At the risk of beginning with an apology (there you have it), Standing in the Shadows isn’t an anything blog. My friends, Sarah Hoffman and Bedford Hope (Accepting Dad) write about raising pink boys in their blogs, and while I, too, raised a pretty pink boy and two more you might call cranberry and raspberry and now have a little girl both feisty and in love with sparkly pink shoes, I write about that only some of the time. I could say the same about local (art, music, farming, community action…), reproductive justice, raising four kids and lots else. Saskia is adopted and I do write about adoption. Yet, I haven’t really seen myself as a real adoption blogger.
That said, there are so many people writing about open adoption and I am learning so much reading their powerful stories. There’s an Open Adoption list and periodically a question is posed for the group to use as a writing prompt. Others are welcome to use the prompt, too. With thanks for that invitation, I’ll add my very much in-process response.
Here’s the question: If there’s one thing we all might agree on, it’s that we’d like our open adoptions to be successful. But what does “success” mean to you, when speaking about open adoption? Do you think it may mean something else to the others in your triad?
Off the top of my head, I am not sure “success” resonates with me as a way to describe adoption (okay, nor parenting writ large). Some words conjure the opposite—almost unconsciously—and for me, success is one of them: I leap to failure somewhere in the recesses of my mind. There’s so much middle ground, so much grey area between the stark terms of success and failure, and for me—two years in—adoption seems to exist in that murky middle. And I don’t declare that as a negative thing, not at all.
What’s murky, what’s bittersweet and muddled is this: no matter how much love there is for a child, that child carries a fissure, too. The mother who carried the pregnancy isn’t raising the child. Whenever and however a transfer was made, there’s a break. We have a board book (apparently no longer in print) called Grow Babies. Every time I read how a newborn knows his or her mother’s voice, I get sad, just for a moment. I think to myself, Saskia didn’t know my voice. Everything sounded different. That different—as in hearing my voice—occurred straight away; I attended Saskia’s birth, and I held her moments after she was born. It’s a tiny tug, though, and with it, I feel a tiny tug for Caroline, the mother whose voice would have been so recognizable.
On the sweeter side, Saskia knows Caroline and has grandmothers and grandfathers and cousins and aunts and uncles so there is no severance. And also sweeter, to the extent that with four children in our midst this is possible, I know that both Saskia’s papa and myself have been conscious of holding her especially close, as if our presence helps knit any fissure together. One of her brothers broke his leg when he was five, and I learned that where it breaks, in young children, the bone can grow back even stronger. I hope the same, somehow, for Saskia. I can only hope (and be resolved to remain open and present) that when she experiences grief or anger or sadness or confusion surrounding her adoption, my willingness to hold her and her feelings is enough and the fact that she has relationships with so many family members offers her a strong sense of connection and support.
What’s also become increasingly clear to me is that open adoption is complicated in large part because every situation is different, everyone has different desires and expectations and so it’s kind of a muddle, (hopefully) a goodhearted muddle.
As I feel committed to holding my daughter’s emotions, so too do I feel obligated to hold Caroline’s to the best of my ability. When a birthday or a holiday rolls around that might make her feel ambivalent or sad, much as I wish she could feel totally at peace with life as it is, I really do want to know that she’s struggling (and it took me a while to come to this place, by the way; there was a passage of time when I hoped she could kind of be “past” that sense of possible regret or second-guessing, that the wound for her could just heal up neat). Adoption isn’t a fracture or a physical wound, so it doesn’t heal in a particular way. I feel better realizing the process is ongoing and realizing that my relationship with Caroline isn’t wrapped up in a neat package, either; it’s one that will evolve over time. Time, I do imagine, is on our side here. We aren’t rushing toward a destination; like raising any child, this is a journey.
On the sweeter side, I have a mantra: more love is more love. For now at least, I’m just going to hold to that as I wander through the murky, the muddle, and all the grey areas. I don’t know that I have any overriding ideas or beliefs to offer others, save for that.
