By Jenna Hatfield
I feel hopeful the next decade will teach us all valuable lessons about support, community, adoption, love, fear, trust, and truth.
Just over two years ago, I quit adoption.
I pulled down my award-winning adoption blog. I removed myself from all online forums and listservs. I unfollowed certain adoption people on Twitter and unfriended them on Facebook, keeping only my daughter’s mother and those who held rank in other categories in my life. I even cold turkey stopped attending an in-person adoption support group, which I had been helpful in creating and sustaining.
I walked away without looking back. If we’re speaking in adopto-speak, you could say I “closed” my adoption world.
And I’m better for it.
I so badly wanted to be understood in those early days after placing my daughter. I wanted to talk to people who knew the deep hole ripped within my being. I didn’t want to explain the loss to people who had no clue; I wanted the silent understanding that comes with having been there, done that.
I turned to online groups first, my inner introvert and the area in which I live not leaving me other options. I wasn’t welcome in any support groups for birth parents as I maintained an open adoption with my daughter’s family; their losses as birth parents in closed adoptions were more real than mine. At one point, a woman took pictures of my daughter and placed anti-adoption rhetoric on them.
But those with deep hurt, caused by adoption and its years of secrecy, its problems with ethics, and life-long loss associated with relinquishment weren’t the only ones who didn’t like my presence in their online groups. Adoptive parents didn’t like the way I shared the realities of my loss; should openness heal those wounds? They called me bitter and angry when I questioned unethical laws. Instead of offering solace when I grieved the loss of my daughter in my life, they lashed out and told me to quit complaining; I chose this, after all.
We talk so much about the mommy-wars, about breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding, but no one was talking about the parent-on-parent hate so prevalent in the adoption world. No one wanted to discuss how to fix the problem as nobody wanted to own up to their own participation in the hate. I needed support to make sense of the challenges I faced in open adoption, but I couldn’t find any. I knew many parents who gave up long before I did, their adoption relationships paying the price.
I shared less and less of my adoption-related life online, instead choosing to help local women start a face-to-face support group for birth parents. My hopes of being heard and, most importantly, respected soon shattered on the floor of a coffee house basement when another mother yelled at me and stormed out for sharing my truth.
My truth isn’t always to understand, of course. Sometimes I’m thrilled when my daughter’s family includes me in her life, when she texts me to ask me a question, or when the sons I am now parenting delight over a visit. Other times I struggle with the overwhelming reality of loss, most often when my younger, parented children express their own feelings of grieving her lack of daily presence in our lives. I present an odd mixture of truth to the adoption world, one that doesn’t fit a mold.
A few months later, I quit everything.
I don’t fancy myself a quitter, but a human being can only stand so much hatred, so much blame-game, so much time in fight or flight mode. At some point, it has to be acceptable for a person to say, “This is enough.” And so I said, “This is enough.”
I turned inward, sharing and seeking comfort in only those closest to me. I turned to those trusted few each time her birthday month rolled around; I struggle the most around her birthday. I found a new therapist who also helped me understand some of the bigger picture of my adoption journey. Together we focus on what I need at any given time rather than engaging in a combative back-and-forth as to who has it worse. I’ve also learned to share more with my husband; I thought by not sharing how I felt, I protected him. Instead, I isolated both of us from bigger healing.
In the past few months, I’ve been writing about adoption again, gently sticking my toe into the water. For the most part, the tentative return feels a bit like the first ocean swim after a winter spent indoors. I’m struggling a bit, but I remember how to do this. I’ve already felt some of the hatred in anonymous comments and not-so-anonymous questioning of my exit and return. But I’ve also felt the warmth of love from friends, family, and strangers alike.
The warmth of the larger community, even beyond just those specifically touched by adoption, is what drew me in over a decade ago. People wanting to connect with people, to meet others in their space, to say, “You are not alone;” these things will always matter the most to me.
As I find my footing again in what I share online about adoption and how it touches me and affects my family, I feel grateful for the lessons I learned before, the space I gave myself, and for the open arms of the online community. I feel hopeful the next decade will teach us all valuable lessons about support, community, adoption, love, fear, trust, and truth.
For now, I’ll wade in a little deeper, but maybe only to my ankles.
Jenna Hatfield lives in Ohio with her husband, two sons, and crazy dog. A writer, editor, marathon runner, and birth mother involved in a fully open adoption, she somehow also manages to blog at http://stopdropandblog.com.
Photo by Scott Boruchov
“It’s still snowing out there,” she said.
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At six-weeks-old, JD was a strikingly attractive baby boy with long, curling eyelashes emphasizing startlingly black eyes. When the nurses woke him so that I could pick him up, he lifted his head up and peered out from under a blanket with an endearing, tear-wet face. For one precious moment, we could see the sweet, calm, charming, little baby he was on the inside.
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I wasn’t nervous because I was worried he might show up to contest the adoption proceedings. I knew he wouldn’t. He had his own thing and his own reasons and I don’t pretend to understand him or judge him. We have made peace. Nonetheless I was still nervous—for reasons that circled around identity and fate and a few other big things that matter in the grand scheme of big things that matter. This was one of those days in your life, few and far between, when who you are is about to change in every imaginable way. Sure, we change a little bit every single day as each moment chisels away at who we will become, but on this day I woke up a particular man and would go to bed a completely someone else. The bailiff, as the law requires, called his name once, and then twice, and finally—much louder—a third time. Silence. Silence. Silence. And it was done. I was a father and I had a 3-year-old son. But I didn’t feel very different. And neither did my son. He asked for some juice.
I met my first blood relative in the middle of the night. The summer heat of the Caribbean dripped down my face as all seven pounds of her came tumbling out of me, blue and wet, her eyes wide and scared. The doctor and her dad pestered her for a few cries, and then I had her in my arms. Flesh of my flesh, dark hair and dozing eyes aching to stay awake and make sense of the confusion and sounds, but at peace to nuzzle into my breast and sleep off the adventure of coming to life.
Last week, my youngest child turned one-two-three-four-five-SIX. Six. Six requires two hands, after all, as Saskia’s godfather pointed out when I emailed the photograph of her with the count displayed across her fingers.
A picture came across my Facebook feed this Thanksgiving. It’s a snapshot of my daughter’s birth mom standing with her 4-year-old son and her younger sister. The three of them are standing in the family kitchen ready to start cooking the holiday meal. My daughter’s mom is wearing her chef’s apron and she’s loaned her little sister her chef’s hat. They are beautiful and they are happy.
The photo arrived the way many photos do these days; I was tagged on Facebook in order to see it. The dress eighteen-month-old Cora wore was one my daughter, Saskia, had worn and loved and I carefully chose it for Cora, because she’s family—and because the dress had family provenance. Let me explain: Saskia’s aunt Laura made the dress. Laura is married to my husband’s brother (son from their dad’s first marriage). Cora is Saskia’s cousin, because Margery is her birth mom’s sister (from their dad’s second marriage). Following me?
This is a happy day, adoption day. Kenton is dressed in a navy blue jacket and tie. A solid, average size ten-year old boy, his light brown hair is cut short. A small cowlick forms a circle in the center of his forehead. My father, his new Pappaw, has spent the morning teaching Kenton to tie the knot in his new plaid tie. Kenton seems itchy with excitement, ready to be adopted. I hug my soon-to-be nephew and breathe him in. He smells like boy, a mixture of fresh grass and dirt, like the earth, if the earth used hair gel.
Breathless, I hurry along narrow trails between Quichua family farms, past squawking chickens and curly-tailed piglets. My destination is a shaman who lives in this village on the outskirts of Otavalo, Ecuador. I’m going as a last-ditch hope he can heal me. Back in Colorado, I tried everything—Eastern and Western medicine, herbs and tinctures, weird diets. And now I’m teetering on the edge of bitter despair.
When we adopted our daughter, Madison, six years ago, the judge was clear. Legally, adoption bound our daughter to our family as if she had been born to us. She would have the same rights as our biological son. We owed her the same level of commitment. A few weeks later, Madison’s amended birth certificate would arrive, with my name as her birth mother and my husband’s name as her birth father. All of her original birth records would be locked up, sealed away, inaccessible. At the end of the brief ceremony, the judge banged his gavel and officially pronounced us—in the language of the mainstream adoption community—”a forever family.”
There’s a twelve-year span and two more kids between our oldest child and our youngest, the original and last babies. When they are tiny, the babies, they are wonder and mystery and vexingly sleepless at times you want them to sleep. As parents, especially the first time round, you imbue so much upon these tiny creatures. Who is this? Who will this become?
Ann Mary Roberts was an uptown girl in the ’60s, a pretty, 16-year-old pianist attending an all-girls Catholic school in upstate New York. Her parents had seven children and her father had Hodgkin’s disease. They caught her sitting on a bench one day in a shaded park with the boy they had just learned got her pregnant. She was on a bus the next day, destined for her older sister’s house in Maryland, with a phony wedding ring and an alibi—”tell anyone who asks that your husband is in Vietnam.”
One of the things that Saskia’s kindergarten-first grade classroom does this year is to study families. This Family Study curriculum has me nervous.
She brings stuff up at bedtime. Most five year-olds do; they don’t want to be left alone to sleep. She likes when I tell her stories in the dark. I rub her back. Who wouldn’t like all that?
I have heard it called liquid gold. I would call it liquid love. Or perhaps liquid life. Life juice, maybe. Holy juice? Juice of the Divine? Certainly the small yellow swirl tipping out of the bottle was worth more to me than a rare metal. That liquid, now flowing in a water treatment plant somewhere in the middle of Iowa, was my first expressed breast milk.
There are all kinds of stereotypes about women who opt for adoption. The main two are likely that they’re very young and that they’re poor. There are similarly stereotypes about adoptive parents (read, mothers) like they’ve grappled with infertility and they are rich. Of course, none of these things are across the board true. Amongst the random things I learned about first or birth mothers is that the “average” age is twenties, not teens.
When my daughter Zella was two, she stuck a small American flag with a shiny gold point up through the palate of her mouth and into her nose.
This week we marked a big first—the first day of kindergarten for the small gal. She set off ready, with her brand-new lunchbox—just like two of her preschool pals had—and her ladybug backpack and her pigtails. I said no to flip-flops; she insisted upon wearing them. Like the seasoned parent I am, I consented, because I knew the teachers would let her know the rules—no flip-flops—and then we’d return to the sensible summery appropriate-for-school footwear. She wore a headband and her hair was sprayed with the rosemary lice repellent.
Mother places child for adoption. Parents try to adopt child. But where’s the father?
Most well meaning lines that don’t come across the way people wish they would, have to do with an innate misunderstanding of what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes. So many times, we want to help or mean to flatter, but our attempts are clunky or just wrong or only partially on the mark. Note: I believe the attempt counts.
Our family endures a weird celebrity. It doesn’t come from being unusually good-looking or accomplished, but just from being odd to look at. My wife, Shasta, has eyes the color of faded denim. She’s four foot ten and only weighs about a hundred pounds. Her tiny hands are pale as eggshells; sunlight is something she likes to read about. On the other hand, because my maternal grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou and my paternal grandparents were Hoosiers, I have a thin, vaguely mongrel appearance one might associate with the Tajik people or the Uzbeks. Shasta’s grandmother, a true New Englander, once asked her why I was so swarthy. Our son, on the other hand, is the color of milk chocolate. He was born outside Addis Ababa and is one member of a new generation of Ethiopians raised abroad. Together, we are an odd trio.
Three months after our third and final in vitro fertilization cycle had failed, Dan and I had returned to the fertility clinic, its Seattle Zen decor designed to pacify our sorrows and forget the fortune we had spent trying to quench our baby lust. A medical assistant with a sweet smile ushered us into a consultation room with faux shoji doors that whooshed with relief as we were closed in. Dan looked as if he might bolt if the doors weren’t closed.
A few days ago, I stood outside a friend’s house, hand-me-down leotards from the friend in hand. My friend’s daughter is a couple of years older than mine. Her girl is wiry, fierce, rarely tuckered out without a great deal of physical activity—and into gymnastics. Her girl, when frustrated, sometimes growls. Mine is the same. Both moms imagine the discipline and physicality of gymnastics to be, for these particular girls, a very good, possibly necessary thing.
No one tells you that you might have to say no. No one says a word. Looking back, I don’t remember even entertaining the notion. The matching seemed like the easiest part of the whole adoption process. Easier than the rounds of paperwork, the notary seals, and the authentications required by the Haitian consulate and the state of Illinois. Easier than police clearances and letters of recommenda- tion and financial disclosures. I always figured the moment I saw the picture would be magical.
It had been a very uncomfortable two weeks.
My five-year-old-daughter has a bottle of milk every night. Should I say my five-year-old-daughter still has a bottle of milk every night? Many people would add the modifier—and I can’t fault them for this. I haven’t made even one attempt to wean her from that ritual. No surprise, our shared attachment to her bottle stems back to her babyhood.
By the time our daughter was ready for preschool (well, the toddler room), I’d had three kids in school for a good long time. So, all those applications and the thick ream of required school forms were nothing new. Checking the box that delineates our daughter as “Biracial” rather than the “Caucasian” box I’m accustomed to marking with my pen—that was strange.
When you adopt a baby, do you take on responsibility for fostering the child’s connection to the culture or cultures of origin your baby leaves behind to join your family? That’s often an issue upon which people take an emphatic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ stance. On the ‘yes’ side you may see white parents at Saturday Chinese schools (or in our case, the local public charter Chinese immersion school). On the ‘no’ side you have parents who plead colorblindness in their households.
In the ten years between my wedding day and the day I met my children, I spent a lot of time fantasizing about the traditions we would celebrate once I finally became a mother. The celebrations I imagined looked a lot like those from my own childhood. There would be Christmas stockings stuffed full of Clementine oranges, chocolate coins, and Bonnie Bell lip smackers; dyed Easter eggs hidden in an obvious way around the living room; piñatas and paper donkey tails poised in the backyard for a birthday party. I pictured my Jewish husband showing the children how to light the menorah. I saw cookie baking and hot cider drinking, Halloween costumes, and fireworks on the Fourth of July. They were all joyful celebrations—I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the rituals and expressions that come along with loss and grief.
I’m headed out I-30 into the nothingness that is East Texas. Antique malls, hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants, truck stops. Several hawks circle overhead, taking their time to survey what’s beneath. I take note of them, never having seen this many hawks on one stretch of road before. They are glorious with their wingspans silhouetted against the sky, but they do nothing to abate my sadness. It’s late January 2012, and a weak sun shines upon my journey. In the car with me is Sugar Biscuit. He’s my foster son, and he’s been with our family since we brought him home from the NICU almost a year ago. He is a fat cherub of a baby with an angelic demeanor and a quick temper. The type of baby that everyone takes notice of when we are out in public. He’s all blue eyes, blond curls, and dimples, with a gap between his front teeth. I nicknamed him Sugar Biscuit when I’d had him about two days. In those first few weeks Sugar Biscuit lived with us, I had no idea of the mountainous journey of faith, miracles, and sorrow upon which I was about to embark. Today, I’m traveling though one of the dark valleys on this path. In the wake of legal motions that will likely terminate the parental rights of the woman who gave birth to the boy that I’ve come to see as my own, I’ve been instructed yet again to deliver him to his maternal aunt. So, with hawks circling above me, I drive and tamp down the grief that weighs so heavily upon me that it becomes its own entity, making it impossible to get air deep into my lungs.
The wedding was about to begin. My not-quite-two-year-old daughter, Saskia, wriggled on my lap and I glanced again toward the doorway in the back of the room.
It’s a Tuesday, and I’m driving past the Child Protective Services (CPS) office a few towns over. Getting close to this place always makes my heart beat a little faster, and I will myself to feel calm. Today, I am not stopping. I am not dropping the child in my backseat with a person wearing a badge, trying not to cling to him as he holds fast to me when taken from my arms.
Every morning I turn on Max & Ruby and sit down in the blue chair with the red cushion. My three-year old daughter grabs a little chair for herself and places it between my feet. I have a wide-toothed comb, a rat-tail comb, and spray-on conditioner. I also have a box of barrettes, cloth-covered rubber bands and little plastic snaps.
I wrested the Cabbage Patch doll from the insistent packaging before the pizza came. Saskia’s birth mother—grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins—sat around the table. We see each other a few times a year. It was just after Christmas and we met at a restaurant midway between her birth mother’s house and ours.