Mainspring acknowledges National Adoption Month
We asked some of the parents who have adopted to take a moment to help Mainspring acknowledge National Adoption Month, recognize the complexities of adoption dynamics, and celebrate the varied family structures that make up our community.
We asked our families the following questions:
Your name and your relationship to Mainspring, and your connection to adoption.
How do you celebrate or acknowledge adoption with your family?
What is one thing you struggle with the most about adoption?
What is one thing you think is important to share with others about adoption?
Family 1
Your name and your relationship to Mainspring, and connection to adoption.
Katie and Greg. Our daughter attends Mainspring! Both Greg and I were adopted, in addition to our daughter being adopted. Two of us are from closed adoptions, and one of us was adopted by our grandparents, so we are all very familiar with adoption and all of the feelings that come along with it. We specifically sought out Mainspring even before our daughter was born because we wanted a school that was rooted in having a diverse and trauma-informed staff.
How do you celebrate or acknowledge adoption with your family?
In our family, our daughter is still young, so we mostly talk about our own family. We have started approaching the adoption topic with her by reading children's books and talking about what we see and how families are all different. For us (her parents), our own families learned a lot by us relating our own experiences when we were older about talking about adoption. Looking back, we wish they knew more when we were little. There are so many more resources available now. One thing we don't do is celebrate "Gotcha Days", and we (as adults) always gently approach Birthdays as those bring up lots of feelings and thoughts about and around being adopted. By all means, please do celebrate birthdays! As adoptees start to develop critical thinking skills, birthdays can bring up questions about where they are from and what circumstances created the world that they live in. When our daughter is older, we look forward to being able to discuss our own adoptions with her and fielding those questions as they come up. One thing that we were raised with, and she is being raised with, is that we always knew we were adopted right from the start. This is really important for adoptees.
What is one thing you struggle with the most about adoption?
As adoptees ourselves, we are not necessarily pro-adoption, which comes as a surprise to many people we've talked to. Mostly because it's often seen as a simple solution, and "everyone wins in the end" with a happy, bright bow all wrapped up. What really happens is a complicated and somewhat unregulated system that doesn't always take care of birth mothers, especially after giving birth, and there's just so much misinformation out there about adoption. The lifelong journey every adoptee goes on can be very complicated and ebbs and flows as they get older. We chose to adopt because we both are adoptees, and we felt we could be a solid support system for an adopted child because of it. Greg was able to have a relationship with his birth mother and has had many conversations with her about her own emotions of placing a child for adoption. It was really eye-opening to hear her perspective about how birth mothers can be trying to do what they think is best in a complicated situation but still live with regret for many years, if not forever. Greg and I share the perspective that ideally, mothers who want to keep their child, should be able to keep their families together. However, we understand we live in a complicated world, which is not an option for everyone. Also, our goal is that our daughter will be able to have a relationship with her birth family if she wants to and be there to support her through her journey. We also hope to create a safe space for her birth mother to feel comfortable with having a relationship with our daughter.
What is one thing you think is important to share with others about adoption?
It's a fine line between wishing there was more awareness but also not wanting to be the ones to bring awareness about it. Adoption is not a cure for infertility, and it's not meant to heal the adoptive parents' hearts. It's a lot of loss and trauma for birth families as well as adoptees. Even thinking about seemingly innocent "family tree" activities in school. What might seem like a fun thing to do can be very challenging and isolating to adoptees, especially those of us with closed adoptions. As with a lot of sensitive topics, movies, social media, and the news tend to paint the process of finding your birth family with lots of happy endings for all involved. This is not really a reality for many adoptees (and it wasn't for me, Katie). We sometimes get pushback about how we (as parents) would feel and why we would want that for our daughter, and the truth is how we feel is not important. It's about our daughter, her life, and her roots that will always take priority. I think it's also important for other parents to teach their kids about adoption. Families can look different, and that's totally normal and okay! We (as parents) are always willing to field questions about adoption, the process, the industry, and our experiences - we hope that educating others makes it a bit easier for the next generation of adoptees.
Family 2
The year I turned 40, I found myself single, alone, watching the Emma Thompson/Hugh Grant movie Sense & Sensibility, at midnight, with my cats. Again. In fact, I found myself doing that all the time.
My friend Daniel noted my pull toward feline-focused isolation. He warned me that I was “one yarn blog away from having a serious problem.” The problem was that it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. Moreover, the future – more cat hair, more Jane Austen movies, more midnights all alone, at 45, 50, 55 – wasn’t what I wanted to look forward to.
What I really wanted was to be a parent. But that hadn’t happened.
One of my aunts adopted her daughter through the foster system when I was in high school. Then a friend here in Austin began her journey as a foster mom. So I trundled off to an informational session held by Child Protective Services. I signed up for the three-month training. I became licensed as a foster parent through CPS. Within 24 hours, and with less than 60 minutes notice, I had my first placement. The case worker left me with a deeply traumatized two-year-old who didn’t eat, sleep, or talk, and I was suddenly this insta-mom with a front-row seat to intense attachment disorder, I thought – you know, this might have been a terrible idea.
It was and it wasn’t.
I fostered four children over five years. Three of them returned to bio-family or were adopted within the bio-family. One child stayed and we became a family together. I am forever grateful – and forever aware that someone had to choose to give up parenthood so that I could be a mom.
I think about my son’s birth mother every day. I think about when she had to hand him over to a case worker. I think about her frequently not showing up for court-ordered weekly visits, which were supposed to be proof that she could responsibly parent. I think about when she did attend court to passionately argue for another chance. I was there, which she didn’t know. This was a disparity in power that, honestly, I did not want to interrupt.
The vast majority of aspiring foster parents in my licensing class were White, like I am. A few parents were Latinx. One Black couple returned to re-license after fostering, adopting, and setting their children off to university. They were only looking for Black teenagers, who faced steep odds in finding permanency.
My children were White, Latinx, and multi-racial. The child who became my son is White. We pass without question in the birth-family-centric world. There is a significant privilege in not being questioned about whether we belong together. Ten years ago, when I was younger and thinner, my son’s birth mom and I did have the same cheekbones. There are still days when complete strangers stop me and remark that my son has my smile. “Man, you just cloned yourself, didn’t you!” No, I want to say. No.
And yes? In that he has never known a parent other than me, or a family other than mine. He has many of my mannerisms. He loves to read. He and my father talk about math and motorcycles as if they were subjects passed down genetically. He and my mother love horses and the landscape of remote West Texas.
I’ve made a point of raising this boy, my son, with full disclosure, in an age-appropriate and progressive way, of how he was born, and to whom, and the challenges she faced, and the extraordinary and wrenching choice she made. “Everybody’s goal is for you to be safe,” I tell him. “I’m very lucky that she thought you would be safe with me.”
