Chapter 2 Excerpt - What I Want My Adopted Child to Know

[SalBac]

My book What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective is due out in a few weeks. Here's an excerpt from chapter 2.

We Are Your Real Parents

Some mothers know, with the first subtle sign, that they carry life within them. They realize something profound has begun, and they can recall the exact moment when they knew they had become part of an organically perfect union. These mothers witness every change their body makes to accommodate the precious new life. They lovingly pat and stroke and whisper love songs to their unborn child. They offer their bodies and minds to sustain the life within, and the great pain they bear is all but forgotten when they first hold their child in their arms and fall in love forever.

Others of us have to trust, often in the absence of any sign whatsoever, that another mother is carrying our child's life within her. We trust that without our knowledge, something profound has begun, and that at the exact right moment, we will become part of a perfectly destined union. We arrange our homes in anticipation of a precious new life, and we lovingly daydream and pray and whisper names for our unborn child. Having offered our bodies to a capricious science, we offer our hearts and hands to the women who carry our children, and the great pain we bear is all but forgotten when we first hold our child in our arms and fall in love forever. All mothers love their children, no matter how they are joined or when they separate.

I know now that parenting has nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with everything else. I know now that parenting is not whose egg let in whose sperm. I know now that parenting is the art of loving someone when they are most unlovable and actually loving them more for trusting you with their worst self. Parenting means leading even when you don't know the way and speaking with authority when you're filled with doubt. It means standing strong when your knees are weak and refusing to compromise what you know is right. It's being ignored in public and adored in private and being OK with both. It's being the first to apologize and the last to eat. It's being so tired you fall asleep standing in the closet. Parenting is beginning each day with the feeling that you're the luckiest person in the world and ending each day with the hope you've made your kids feel the same way.

[onethentwins]

Nov. 11, 2009 at 7:41 PM

Adoption 101 - never use the "R" word when it comes to parenting. It goes hand in hand with never telling an adoptee that their mother gave them up "because she love them."

Adoptees, by definition, have two families. Their birth family that they were born into, and the adoptive family that they are raised in. Both families are very real. When you say "We are Your Real Parents", what follows, and what the adoptee hears is that your birth parents are not.

You are telling them that their siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, ancestors, in their birth family are not really their family. You deny their heritage. Of course, the opposite is true, if the birth family is called the "Real Family", that denies the bond of the adoptive family and the motherhood and fatherhood, and siblinghood of the adoptive family. In both cases it's extreamly disrepectful and hurtful to the adoptee.

I respectfully implore you to change the description from "We are Your Real Parents" to "We Really Are Your Parents" and drop the "I  know now that parenting has nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with everything else." because the DNA link between the adoptee and his birth family is not nothing, it is cellular and spritual, and this comment denies the loss that the adoptee experienced when he lost his original mother.

[onethentwins]

Nov. 11, 2009 at 7:46 PM

I meant to mention that I see what you are trying to say, that you are trying to impart to your children that they are a part of your family and that you are their parents, and that's a good thing. But, it doesn't necessitate diminishingthe importance of the birth family and the adoptees' DNA, whether deliberate or not,  in order to achieve that.

[SalBac]

Nov. 13, 2009 at 6:44 AM

I sincerely appreciate your comments. I agree with you, and I wonder if I should have chosen a different excerpt. There is sarcasm in the chapter title that isn't apparent until further into the chapter, where I say "You don't have 'real' parents and 'unreal' parents." I speak to the importance of birth parents throughout a child/adult's life, that BPs will always be a vital part of who you are, etc. in more depth. 

We never use the term "real parents" in our family, and it seems too often that we have occasion to correct and educate someone else who does think of us that way.

I like your suggestion of "We Really Are Your Parents"... I like that a lot. I never thought of using that for the chapter title. Perhaps it takes a village to write a book  :)

(Original Poster)

[onethentwins]

Nov. 13, 2009 at 11:00 AM

i"m so glad you took my comments in the spirit they were intended. My only goal is to help the adoptees in our world :)