped to have a placement  9 months aftaer filling out our paperwork and she said that she thought it might go quicker for us, which made my heart skip a beat. Yeah!

An hour and a half into it, she told us that she was ready to leave. I thought about insisting that she do the walk through before she left–because I didn’t know when or if I would ever have the energy to clean my house like that again, but I bit my lip and kept quiet. I didn’t want her to mention my bossiness in the home study. 

I enjoyed her visit. And she will return in a few weeks for part two.

In the meantime, Nadia and I are still wondering if we should put our pulp fiction postcards back in our bathroom until she returns.

So, Nadia asked me what my New Year’s resolution would be for 2010 and I told her I had none.

“What?” she said, “you are the most goal oriented person I know.”

“Yeah, well, 2009 didn’t work so well for me so I not going down that road this year. No resolutions, less disappointments, you know?” I quipped.

“What are you talking about?” She countered.

“Well, I really wanted to get pregnant in 2009 and I didn’t.”

“Yes, but that was completely out of your control. Getting pregnant is not a resolution.”

And you know what? She’s right. And I need to let it go. At least, I need to let go of the self-blame that has grown out of my infertility.

My infertility is completely out of my control. My failures are not reflections of me as a person. My infertility is completely out of my control. My failures are not relfections of me as a person…

Now I just have to say those two sentences to myself every day 20x at a fast pace.

If I review the last decade, it was actually very good. I came out. Feel in love. Got married. Bought a condo. Enrolled in seminary.

In the context of all of my accomplishments throughout the decade, my infertility does not loom quite so large. I know that 2010, will have a lot of ups and downs but I’m confident that this new decade will bring the child that Nadia and I were meant to have.

Happy New Year!

One of the things about the adoption process that is strikingly different than the TTC process is that there is a lot of paperwork.   Often couples celebrate every paper milestone, including: completing their initial application, finalizing their homestudy, and, eventually, when  all of their paperwork is submitted, and they are waiting to be chosen by a birthmother, they celebrate their ‘paper pregnancy’. Well, I’m not sure how I feel about that last term, but that’s not what this post is about, this is about the  impending homestudy visit,  its subsequent write up,  and our related jitters.

Last month, after my IVF retrieval, when I learned that I wasn’t going to have an embryo transfer, I immediately sprung into action, embarking on an almost  manic quest to find out everything about adoption and get my paper work submitted the court, so that our home could be certified as a pre-adoptive home. Well, being the eager beaver that I am, I scheduled the home study for this Tuesday.

Yikes! What was I thinking? Are we ready for this?

Nadia and I will have to submit an intake form and the social worker will interview us to determine if we are qualified to adopt according to the laws of our state.  As part of the home study process, the social worker comes to our house to ‘inspect’  our home. In addition to the interview and intake form, we will have to have a legal background check and a financial evaluation.

 Well, since that initial flurry of activity, I’ve slowly been coming down from the mania, and I’m not looking forward to this visit on Tuesday. What is the social worker going to think of us? Ironcially, Nadia, in her line of work as a social worker in foster care,  does home studies all of the time, and even she is feeling a little anxious.

I’m spending the next two days, cleaning (over and over again)  to make sure the dust bunnies are removed, but I have to admit that I”m a little worried about questions about my desire to conceive and how I”m processing that loss. I will be honest but I don’t want her to think that I would be an unfit parent because I’m still greiving. I know that some adoption agencies want people to finish greiving before they start on their adoption journey but, honestly, I dont’ think that that’s realistic.

If I’ve learned anything in the last few years while I was trying to get pregnant, I”ve learned that grief is cyclical. And I can’t be expected to say ‘yes, I’ve mourned my loss and I’m over it.” What I think I can say is that “I am working on my feelings of loss and disappointment and what matters to me most is become  a mother. Once  Nadia and I have the litle one in our arms, I feel confident that we will be able to nurture him (or her) and give him all of the love and support we would have given to my own biological child.”

We’ll see how it goes.

Last week, when I was feeling a little down about my infertility, a dear friend (of 1 is the new 4 fame)sent me the following text message…

 ”Sendin luv n stil keepin my son’s 1st baby blanket 4 my future adoptiv niecenephew. Luv u”.

Her words brought tears to my eyes. She has definitely been one of my biggest TTC supporters and I was worried how she would feel about me making the transition from trying to conceive to adoption. She and I went to high school together,  and when I started the TTC, we dreamed about what it would be like for both of us to be pregnant at the same time. Now, that my TTC dreams have been shattered and, as Nadia and I struggle to create new adoption dreams, I was nervous about how people, like her, would react to my new normal, aka “adopting after infertility”.

In a simple text, she put a lot of my fears to rest. Her message was beautiful, not only because it’s wonderful to think that she’s been saving her son’s first blanket for me, but also because I now know that she won’t make a distinction between my bio-child and my adoptive child, which is one of biggest fears.  I guess it all can be traced back to my family.

You see, my lesbianism makes me a  ’sister outsider’  within my very Christian extended family and I guess that deep, deep down I was hoping that having a baby with my mom’s genes would soften them a bit. While I was actively TTCing, I wasn’t consciously aware of this, but I guess I was longing for their love and acceptance. Now that my TTC journey has come to an end, I find myself mourning those fantasies  of reconciliation with my mother’s numerous brothers and sisters and the majority of my cousins.

My extended family is very, very into genes, lineage and family pride and, I guess, the fact that my adoptive child won’t have our genes means that I have to accept the fact that there may never be the rapprochement I was longing for. In fact, they might see my decision to adopt as just another crazy, offbeat pursuit that I’ve embarked on, along with a string of other offbeat failures, most notably my same-sex marriage.

Obviously, these are dreams and fantasies that I need to work through. Rationally, I know that any baby, even my own bio-child, may have never inspired the kind of love fest I secretly crave. So, I’ve identified yet another item I for the ’shrink catalogue’ to discuss in therapy.

Until then, I’m going to meditate on a new vision of me, Nadia, and our adopted baby, wrapped in a blanket of love.

As I become more and more attuned to adoption stories, images, and faces in my every day life, I’m learning that adoption has many faces.

Pop Culture

Okay, did anyone see Dr. Phil last Friday? His show was on adoption dilmenas and it was enough to make me go screaming from the room. He started off by saying something to the effect of ”what would you do if someone took your child and wouldn’t let you have it back?”

The show presented a sensationalistic, one-sided, and narrow view of everything that can go wrong in an adoption. Some of the scenarios covered were:

• Kids that seemed to be placed without the consent of both birth parents.
• A mother who wanted to reclaim full custody of her child from it’s adoptive parents after six years.
• A prospective adoptive couple who paid an attorney $20,000 in cash after seeing a sonogram of “their baby” only to discover that the whole thing was a hoax.

Ugh. I kind of wish I hadn’t watched that show because it left such bad taste in my mouth but it was kind of  like watching a train wreck.

Real Life

Earlier this month, Nadia and I went to a post-adoption conference support group/workshop sponsored by the same organization that organized the adoption conference last month. If I had been in my right mind, I would have skipped the conference, but I was in still at the point in this process where I wanted to soak up as much knowledge as possible about adoption, so I dragged Nadia along with me to the workhsop.

When we walked, in the facilitator zeroed in on me like white on rice. He kept staring at me. Even as more and more people entered the room (there were about 15 attendees ), he kept looking at me and asking questions. He wanted to know what we thought of the conference? what we had decided about our domestic adoption options: private placement through an attorney? or adoption agency? He told us that he “assumed we wanted a biracial child” and that he wanted to save us some time because he knew the names of a few agencies that  would “help us ” under the circumstances.

I felt like I was in the hot seat, to say the least. My intention was to go to the workshop and listen, not to be the main attraction. I really didn’t say much, and neither did Nadia. We both kept glancing at each other, thinking, ‘when is he going to stop focusing on us.” As one of three African-Americans in the room, I really didn’t feel as if I needed any more attention, you know?

Don’t get me wrong, he was definitely trying to be helpful and he was very nice,but what’s that saying about the road to hell? He was basically shining a spotlike on “our situation” and, believe me, I know that in the context of that crowd, Nadia and I were ‘unique”.  To be blunt ,we were the only same-sex inter-racial couple in the room. Or should I say’ transracial?”  which is the new buzz word these days and I’m learning that there are a lot buzz words in the world of adoption, but that will be a separate post for another day.

At the workshop, there were many people who had questions and some people were even allowed to ask them. He did turn his attention away from us long enough to give advice about how important it is to decide what kind of child you want (white, black, domestic, international) because all of those factors can influence how long you wait and how much you spend. So people where able to ask some questions about those check boxes, but he kept coming back to us. I felt like a very exotic flower, and if you know me in real life, you knwo that I am not generally self-conscious. He just thought we would be good candidates for a specific agency.

When Nadia and I got up to leave, he interrupted the woman to my left, to tell me that we had to take down his email address. He desperately wanted us to attend the info session of an agency that is “very comfortable with non-traditional families” another buzz word and has placed many bi-racial children.  In the world of adoption children are reduced to check boxes (black? white? domestic? international?) Adoption is very much about race, and by extension, class. I took down his email  but I won’t be using it because thae agency in question charges $10 to $15K more than I hope to spend on this process.

Nadia and I plan to  do a lot of our own adoption outreach and networking and work with a private attorney  who is magnificient. In fact, she is helping us to get certified as adoptive parents with the court. To that end, our first of two meetings with the social worker who will do our homestudy is on 12/29.

Nature

All of that to say, that my wheels are spinning about adoption. I continue to have many mixed emotions but this story, my final presentaton on the many faces of adoption really made me smile this weekend. Friday’s  Sun  ran a story about  Gay Penguin dads, really and it really made me smile. If they can do, maybe Nadia and I can too. Here’s an excerpt…

EVERYTHING is going swimmingly for a baby penguin brought up by two GAY parents.

The unnamed chick has been cared for by dads Guido and Molly since being born six months ago.

Curator Siani Tinley, at the East London Aquarium in South Africa, said: “He’s strong and healthy and showing no signs of confusion from having non-heterosexual parents.

“He’s happy and loves swimming around – I think the parents are very proud.”

The youngster was born five months ago after Guido and Molly — named when staff thought he was a female — incubated the egg after it was rejected by a male and female couple.

Aquarium staff say they will be conducting blood tests on the youngster in the coming weeks to determine its sex after which it will be named.

Like heterosexual penguins, the two dads took it in turns to incubate the egg until their baby hatched.

So on Sunday, Nadia and I went to the adoption conference. There were over 150 people there and 90 workshops. It was like a cornucopia of workshops and speakers on the topic of adoption- domestic and international.

Of course Nadia and I will be going the domestic route. International adoptions are getting harder for everyone these days (except for Brang.elin.a) and for same-sex couples they are just  impossible. Years ago one gay person in a couple would have to adopt as a single person and then the couple would have to do a second parent adoption for the other half of the couple. Now countries are making social workers swear that the single person in their homestudy is, in fact, single.

Nadia and I would never bend our relationship status– and that’s not to take away from those who do–but under the circomstances, it goes without saying that we are going domestic.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am not a xenophobe but when it comes to our baby, I will be proud to wave the flag and shout: Born in the USA! or 100% American! Because this is the only viable adotipon option for us right now and I’m sooooo grateful for it.

Additionally, we feel as if there are lots of beautiful black and brown babies here in the U.S who we would love to mother and they tend to be harder to place. One agency even has lower rates for ‘full African American’ or biracial babies, and even though I welcome the cheaper rate, its also pretty sad. When I ask people what the wait time is, they always say, “well the wait time for an African American child is not that long.” I’m happy that I may not have to wait long, but I’m not sure what else I feel about that (fodder for another post, perhaps…)

At the conference, we sat in worshops about “open adoption”, “agency or private placement adoption”, “parenting over 40″, and “how to get a birth mother to pick you out of a gazillion online profiles”. We got there at 9AM and left at 5PM; needless to say, when we left we were a little overwhelmed with all of the info.

The feeling reminded both of us of the dog days of yesteryear when we were first learning about IVF and we had to learn the difference between a menopur vial and a gonal-f pen. And, as Nadia said earlier this morning, ”you learned that too, right?”

Well, in this case, I am a reluctant student but I guess I was also a reluctant student when I got on the IVF train and then I quickly became obcessed with all of the successful cycle indicators, like follicle size, E2 levels, etc. If the past is prologue, I will become obcessed with the adoption process too, but I’m not there yet.

At the conference, there were many times when I looked at the people sitting around me and thought to myself, what am I doing here? If anyone would have told me in March of 2007, when I started this quest, that I wound up at an adoption conference, I would have called them a dirty liar!

I was able to find solace in the fact that many people at the conference were in the exact same boat as me and Nadia. There were many questions that referenced unresolved fertility treatments, and facilitators who talked about the losses in adoption- for the birth mother, the baby and the couple that experiences the loss  ofnever having their own bio-child. Hearing the testimonies, questions, and insights that referenced our situation really made me feel better about my adoption ambivalence.

I was also happy to attend a panel on ‘non-tradtional’ families. This panel was all about lesbian and gay parents who had successfully adopted newborns, which was also very affirming. The little room that the conference organizers stuffed housed us in was packed with ‘expectant’ adoptive parents, like Nadia and me and it  felt good to be in community.

Tomorrow Nadia and I have an appointment with an adoption attorney who will give us specific advice on the particulars of our situation from a legal point of view. I made this appointment about a week ago and it just turned out that our lawyer was at the conference on Sunday and that we were able to meet her for the first time. She seemed really great and knowledgment but I will find out more tomorrow.

As we approach the Thanksgiving Holiday, I just want to be mindful of all that I have so I must add that I’m thankful to be able to move forward and very grateful to have the resources to do so, but I also need to acknowledge that I am in mourning, for the bio-child that won’t ever be.

Last Wednesday, I learned that my little embie didn’t make it and that that cycle was a bust. It’s hard but Nadia and I have decided to move on to domestic adoption.

I’ll write more about it in the coming weeks.

Thanks so much for your support. It  means a lot.