I wish I wasn't such a on and off poster here; I completely missed this thread. First off, Sophia is beautiful and I congratulate you Grant!
I am working on a book on the history of adoption and foster care in the United States, so will you forgive me if I go back to the original question, now, although you've had the lovely babe-in-arms for less than a month and deserve a honeymoon? Maybe read this when you're ready to come back to ground after a serious loop-de-loop of post-natal giddiness.
Well, here goes: The most serious critique I've yet read of international adoption is that, like most Western consumer goods, it comes at the expense of third world women. I want that fact to haunt us, somehow, and I say that as an adoptive parent myself. I adopted my nieces in what happened to be an international adoption; their parents are very "real" to me, since one of them is my sister. I get very frustrated with them, i.e., the girls' parents, at times, with their "hereness", their "not going away"ness, but at some level I think it's right that I have to continue to deal with them, to acknowledge their reality. These children were not "blank slates"--no child is.
I am haunted by the fact that my children's parents and I have very different access to wealth; we're marked differently by social class. I, too, am a "(not all that) rich" American, but, still and all, I have had access to education and good jobs and attracted a partner wealthier than myself. And I of course cannot claim that his financial security was invisible to me; that he was just some frog I kissed who turned into some financially stable prince.... so.
Adoption would be more rare if the access to wealth were more equitable in this world.
If we were really generous, selfless, we'd pay for a child to be raised by others.
But most of us, me included, are not so generous.
In America we pretty much refuse to acknowledge any real connection to the poor. There's a history in this country of believing that poor children should be taken away from poor parents who will inevitably corrupt them and placed with us good, solid, middle class folks.
But I stumble along. For me, I just knew something had to be done; it was a crisis, and at some level I must admit to myself that childrearing is as much about my own desire to raise a child, for that personal fulfillment, as it is altruism.
And I must, I think we MUST, somehow have something like awe, something like shame, something like humility, something like the opposite of self-satisfaction or smugness in the face of it all. And let me HASTEN to add that I'm not saying that those self-centered labels apply to you Grant; from anything I've read you're a smart, wonderful, caring, thoughtful human. But I feel those emotions as a kind of personal temptation, myself; or I feel them in the form of a strange discomfort when people say to me (as they have), "What you've done is just so wonderful for those poor girls! They are so lucky to have had you take them in!"
"Wait!" I want to say, "Wait! They've done so much for me. And much as their parents sometimes drive me berzerk, in the cosmic scheme of things, I owe them, too . . . And what am I doing being so lucky in this world? And if I were truly so selfless, well, I'd have likely been disallowed to take them in; and the system has provided lots of invisible help to me . . ." And when I hear those thoughts they sound so falsely modest to me, like something out of a Monty Python version of religion, "Forgive me this forgive me that and I'm not worthy...." So I usually say nothing.
So as long as you remain just a little haunted, Grant, by the inequities of the world, then my Puritanism (or whatever it is) will be satisfied...
Actually of course I wish you the best. I wish you and Sophia deep joy. I am daily joyful for my girls, and mostly all the more in awe of the fact that every adoption, like mine, begins in crisis, pain and sorrow, at some level. What can we do to make that pain and sorrow less likely, when there's something of a market interest in keeping it that way? That's the question that haunts me. |
