Whoot, whoot! It is that time of year again for all members of the adoption community to come together and interview each other. I love this Project and participated in March 2010 and November 2011 as well. For a complete list of participants and links to their respective interviews click here. (My partner and I got top billing on the list :)
Though this is my third year participating, it is also a year of firsts. For the first time I was paired with a blogger that I already follow and love dearly. It is also the first time I get to interview an adoptee blogger. I'd like to introduce to you Rebecca Hawks who blogs at Love Is Not a Pie. Rebecca blogs from the perspective of an adoptee in reunion with her first family and an adoptive mother who adopted her daughter through foster care. She also shares her experience with open adoption in foster care adoption. So, without any further ado...
The Interview
ME: In your writing you mention that in your 20's you experienced a shift in how you processed your adoption. Do you mind describing a bit of what this shift was like? Were there specific events that you believe brought it about? What resources did you find the most helpful as you moved through this shift?
REBECCA: Thanks. This is a great question. The first time it happened I was reading the novel Marya: A Life by Joyce Carol Oates. The book doesn’t deal with a formal adoption, but the main character’s father is dead and her mother has abandoned her. The ending of the book snuck past my defenses and touched on an adoptee nerve. Suddenly I had thrown the book across the room and was on the floor in tears. A wave of grief and loneliness came over me and just completely knocked me flat. A similar thing happened about a year later when watching the movie The Joy Luck Club. The scene at the end where one of the main characters returns to China to meet her two sisters just completely undid me. Prior to all of this I would have told you that I was completely fine with being adopted and had no adoption-related issues at all.
This was all pre-Internet, and I had absolutely no resources. I didn’t even know enough to look for them. I had always been told that being adopted wasn’t a big deal and that I was no different from children who were born into a family, so I had no way to make sense of all these feelings that I wasn’t “supposed” to be feeling. I felt completely alone.
These feelings did shift me from thinking that I would never search for my biological family because I was “just fine without them.” Obviously, I wasn’t fine. It took a few more years before I really got up the nerve to search, but the seeds were sown during this period of emotional awakening.
It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered resources such as books by Betty Jean Lifton and Nancy Verrier. I wish I had known about these earlier.
ME: Do you mind describing what brought you and your husband to the decision to become foster parents and eventually adoptive parents? Did you foster any children before Ashley came to your home?
REBECCA: As an adoptee, I was always aware of adoption as a possible means of family building, but I was never drawn toward infant adoption. I knew that there were kids in the foster system who needed homes, and I thought that my husband and I might be good candidates to take in an older child. I had read a fair amount about trauma and believed that this knowledge combined with my personal understanding of adoptee issues might help me be an effective parent to a child who had experienced disruption. Of course, I had no idea what I was really getting in for! (Does any parent?) Also, let’s face it: our motivations were not entirely altruistic; we simply had the sense that our family wasn’t quite complete yet and believed that an older child -- specifically, a daughter -- would be the best match for our family. We were already parenting one child (my biological daughter, adopted by my husband as a step-parent adoption), and it made sense to add a child of a similar age and developmental stage.
Our process started when my husband called me on the phone one day, and I was on a website looking at profiles of waiting children in our state. I confessed what I was doing, and he admitted to having entertained similar thoughts. So we called the Department and Children and Families and scheduled the first step, a social worker visit to our home. Then we decided to take the next step, which was to take the required training course. As we took these early steps we told ourselves we were just exploring possibilities, but shortly after we made that initial call, Ashley’s profile popped up on that website. Both my husband and I felt drawn to her for reasons that I can’t entirely put into words. I could tell you some of the reasons why we believed she would be a good match for us, and vise versa, but the emotional connection and the pull toward this particular child cannot be explained by the sum of the parts. Later, we met Ashley in person at a local adoption event and our daughter Mackenzie was drawn to her as well, without even knowing that my husband and I had already told Ashley’s social worker that we were interested in being matched with her.
So to answer your final question, no, we didn’t foster any other children before Ashley. We didn’t even consider any other children; she was the only one.
ME: You have an open relationship with your daughter Ashley's first mother, Erica. Was this a relationship something that you, your husband and Ashley decided to pursue? Does the foster care system encourage openness in foster adoption? Do they have resources available to all three parties (first parents, adoptees and adoptive parents) to help facilitate open relationships in foster adoption?
REBECCA: My husband Paul and I went into our foster-adoption experience expecting to have an open relationship of some kind. In our geographic area, foster-adoptions do often involve a limited amount of visitation between the child and his or her biological family … typically one or two supervised visits a year. Prior to the finalization of Ashley’s adoption, Erica retained the rights to two visits a year; this was something she had negotiated when she agreed to sign the papers terminating her parental rights. The visits were supervised by a Department of Children and Families social worker. As part of the adoption finalization, Paul and I signed our own agreement with Erica, this one giving her the right to at least one supervised visit a year. Our agreement stipulates that Paul and I have the choice of supervising the visits ourselves or of having them supervised by a third party (as at a visitation center).
That’s where we began. Where we ended up is someplace completely different. It was a gradual transition, but over time, much of the formality of our official agreement has dropped away. We consider Erica and the two young sons she is parenting to be a part of our family. We all spent Mother’s Day together and we have plans to spend Thanksgiving together, for example. We do many more visits than our contract requires.
Erica is an amazing, resilient woman who has worked hard to turn her life around. She has not only triumphed in her own battle with drug addiction and overcoming a trauma history, but now works for a program that helps other mothers-in-crisis do the same. She is one of my closest friends and a source of inspiration to me. I never could have predicted that outcome!
Ashley had always maintained a bond with her mother. The family had come into crisis, but there was never any question of Ashley’s love for her mother or vise versa. My husband and I noticed that our support of frequent visitation did not prevent Ashley from bonding with us; in fact, the opposite was true. As we increased visitation with Erica, Ashley’s bond with us strengthened. Because of our openness, Ashley understood that she didn’t have to choose or hold back from connecting with us out of loyalty to Erica.
As for support and resources, the foster-care system in our area does encourage openness to a certain extent. For example, I am frequently invited by the department to speak to groups of people who are training to become foster-adoptive parents. I certainly encourage openness when I am speaking on such occasions, and they keep inviting me back so I guess that says something. But as for resources, no, we do not offer much in terms of post-placement support of openness. That is something that Erica and I would very much like to create through our organization Ashley’s Moms (www.ashleysmoms.org). Because we don’t yet have funding, we currently fulfill our mission primarily by speaking and writing about openness in foster adoption, specifically by sharing our personal story, but we do very much hope to eventually create some actual programs that would support others in creating successful open-adoption relationships.
ME: How does your experience as an adoptee influence your experience as an adoptive mother? What advice would you give adoptive and prospective adoptive parents to help them better understand the experience of adoptees that they may be more supportive of their children through processing their own adoptedness?
REBECCA:My commitment to openness is certainly influenced by my own experience as an adoptee in reunion. (I have had a relationship with my maternal family for the past 17 years and recently reunited with my biological father.) I have four parents, and they are each “real.” I love my adoptive family and I love my biological one. The one does not detract from the other. Because this is my own viewpoint regarding family, it’s natural for me to hold both parts of my daughter’s family in the same way.
I think it is important for adoptive parents to understand that being adopted is different from being born into a family. The adopted person may deal with a range of issues throughout the lifetime, and his or her feelings and thoughts about adoption may change many times throughout the years. I encourage adoptive parents to follow their child’s lead as much as possible. Listen. Be emotionally open to whatever comes up for the adoptee.
An adoptive parent (Shannon LC Cate, who blogs at http://shannonlccate.com/) left a comment on my blog the other day that I thought was just perfect. She said: “When my children need to talk about adoption, I try to remember to ask them as many questions as they ask me, so they will know it's their story, their feelings and their life to make of what they will--with my unconditional support for it, no matter what it is.” That nicely sums up what I would advise as well.
ME: What reform would you like to see in the adoption industry and/or the foster care system? Feel free to focus on one or the other if that would be easier. This is a HUGE question.
REBECCA: Ha, ha - yes, this is a huge question. My short answer is that I’d like for the adoption industry to be smaller … and less of an industry. I have serious concerns about adoptions being handled by for-profit agencies, but that in itself is a huge topic. For now, I’m going to cheat a little and focus on the changes I’d like to see in the way adoption is perceived and understood in the broader culture. I think there’s a tendency to perceive adoption as a simple solution in which everybody wins, and it’s not that at all. Take domestic infant adoption, for example. It’s tempting to look at a situation in which we have an infertile couple on the one hand and an unplanned pregnancy on the other, with parents who are not fully prepared to parent on their own without additional support of some kind, and say, “OK, so we move the child from one family to the other and, ta da, everybody wins!” But it’s not that simple. There’s often a huge price to pay, for the child (I know so many adult adoptees who are struggling with issues of identity, unresolved grief, etc), for the biological parents, and even for the adoptive parents. As the title of your blog indicates, adoptive parenting is no walk in the park!
The closed adoption system of my era was based on certain assumptions. Children were assumed to be blank slates. Nurture was assumed to trump nature. Things like genetic mirroring and a connection to one’s biological roots were considered to be of of small importance to the adoptee. Now many grown adoptees, such as myself, are speaking up and saying that these assumptions did not prove accurate in our situations. Many of us have mourned the loss of connection to our biological families, and we have struggle to make sense of our lives because of the lack of genetic mirroring and of knowledge about our histories. Many original parents are also speaking out now about the pain that they endured. That’s another one of the assumptions that was prevalent at the time of my adoption -- that the birth parents would simply move on as if nothing had happened. But they didn’t … not really.
Obviously, strong bonds can and do occur between family members who are not biologically related, in adoptive and other kinds of families. I’m not negating that. I’m saying that those new bonds don’t cancel out the original bond to the biological family. I believe that if our society truly understood and valued the bond of biological family, we would not have adoption as we know it. We certainly wouldn't have the kind of adoptions that completely severe a child from his or her genetic roots and seal up the original identity in a legal vault. We're a creative species; we can come up with solutions that don't involve such extreme measures. I do believe open adoption is a step in the right direction, when the adoption is truly open, involving a real relationship such as the one you have with River's first parents and brothers. But, unfortunately, I read about many adoptions that are nominally open on paper and yet lack a true spirit of openness; I don’t believe such arrangements are a significant enough improvement over the closed adoptions of my time.
Thank you so much, Rebecca, for opening up and sharing your thoughts with me in this Project. I hope everyone else feels as edified as I did after this interview. You can read my responses to Rebecca's questions here. Happy Reading!!
Adoption Ain't For Sissies: “We read to know we’re not alone.” ~ C.S. Lewis
