One more cup of coffee

Nathan's adoption

Two stories:

• A couple of weeks ago, with Nathan in the cart at Home Depot, the checker asked me, “is he a different race or is he just really tan?” I suppose ‘really tan’ in mid-March in Seattle seemed improbable.
• A couple of days ago, a woman who was at our house installing baby gates asked, “do you know you son looks like you?” I assumed Meredith had mentioned at some point during the day that Nathan was adopted, but she hadn’t. I actually get that a lot.

…

People who know or find out that Nathan is adopted occasionally ask when / if we’ll tell him. We’ve always told him. He has a photo album in his room with pictures of different family members, with one of him (when he was less than a week old), his brother and sister, and birthmother. We tell him “that’s Mama D.” He takes it out and looks at the picture. I wonder what he thinks.

Nathan’s is an open adoption, meaning that we keep in contact with his birth mother. Or, rather, we try. She’s moved at least five different times in the 15 months since Nathan was born, with different phone numbers every time. When she moves, we have to wait for her to get back in touch with us.

The last time we heard from her was shortly after Nathan’s birthday. We tried to call her recently to tell her that we had moved, but at the last phone number we had, Meredith got someone who’d never heard of her. Dead end again. So, in the meantime, I’m keeping my cell phone number the same until she calls so we can give her the new phone number.

Not knowing where she is is hard. I hope she’s doing OK. I hope that when Nathan starts asking questions about her, that he can talk to her.

…

In the last few months, I’ve read a number of blogs about adoption. There are a growing number of birthmother blogs. They’re all interesting to read, but some of them are really hard to read. Some of those women feel very used by the adoption process. One birthmother, whose blog completely disappeared recently, wrote of the adoptive mother taking out a restraining order to prevent contact after promising an open adoption. While the restraining order part is slightly atypical, the forced end of contact, sadly, is much less so.

There’s a lot that should change with adoption. There is a ton of money involved in domestic infant adoption – so much so that it’s easy to wonder just how ethical the whole thing can be with so much money involved. There are adoption facilitators, lawyers, social workers & state agencies, and they all get their piece. One adoption agency asked on the form "How much money have you budgeted to spend on your adoption?", which seems not unlike the used car salesman who asks “how much do you have to spend on this car?”

In our first match, the young couple, feeling the stress of dealing with a pregnancy and possible adoption, asked to see a counselor. We agreed to pay for it, and they went to a counselor recommended by the adoption facilitator we were using. Soon after, the facilitator mailed us a copy of the notes from the counseling session that the therapist had sent to her. We were appalled, and told the couple what had happened. They didn’t go back, and we spent the next few months watching the stress continue to mount and eat at them.

It’s hard to know how to fix it. Some have suggested that the fix is to simply end all adoption, which is obviously hard for me to imagine. But something should change.

Posted by Mike at April 5, 2006 10:50 PM