My last blog was a review of Jana Wolff’s memoir Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother. It led me to reflect: did I relate to her thoughts as she went through the adoption process? Did I have other secret thoughts?
I do sometimes wonder how Wolff’s now-teenage son feels about this book. I think that, although Wolff shares her conflicting, not-so-socially-correct thoughts like we all have from time to time, her love of her son and her appreciation for his birthmother come through. Her son may well value this record of his mother’s experience.
Still, adoptive parents now are advised that their children’s stories belong to their children. I have to remember to tell my story, not too much of theirs.
It should be noted that I have adopted internationally, while Wolff’s experience is of an open domestic infant adoption.
The very first page of Wolff’s story reveals a major difference in the way we approached adoption. Wolff tells of playing, as a child, with “birthing” a doll from under her T-shirt. I imagine I did the same. However Wolff goes on to say, “None of us dreams of becoming an adoptive mother. Adoption is not in the repertoire of child’s play.”
I actually did play-act being the mother of a large family of both biological and adopted children. It was the mainstay of my imaginative play from kindergarten up. (I tell about this in my blog, Somebody Meant This to Be.)
I did relate to Wolff’s recounting of the myriad of decisions and hypothetical situations the adopting parents must deal with in the beginning of the process. She writes of having to decide whether she and her husband would accept twins, babies of different races, older children, and specifically what special needs they could deal with.
I remember those forms. They were single-spaced, double-sided. Could we accept a child conceived from rape? From incest? With an unknown birthfather? With a history of mental illness in a birthparent? In other birth relatives? How were we to assess special needs, some of which we had never heard of? The forms were very specific. What’s the difference between mild kidney problems and moderate kidney problems? Should we check “yes” to missing fingers and “no” or “maybe” to missing arms? Could we afford both adoption and remodeling a house to be wheelchair-accessible? We were asked not only about birthmarks, but about how much of the face and body we could accept the birthmark covering.My husband and I sat and debated these over a couple of very long nights. He later referred to this part of the process as one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
I love Wolff’s chapter title “Expecting Without Pregnancy”. My body reacted to my son’s presence in my womb by becoming violently ill. I had to fill out forms—not entirely unlike the adoption ones referred to above—and make decisions not only balancing the negative effects of medications with the negative effects of not taking medications, but also about my beliefs about infant baptism and organ donation. Still, as another mother said, I’m glad to have had the experience—once.
Therefore, I don’t feel I missed something when I was getting ready for the girls’ arrivals, enjoying a baby shower the neighbors planned, preparing a room. In fact, I felt that this was the only time I was truly “expecting” a baby. For eight-plus months before I saw my son, I never doubted that he was very much here!
Perhaps it was also easier since I was expecting a specific child already born. I had a picture to look at, although the pictures seemed to be always sent about three months after they were taken.
In my next blog I’ll continue my reflections, comparing and contrasting my experience with Wolff’s. In the meantime, you can read my review of Chicken Soup for the Adopted Soul, which contains writers from diverse experiences writing about their adoption-related experiences.