I’m trying to kinda group things together.
From Andy, “How did you guys decide how often to meet and when in the begining? Before you developed a natural relationship of your own?”
We didn’t, which worked for us. When we left the hospital with Madison, our only thing is that we would see Pennie in about a month. She had a concert (natch!) to go to and she planned on coming over before hand. That established a rhythm that’s ended up being about a visit a month, sometimes more and rarely less. And note — in that picture? Insane Clown Posse t-shirt. (I don’t know if it was an ICP show or one of their off-shoot bands.) And yes, it was very hard for her to leave to go to the concert. (She brought her friends with her and at first was worried about holding Madison so her best friend picked her up and broke that first nervous barrier. We have a nice pic of that, too, and the look on Pennie’s face is pretty heartbreaking. Lots of love there and lots of sorrow.)
Pronoia asked, “What was the thing that has most surprised you in open, transracial adoptive parenting? What was the thing you were most worried about that, in retrospect, is just silly and funny?”
I was thinking on this yesterday. One of the things that surprised me in the beginning is how friendly the black men I saw around town were to me when I had Madison with me. I don’t mean they were flirting, I mean friendly like friendly. I hadn’t realized that they weren’t until I had Madison. We live in a part of town that’s racially mixed and I always thought it was a very friendly part of town. Now gentlemen have always, say, opened doors and that kind of thing but when I had Madison with me, I noticed they would catch my eye as they held the door open and smile and say hello. I think it’s because as a white woman with a brown-skinned child, I was safe to say hello to. Again, I’m not talking about flirting (who flirts with a new mom with baby spit-up on her shirt and bags under her eyes and uncombed hair???), I’m talking about common friendliness. I didn’t notice this same difference with black women towards me but certainly the black cashier is much more likely to chat with Madison than she was to chat with Noah when he was four. (Another thing? I know that white people might look at that picture there and say, “You can hardly tell she’s black!” but black people always knew she was black and very often would check out and comment on her hair, even at that wee small stage.) Other white mothers of transracially adopted biracial African American babies, has this been your experience? The friendliness and the claiming/acknowledging?
It made me realize how omnipresent the barrier is and how a reality I took for granted was actually not at all neutral. That was a huge surprise to me.
As far as what worried me, it didn’t worry me so much as I expected to be more conspicuous as a family and I don’t think we are. I haven’t had a stranger ask me in a long, long time if Madison was adopted. I think people remember us more than they did pre-Madison, like at shops and things. They remember our family a little more because we do stand out a bit. But that could also be the age range of the kids and Noah being with us when school is in session, too, as much as being a transracial family. I don’t know. There are a lot of mixed families that I see out and about and there’s no shortage of white moms with brown kids at our grocery or the thrift store or at the parks.
Finally Brandi asked, “All adoption related web communities, on the other hand, seem to be dominated by women. First moms, adoptive moms, and female adoptees outnumber first dads, adoptive dads, and male adoptees by a pretty large percentage in my observation. … to what do you attribute the disproportion?”
1. Women tend to be more interested in relationships.
2. Women tend to do more parenting.
3. In many adoptions dads (first dads) are absent because they can be or because they are deliberately excluded or because they are able to deny what happened more easily (since it didn’t happen in their bodies) or because there are fewer role models to help first dads understand how to handle/process the experience.
In pretty much all the family/parenting forums, women show up in greater number then men. It’s the nature of the beast. Anyway, that’s my take on it.
(I was up so late last night working on a client site that I’m ready to drop and may not be stringing words together in a comprehensible, typo-free way. I’m just counting the hours until I can go back to bed so apologies if I’m a twit today.)
The pics are: Pennie’s first visit, me so tired I can’t see straight with Maddie in the sling, Madison’s 8 week old toes.
Related posts:
I’m intrigued by your observations about black men– my girls never looked African-American, but as a white mother of brown-skinned babies, I was surprised at how many times people assumed my kids were adopted, and tried to strike up conversations about adoption with me (or they assumed I was the babysitter, partially because I was young and young-looking, and because we live in a college-heavy area).
[...] I got all the way upstairs and wanted to add one thing to the post below so had to come back [...]
Like I said, there are lots of mixed families in the area where we live and few (visible) caregivers/nannies so it makes sense people would see a mid-30s white woman with a brown baby around here and assume she was a mom but if I were younger and if I lived in a different area — like Upper Arlington where Brett grew up — people probably wouldn’t make that assumption at all. In fact, when I took my kids to lunch in UA when Madison was a toddler, people deliberately tried NOT to look at us. It was very obvious that they were “politely” pretending not to see us. I noticed it a whole lot because we rented in that are when Noah was small and the experience of being there with Madison was hugely different.
(sent via email and posted on blog)
Dawn ~ Our daughter is Chinese-American, but I’ve experienced this same thing (in regard to black men – and women – showing greater friendliness to me when the Tongginator is with me). We live very close to Prince George’s county, which has the largest population of middle-class African-Americans in the nation. When the Tongginator is with me, minorities (most commonly African-Americans) are so much more friendly, apt to start a conversation, smile more, etc. It’s been a wonderful experience for us.
Totally off subject, but I just wanted to comment that I had that exact same sling (same color too) with my second born and man, that was the best sling ever!!
Sarah, I posted to this very blog looking for a polarfleece pouch sling after seeing a random woman in the park wearing one because I knew I had to have one, too! I LOVED that sling (and I think Shannon/Peter’s Cross Station also loved it when I sent it on for her to use with Nat). The Kangaroo Korner sling was indeed the BEST SLING EVER!!!!
For anyone wanting THE BEST SLING EVER: http://www.kangarookorner.com/
(sent via email and posted on blog)
“Other white mothers of transracially adopted biracial African American babies, has this been your experience? The friendliness and the claiming/acknowledging?”
Oh yes. I think that I had no idea how distant we were from both strangers and fairly close friends of color until we had our baby and that protective distance was gone.
Having a mixed race baby changed how we think about everything, of course, but we particularly noticed the gap in our experiences: I was a young mom and got a lot of positive support from the AA community (roughly 40% of our small town, many people that I’d known all my life). I actually heard my high school choir teacher, a pillar of the AA church-going community, commenting to her 97 year old mother from the next aisle at Drug Mart: ‘Well, Mama, I don’t know who the daddy is either, but I always knew that girl was all right.’ Since she had always specifically disliked me, this was as close to an experiment on human subjects as I can think of. Seeing that little brown fist waving form the sling made me a new kind of person to her.
Mrs Phoenix, OTOH, who was fortyish when we had a baby, had a somewhat different experience that she described as ‘thawing’. People of all races in my historically mixed hometown warmed up to her a LOT once we had a little brown baby as her cultural passport. She is from a white/Asian part of the Northwest so being invited into the black hair salon to try product on her baby? The kind of cultural shift that she wasn’t really expecting.
Men are also better able to ignore it, because women are flushed full of hormones that bond us to our offspring. Otherwise, with babies being the demanding and often unpleasant critters they are, we’d probably eat our young instead of cooing over how cute they are.
Women get to deal with the pregnancy. They live with the baby inside of them day-in day-out for 9 months. They deal with the birth. They hear the baby cry. Their colostrum leaks. Their milk comes in, and when there is no baby to nurse, if often stays in far longer than they would have preferred.
It’s more “there” for women. Emotionally, physically, etc.
Often when people talk about adoption they talk about it as if they’re talking about the time your dog had puppies when you were 10 and it bothered you to give them away. The lack of respect toward birth moms bothers me, even though I’ve never been involved in an adoption! (Not adopted, haven’t adopted, haven’t given up for adoption, don’t know anyone adopted.)
Men are also better about bottling things up and pretending that it doesn’t matter. There are probably a lot of men out there that are hurting over their loss and that just don’t feel able to deal with it or mention it or seek out support.
In terms of gender – where do we place gay men? Some share the same keen interest in parenting – as do some straight men – as we women do.
Among adoptees, things are a bit different in terms of gender.
When you get to adult issues, the balance of primarily female involvement begins to shift and be less prominent.
However, still less men than women show an interest in “searching” and finding their roots etc. Women, generally speaking, are more able to identify with a woman dealing with a crisis pregnancy. Men deal less well with their feelings of rejection, hurt, abandonment and often feel and express it all in anger or “I don’t care” denial because of fear of being rejected once again.
Betty Jean Lifton’s books on adoptee psychology describes the fantasies of adoptees growing up not knowing. They fantasize in extremes: their mothers are either movie stars, princesses or whores. Women vacillate; men tend toward the darker fantasies.
Single mothers are often very judgmental of mothers who have lost children to adoption, claiming “I don’t know how anyone could do that!” and not being able to find the compassion or empathy to walk a mile in the shoes of someone who may not have had the options she did. I have written about other ways n which adoption pits women against women and it is quite sad,IMO. It is, sadly, very classist.
I couldn’t help noticing your comment that Pennie was apprehensive to hold Madision. Of course! One, she and Mdisonhave had a long separation and lacked th ebonding you and madison had. Even if Madison has bene in an incubator that whole month, Pennie would have seen and touched her.
On some level every mother who loses a child to adoption has to internalize that she is not fit to be a mother and that you are “better” and more deserving, etc. Now she needs to “perform” right in front of you where she is being compared to – and comparing herself – to you! I’ve been there! It’s a very unpleasant position to be in.
Finally – I have a new question for you: When you are out and about and people admire Madison. Do you offer that she is adopted or allow then to assume that she might be your by birth?
Mirah