It is time for the second annual Adoption Interview Project put on by Heather at Production, Not Reproduction! I love this Project and participated in March 2010 as well. For a complete list of participants and links to their respective interviews click here. I can't wait to dig in to all of the interviews! I learned so much and found so many great blogs last time.
I'd like to introduce my interview partner, Josh, who blogs at Regular Midwesterners. Josh is a gay, stay-at-home papa to Miles, his son that he and his partner adopted through infant, domestic, transracial adoption. You will find as you read this interview and also hop on over to his blog to learn more about him that he is an amazing writer, and a very purposeful parent. I am so grateful for Heather's random generator that paired participants. We are quite the odd couple… a Mormon and a gay man. But we thoroughly enjoyed our opportunity to get to know each other and share our respective journeys as adoptive parents.
ME: I greatly admire the parenting techniques you use with your son Miles. Particularly in regards to how you help encourage him to develop different talents/interests and also how you teach him to be aware of his connectedness with the rest of the world. What resources and/or mentors have helped you develop your parenting style?
JOSH: Those are kind and probably undeserved words. I feel like every week is a new game, and I'm always muddling my way through.
Whenever I reach a point in my son's development that confuses or frustrates me, I tend to make a new trip to the library to research child development books. There hasn't been any one in particular that's been my parenting bible, although one early influence was Diary of a Baby. I also share my frustrations with my mom who is really excellent with young kids.
The particular advice I get has been less important than the opportunity reading or talking about it provides to reground myself in what my kid is experiencing, what the world is looking like from his perspective. Getting back to that kind of thinking always helps me hit the restart button with patience and with trying new activities to channel his energy and curiosity.
I'm gradually learning more about Montessori education, through Miles' teacher and school, and much of what I learn makes intuitive sense and gives me valuable conceptual tools. For example, at my first-ever parent-teacher conference last month, his teacher told me she can tell he's in what they call his "sensitive period" for fine-motor learning. I might get this wrong, but I think the basic idea is it's the time when he's developmentally curious and beginning to develop more capacity to explore a particular area of learning and behavior. It's a time to foster that curiosity with activities suited to that particular area of learning. She was totally right. He'd always shown little interest in fine motor activities but had suddenly started insisted on spreading his own butter or trying to unbutton his shirts. At first I was seeing these moments as battles—I just wanted to plow through the morning routine—but when I understood that something bigger was going on, I slowed down and started giving him more outlets to explore his new interest in these sorts of activities.
ME: Many couples that adopt transracially find that when they are out in public they get a lot of attention as if they are a billboard for adoption. Have you experienced this as well in particular because you are a gay couple that has adopted transracially? Would you mind sharing any particular comments that you have received and how you have responded to them?
JOSH: Yes, we're definitely conspicuous. There are no other gay dads and not many transracial, adoptive families where we live—certainly not many white men out and about during the day with a child of color. It's much more common here to see Amish, conservative Pentecostal, and conservative Mennonite women with lots of kids.
The nature of the reactions seems to depend on local culture. The community where I live now is very reserved and stereotypically Midwestern. People are not expressive in public, especially with strangers, and sometimes even kind of cold. It's difficult not to read this as hostility towards us. Rarely does someone at the grocery store or the library ever engage me in any kind of exchange beyond the transaction at hand. There have been only a few exceptions to that, and I've blogged about them here and here. In one case, a woman asked if Miles was ours and then told me about how she was trying to be a surrogate for a gay couple. In another case, a white woman who had recently adopted an African-American infant asked me lots of questions. So here the questions tend to come from other people forming families in unconventional ways. Elsewhere, when we lived in Madison or have traveled even to nearby cities, I find people smiling at us in recognition and much more likely to ask questions about how we adopted, what kind of relationship we have with his birth family, etc. I've observed that younger African-American women in particular are warmer, smiling and commenting that our son is very cute, which of course is great.
We're misread more than I would have expected. This seems to happen in more diverse, cosmopolitan settings and seems to be determined by the particular culture or ethnicity of the people we interact with. So for example, when we traveled to Toronto two years ago for a short vacation, the three of us went out to eat at an Indian restaurant on the outskirts of the city, in an Indian neighborhood. The woman running the restaurant was very friendly to us. Each time she came to the table, she'd say something sweet to our son. Then finally, she looked at me and said, "Your wife must be Indian. He's very beautiful, you know." I was blown away. I mean, Travis was sitting right there. But maybe not that many openly gay couples hung out in that part of town. Sometimes people ask if we're brother, even though we don't look that much alike.
ME: How did you initiate the conversation with Miles about his adoption? At almost 4 years old, how interested does he seem to be in his story? How much of it does he seem able to grasp?
JOSH: He started asking, "Where's my mom?" when he was 22 months old. I guess he had noticed that everyone else around him—real people, plus characters in almost every book we read—refer often to this thing called, "mom." So that's when we started talking about his mom and explaining that we adopted him from her, she loves him very much, we're his parents forever, and he has two dads. We created a life book to walk him through his story, and we get that out every few weeks. He always reacts positively and loves to pour over the pictures of the big, extended family of people who love him.
Your question reminds me of a time when Miles' grandma was visiting from Oregon and took us all to baseball game in a nearby city. We sat behind a man, woman, and boy who appeared to be about six years old. At one point, they turned around, and Miles played peekabo with the young kid. The mom smiled at us and asked if we had adopted Miles. She then turned to her son and said, "Say hello. He was adopted, just like you." It was such a sweet moment and really modeled a certain openness and matter of factness that I try to emulate, even when it sometimes feels hard.
Miles' mom, sister, aunt, and cousin came to visit us this summer. We had last visited them the year before. Now that Miles was three, I think he could understand better—although not quite all the way—that this was him mom, the woman who carried and gave birth to him. He was especially interested in his (full biological) sister. She's seven and loved being near her little brother. He, in turn, was very interested in the idea of having a sister, since so many of his friends have siblings. After the visit, he started asking lots of questions about his skin color and other people's skin color, so I think the visit stirred things up for him—like really noticing for the first time, even though we've talked about it before, that his skin color is different from ours.
So we've increasingly worked to address not just adoption but transracial adoption issues. We're loving Karen Katz's book, The Colors of Us. It focuses on the different shades of brown a little girl sees in the people in her community—with vibrant, beautiful drawings—and associates those shades with different kinds of food, which seems to attract Miles' attention and foster positive connotations with those darker shades of skin. Travis and I both follow Mama C., your interview partner from last year (!), who offers lots of inspiration, ideas, and food for thought about transracial adoption.
ME: Did you seek openness when you began the adoption process? How has your experience been with open adoption? What is one benefit and one challenge you have found in open adoption?
JOSH: Yes, we wanted openness but didn't make it a prerequisite for a match. I didn't like the idea that we wouldn't know the mother of our child and somehow be spared from at least some of what she went through. I had no idea just how emotionally complicated adoption can be and the level of openness we have has helped me understand that—the impact of this adoption on everyone involved. Some days it's really hard and I wake up in the middle of the night fretting about some aspect of it, but I can't imagine having it any other way.
One benefit of open adoption is that, despite some fears about how things would turn out, our relationship with Miles' mom has gone really well. She is a very strong woman, and after placing, she went on to achieve the goals she had told us were important to her. We respect her tremendously. It seems like all of us seem to focus on doing what we think is best for Miles, and I think that will continue.
One challenge is that things can feel unchartered and unknown. I sometimes wish the adoption had taken place in a state with enforced open adoption contract law so that we could have had a more formal process early on to lay out what each of us wanted, along with occasional, more formal conversations to revisit how things are going. As it is, we never know for sure what's coming next. Sometimes I worry, for example, that maybe his mom wants more contact or more emails, or on the other hand, there have been a few times I wondered if we'd hear from her again. At those times, I just try to use the occasion of thinking about her to send an email with a quick update about what's new with Miles, along with our latest pictures.
ME: Previously as prospective adoptive parents, and now as adoptive parents what stereotypes and challenges did you and Travis have to overcome along the adoption process as a gay couple? Did you encounter any resistance from agencies, local government or even from family and friends?
JOSH: Plenty of change still needs to happen, but I try to remind myself how much the world has changed and so very quickly. When you think about what was possible for gay men even one or two generations ago compared to what I've been able to do, it's incredible. So I feel lucky. But I'm also not one to accept the status quo. Entering the world of adoption, as a gay couple, can really get you down. Immediately, you run smack up against the reality of discrimination and prejudice. The biggest obstacle, for private adoption anyway, is what I think of as the three-tiered system of agencies. First, the (mostly) Christian agencies with stated prohibitions on working with gay couples (or any prospective parents who aren't straight, married and Christian). Second, the agencies that don't have explicit policies yet have no or very little evidence that they are gay friendly. So you have to decide if you're going to spend time figuring out whether they're quietly anti-gay or whether they just haven't had the occasion to work with a gay couple. Third, the smaller but growing number of agencies that are open to working with gay couples and have a clear track record of placing with gay couples. Then even when you find a gay-friendly agency, it's still no guarantee that expectant mothers coming forward will want to select a gay couple.
The other major obstacle is the retrograde nature of family law in most states. In Ohio, gay couples cannot jointly adopt. Unmarried couples cannot adopt, and of course, gay couples can't marry here. And there is no option, like second-parent adoption, available here to ensure both parents can have secure, fully recognized relationships as the parents of their child. It burns me to think I can give up working outside of our home to spend my days caring for my kid, but the state would still treat me as a legal stranger to my child. Fortunately, we were able to do a second-parent adoption with Miles before we moved here so we both have adoption orders and our names on his birth certificate.
Fortunately, a number of states will allow gay couples to jointly adopt. We're working with out-of-state agencies for our second adoption in the hopes that we can jointly adopt by finalizing in another state, but there is no guarantee that Ohio will recognize that adoption when we try to come back home after placement.
When it comes to family and friends, we have no problems. Travis and I both came out when we were teenagers, so our families have had a long time to get more accustomed to what it means to have gay kids. I also have a younger gay brother, so there's a lot of gay up in my family. Our families are very supportive and very much involved as grandparents. When I was younger and first coming out, I had a few friends tell me I was a sinner or going to hell. They're not my friends anymore; I can't see being close with people now who think like that.
ME: For same sex prospective adoptive parents and adoptive parents what advice would you give to help them navigate those challenges? What resources did you find to be the most helpful?
JOSH: I think you have to have a thick skin and you have to really know you want to become a parent. The bar is higher for gay couples, on average, than it is for non-gay couples, in terms of what you have to go through and how you have to persevere, even after you have a kid. At least out here in the Midwest, it can feel like you never quite stop feeling like it's a fight to be recognized as a legitimate family. There is one new resource that's very helpful. It's Conceivable Now is an online hub for all the ins and outs of LGBT parenting—legal issues, practical know-how, and personal stories. We've also found it to be really valuable to connect with other LGBT families, like Rainbow Families Great Lakes.
Having a solid relationship and the support of family and friends goes a long way, I would imagine, for anyone pursuing adoption. We were lucky to have close friends like Gretchen (my Regular Midwesterners co-blogger) and her partner Jill, who were also trying to have kids. It helped a lot to be able to commiserate and share the hard parts.
I wish I had talked with more adoptive parents in general, specifically transracial families and families with open adoptions. It seems really important to understand up front that adoption isn't a glowing, beautiful ending to the story of your quest to become parents. It is beautiful in many ways, but it's not only beautiful. I would have liked more information about the hard parts—the loss, the potential life-long impact on everyone involved. At the same time, I think it's important not to assume everything you hear about other people's adoption experiences will necessarily be true for you and your situation. There seems to be such a huge diversity in how people—adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive families—experience adoption.
ME: Many people have certain perceptions of gay and lesbian individuals and couples. What would you want them to know to help them better understand your perspective as an individual, partner and parent?
JOSH: I might be naïve, but unless someone is adamantly, hard-core opposed to openly gay people and families, spending time getting to know gay people and their families goes a long way toward promoting understanding and finding commonalities. I don't know for sure, but I get the feeling we make a difference where we live simply by being out and about as a gay family.
I also wish more non-gay people took the time to educate themselves about the discriminatory state of the law. I've been surprised many times when non-gay, educated, progressive friends tell me they had no idea that, for example, gay couples can't jointly adopt in our state. Or that 29 states have passed horrible anti-gay constitutional amendments and more will vote on similar amendments soon. Or that gays can only marry in six states. I mean I know it's not exactly a topic—the legal issues—that's featured in the media every day. And there are certainly other important issues clamoring for attention, but I always feel a little like, "Really? What in the world made you think all of this had been sorted out already? Where have you been?"
ME: How has your journey to adopt again differed from your initial experience adopting Miles? You mention in your writing that over the course of the process you and Travis have questioned whether or not to continue. What has caused you to reconsider?
JOSH: We have been trying to adopt a second child for about a year and a half now. Especially after a match fell through, we questioned to keep trying. Ultimately, we decided to stick with it and recently signed up with a second agency to increase our chances of a match. Once we got farther away from the sadness of the unsuccessful match (our second since before we had Miles), we grew more excited again about having a second kid. We really, really want Miles to have a younger sibling, another child of color in our family, especially if we end up living here in this not-so-diverse community. Now that Miles is almost four and more independent, it's also easier to imagine taking care of him and a little baby at the same time. Finally, Travis and I both love babies and really want that experience again, even if I occasionally bawl into my pillow at night because I'm a complete mess with sleep deprivation.
I want to thank Josh for a great interview exchange and Heather for all of the time and effort she puts into this project allowing us to come together as a community to learn more about each other! You can read my responses to Josh's questions here.
I'm off to start reading interviews. Hmmm… I wonder what tea would go best… Chamomile or Dandelion Root J
