by Anne Moody
Ideas about openness have changed a lot over the years. It is now common for adoptive families to share full identifying information with birth parents, often in their first encounters. In an effort to find a baby in an ever-more-challenging market, most families seeking to adopt an in-country infant post online profiles full of information about themselves, giving birth parents the opportunity to thoroughly scrutinize (and Google) them before any direct contact is made. There are ways for people to protect their identity, but the ways for people to get around those safeguards are ever multiplying. Given that reality, many adoptive parents accept the fact that confidential adoptions are largely a thing of the past.
For most people, this is a harmless trend, even a beneficial one. But there are some situations in which birth parents simply aren’t emotionally stable enough for open adoption. It might seem that the best approach in these cases is a vigilant effort to preserve confidentiality, and this would indeed shield the child for a few years. But in the long run, it may prove harmful. Once the child is old enough to ask questions about his adoption or his birth parents, to realize that there are other adoptees who know their birth parents, and to learn to use a computer, the adoptive parents may find that they can no longer control the amount of information their child will be able to access. If they haven’t created an atmosphere in which the child feels comfortable coming to them with questions about the birth family and trusts that they are telling the truth, then the child is likely to search for information in secret. Far better for the parents to share what they know and be as honest as their child’s age allows them to be in talking about why they don’t maintain contact with the birth parents. It is usually true that the unknown is scarier than just about anything else, so adoptive parents need to make sure that their child’s imagination, and/or the “information” he finds out in secret, isn’t more troubling than the truth would be. And in those situations in which the truth is just unavoidably troubling, it is all the more important for the parents to be the ones to talk with their children about it first.
When I worked with the Options for Pregnancy program, it was in the forefront of promoting open adoption. There were a few other agencies at the time that urged a much greater degree of openness, creating adoptions that seemed more like guardianship or co-parenting arrangements, but the majority of agency adoptions were still quite traditional. It was revolutionary in those days to allow birth parents to select adoptive parents, meet with them, have them present at the baby’s birth, and maintain contact after placement. But change was happening quickly, and agencies that continued to operate under the old rules began to either adapt to some degree of openness or go out of the business of infant adoption. Those who chose to adapt were a cautiously excited bunch, feeling their way through new terrain.
Some years later, Patti Beasley—who had also worked at WACAP as an adoption counselor—and I had the opportunity to run our own agency, Adoption Connections. We decided to have a single counselor work with both the birth and adoptive parents. We had come to feel that conventional adoption social work practice was guided by the fallacy that birth and adoptive parents represent opposing sides in an adoption. What we usually found instead was that these were people who were working together to achieve the same goal; a happy family for the baby. Certainly there were times when people had differences of opinion about how some aspect of the adoption should be handled, and certainly there were times when a birth parent’s requests exceeded a particular family’s comfort level. But these were situations in which a counselor could either help them negotiate a solution or help them come to the decision that they weren’t a good match for each other.
The adoption process is fraught with extreme emotions, and there are bound to be times of conflict. But when everyone stays focused on what is best for the child, there is strong motivation to work through these difficulties. The goal becomes larger than the straightforward one of finding a baby or finding an adoptive family; it grows to encompass the creation of a relationship that will demonstrate mutual care and respect between birth and adoptive families. This can happen whether people develop ongoing relationships or choose to meet only once. I have even seen it happen on the rarest of occasions—when birth parents have requested closed adoptions and asked us to handle everything confidentially. In all of these various kinds of arrangements, there is one common thread: everyone involved can say that they have done their very best for the child and for one another.
14
Finding Just the Right Home
One summer morning in 1985, I rode the ferry across Puget Sound to meet with an adoptive family living on Bainbridge Island, a thirty-five-minute trip from downtown Seattle.
The island proved to be bucolic; I drove past a charming little public grade school, thinking wistfully, “I wish my children could go to a school like that.” The previous months had been spent trying futilely to figure out our six-year-old daughter Erin’s school plans for the coming year. It was a particularly fraught time in the history of the Seattle school system, which a few years later would be given a total overhaul with major improvements that made the city a place where families once again wanted to send their kids to public schools. But that year was a bad one, and Erin was slated to spend two hours each day riding a bus to and from a dismal neighborhood where a little girl had recently been shot across the street from the school playground. We were not going to send our child there. The alternative was private school; the private schools in Seattle were proliferating like mad during those years. Erin had been going to a wonderful private preschool and kindergarten, founded by the University of Washington’s Department of Early Childhood Development, for the past two years, and she loved school and thrived in that environment. But we had to look ahead, realize that private school fees were climbing every year, and wonder how we would be able to afford them in the years to come. We had two children to consider at this point (Erin and our younger daughter, Caitlin). We wanted a third, to be adopted from Korea, and there were considerable expenses attached to that decision as well.
As I watched the children playing happily on the grassy hillside playground, my thinking switched to, “Why couldn’t my children go to a school like that?” As most parents do, I wanted my children to grow up in the best possible circumstances, and island life looked idyllic to me.
Our decision to move to Bainbridge was made in haste. A few days after my first visit, my husband and I returned to check out the housing situation—just an exploratory venture without any real thought or plan to move. By the next weekend, we had made an offer on a house, and two weeks after that we had sold our house in Seattle. Things happened so quickly that we couldn’t help but wonder what we had done. We kept waiting for feelings of remorse to creep into our enthusiasm, but they never did. There was a brief moment of concern when we realized that there was no place on the island to get peanut M&Ms at midnight, but we adjusted.
When we moved to the island, the population was made up of newcomers (like us) and old-timers, meaning people who had grown up here, mostly Caucasian but including many Japanese and Filipino families who were early farmers and landowners. Bainbridge has always been a close-knit community—we quickly learned not to honk our horns or scowl at a stranger who might turn out to be your dentist or the parent of your child’s new friend. The community’s cohesion was never more evident than during the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. The local paper—the Bainbridge Review—was the first West Coast newspaper to editorialize against the internment, and islanders (many of them Filipino men who had come to Bainbridge to work in the lumber mills and the native American women they married) for the most part safeguarded the property of the interned until they could come back to reclaim it.
Bainbridge also had an artistic element that included lots of writers, painters, musicians, and a plethora of cottage industries. Many people on the island, including my husband, commuted to jobs in downtown Seattle, the f
erry ride being a relatively quick, inexpensive, and extremely pleasant trip for a pedestrian. The commuters’ days began and ended with a ride across Puget Sound and (when it wasn’t raining) spectacular sunrises and sunsets that turned the sky and the snow on the Olympics and Mt. Rainier into gorgeous shades of pink, purple, and gold. On winter evenings, when the ride home was in the dark, even longtime commuters might take seats at the back of the boat to take in the dramatic sight of the city lights sparkling like countless jewels on the hillsides of Seattle and as they were reflected in the waters of Elliott Bay.
We moved into an old farmhouse at the end of a dead-end road with seven other houses, lived in by families with a total of thirteen children under age ten. Most of the houses had about an acre of land each, and the kids were given a degree of independence they would never have been allowed in the city. We were astonished by our good fortune at finding not only schools but a community and neighborhood that was everything we hoped it would be. Life on Bainbridge just kept surprising us in delightful ways. The nights were so quiet that we could hear seals barking on a beach a half mile away. We saw skies full of stars and meteors and experienced moonlight so bright it cast distinct shadows in the yard. The wildlife, including deer, raccoons, eagles, owls, and coyotes, was beautiful, exciting, and troublesome. The deer families that were so lovely to look at would regularly eat anything that blossomed, raccoons were ingenious at getting into the garbage, and eagles and coyotes made people’s small pets disappear. Nevertheless, as long as our own small pets were safely inside, we were delighted by frequent visits from all of these animals. If the kids got to the bus stop a few minutes early in the morning, they could spend the extra time petting the horses pastured there, and sometimes as the bus drove past the bay, they would see a seal head pop up in the water.
I had been contentedly living on Bainbridge for about five years when I was contacted about working with a young couple from east Texas who wanted to find an adoptive family for their two young children—a two-year-old girl and a nine-month-old boy. Often, calls about wanting to place “older” children are a cry for help from someone who is feeling temporarily overwhelmed, and it is likely that the caller actually needs and wants assistance with some other aspect of life, such as finances or parenting, rather than with planning an adoption. Becca was seventeen years old (meaning she had been fourteen when she got pregnant with her daughter), and her boyfriend, Jarod, was eighteen. They lived together with their children, usually with one or the other of their parents, and, as Becca told me, they had so far been able to provide for their kids. Becca was a girl of few words, and I was having some difficulty figuring out why she and Jarod were thinking about adoption, especially since they had family support. She wanted me to tell her about adoptive families, however, so I did, and I also sent her some family profiles to look at.
Becca called again about a week later and said that she and Jarod were excited about one of the families they had seen and wanted to know if they could meet the couple. This time, Becca was more forthcoming in our conversation, and she told me that although nothing had happened yet, she wanted to find an adoptive family soon because both she and Jarod were on the verge of losing their tempers with the children. I asked her about leaving them with the grandparents when they were feeling stressed, and Becca told me she had the same concerns about the grandparents’ lack of self-control. She assured me that the kids weren’t in immediate danger, but in my experience, when someone expresses fear that a child “might” be abused, the abuse has often already happened. Becca denied that this was the case, but she was eager to proceed with an adoption.
The family Becca and Jarod wanted to meet was from Bainbridge Island. Within a week, they and their children had flown here and met the prospective adoptive parents, Mark and Elizabeth. The children were adorable and appeared to have been well cared for. Becca and Jarod were friendly and pleasant and straightforward in their explanations about why they wanted their children to have lives different from the ones they could provide. They talked about their hopes for the children’s futures and also about hopes for themselves. They said they just needed a chance to grow up more before they would be ready to handle the responsibilities of parenthood. They were calm but not unemotional, and their resolve to do an adoption was clearly strengthened by meeting Mark and Elizabeth and being able to form an image of what life with them would be like for the children.
After the first meeting, which was at Mark and Elizabeth’s home, we decided that the children would spend some time alone with them the following day while I took Becca and Jarod on a tour of the island. They were delighted by everything they saw. Becca, it turned out, was fascinated by sea life, so after showing them such things as the schools and parks, we headed for a beach. As we approached the water, Becca asked if we ever saw seals; I told her that there were lots of seals, that sometimes we saw otters and orcas, and that my daughters and their grandfather had once been no more than fifty yards away from a gray whale as they fished from the dock at this very beach. Becca then asked me about various types of sea life such as starfish, anemones, and crabs, and expressed amazement and delight when I told her that, yes, they were all here. But the thing that made her happiest was the sight of the zillions of little white clam shells that covered the beach. After exclaiming over their beauty, she asked if she might be able to take one home. Of course, I told her, “Take as many as you like.” Then I hurriedly turned away to hide my emotions as Becca and Jarod filled their pockets with clamshells.
In a perfect world, Becca and Jarod would have suddenly aged about ten years, would have found jobs that allowed them independence from their parents, and would have then been able to raise their own children without fears about abuse. What really happened was that they returned to Texas a few days later and left the kids with Mark and Elizabeth, to grow up surrounded by sea life. My impression was that they hadn’t wavered in their decision, which seemed clearly motivated by the desire to do the best that they could for their children. And, in this effort, Becca and Jarod appeared to feel well satisfied that they had succeeded.
III
Adoptive Parenthood and Sisterhood
15
Children Are Exactly Who They Are Meant to Be
When a wonderful baby flies over the ocean
To come like a little bird, safe to this nest,
We’ll surround her with all of our love and devotion
And give thanks for the child from the East who came West.
By Jean Moehring, on the occasion of her granddaughter’s arrival
I have a distinct memory of the moment I first wanted to be an adoptive parent. It was 1964. I was thirteen years old and on a spring-break road trip with my parents and sister. We were driving across the country, stopping at various sites of historical significance along the way, but I just wanted to stay in the car and read. At one point in the trip, I was sitting in the car reading a newspaper article about a single woman (I believe she was a reporter) who had adopted a little girl from Korea. I think what made the story newsworthy was that the woman was a little famous and had managed to adopt as a single parent at a time when that was almost unheard of. But whatever the reason, I was fascinated—and could clearly see my future, most of which was extremely murky, as the mother of a Korean daughter.
Twenty-three years later, that future was realized in the adoption of our youngest daughter, Jocelyn, who arrived from Korea at three-and-a-half months old. My husband wrote a wonderful story about our adoption experience for the Seattle Times, in which he tried to explain why we had made the decision to adopt. As he told it, when I brought the subject of adoption up to him it didn’t seem as though I wanted to start a discussion; it was more like I was announcing a pregnancy. And that’s exactly the way I felt about it.
People were curious about why we had decided to adopt. We were already the parents of two daughters who had fulfilled our expectations of parenthood
beyond our wildest dreams. The grandparents, especially, couldn’t figure out why we didn’t just have another child like the two we all adored so much. I would try to answer their questions logically, by saying things like, “Well, we just feel we’ve been so fortunate to have two healthy children and we don’t want to press our luck with a third pregnancy.” But that wasn’t true at all: we wanted to adopt because it felt fated that we do so. I had known that little girl was coming for a long, long time.