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Dec 4, 2008 
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Haggis gets The Question from her Bambina, and handles it (as I would have anticipated) with grace.
And then it happened. The question I've been dreading, preparing for, anticipating since 2005:
"Mama, why did my Chinese mother not stay with me forever? Did she want to stay with me forever?"
I haven't gotten this precise question, though I've gotten ones uncomfortably close to it. (I would almost rather field explaining Proposition 8 to a 7-year-old, which Katrina had to do last week). There are no easy or genuinely soothing answers, nothing to ward off the sense of hurt and loss that children of adoption feel. We are not magically endowed, as parents or people who have gone through the adoption process, with the ability to answer such questions wisely. All we can offer is honesty, compassion both to the child and her birth parents, and a sense that such questions are not off limits. We can also assure our children — falsely — that their inquiries do not wound us.
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Adoption
I'll be the first to admit — I was wrong. Until very recently, I thought it was highly unlikely that the United States would elect a black person as president in my lifetime. I'm pleased that I was so wrong. I'm particularly pleased because of them:
Mike Seate has strong feelings about the proper racial makeup of your family.
That's hardly surprising in and of itself. There are plenty of people who have strong feelings about what some folks still call "race-mixing." Their views have fallen out of fashion, so they're mostly confined to writing poorly spelled screeds on web sites and marching in the occasional white-sheeted parade.
What makes Mike's views notable is that he's a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and it publishes his tripe.
See, Mike has concluded that international adoption is just about making a fashion statement, and that there is no reason to adopt some Asian kid. Mike has concluded that knows everything there is to know about adoption from watching a couple of movies.
As you may have realized by this point, Mike is a willfully ignorant ass.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband and I have two daughters, ages 3 and 6, that we adopted from China when they were babies. Many times when we are in public, absolute strangers will come up to our family and ask within our children's hearing if they are "real" sisters.
If I say, "yes," they continue to press me about if they are biologically related. As far as we know, our daughters are not biologically related. However, we don't feel that we owe strangers explanations about our personal family business.
Could you please offer some suggestions on how to answer this "invasive" question? We want to set a good example for our children, and we don't want to be rude, but it is getting tiresome.
GENTLE READER: Since you know from the wording of the first question that the second one is coming, Miss Manners advises nipping this conversation early. She suggests saying gently, "Yes, they are sisters, and I am their mother. But I have been teaching them not to talk to strangers, so I'm afraid that you will have to excuse me, please."
On some level this warms my heart, because Miss Manners is advocating something that sounds very much like the cut direct, which is precisely what such insufferable inquisitiveness merits. I would have expected her to advocate something far more genteel. Perhaps she knows that such people are very rarely deterred from their nosiness by a polite deflection; they persist in saying things like "no, I mean are they really sisters," or "you, YOU KNOW what I mean" as if they are entitled to know. The response "oi, fuckstain, what's it to you" is effective and adequate to the occasion when the children are not within earshot or able to comprehend. But Miss Manners, I believe, does not advocate use of the term "fuckstain," with the possible exception of improper salad fork placement.
Like any other group of people, prospective adoptive parents can be jackasses. Take this couple, who saw that their waitress was pregnant and left, with their tip, an unsolicited request to adopt her unborn child:
After they left, she opened the bill holder to get the tip and also found a card inside that read:
We wish to adopt a baby. We are a caring, happily married, financially secure and loving couple. We want to share our joy and love with a child.
The card included the names of the couple and phone numbers.
The waitress, not surprisingly, was creeped out and offended.
Who is behind this? Wow, what a shock — an adoption attorney.
As far as the card is concerned, he said, "We haven't had any negative response to this method."
Kevin Minh Allen of misplaced baggage is angry about a series of articles about adoption from Vietnam. He has two basic reasons: the exclusion of adult adoptee or birth parent dissent from the discussion and the promotion of adoptees-owe-us-gratitude thinking:
These quotes represent a major hurdle in facilitating the equitable distribution of voices that should add color to the bigger adoption picture. As I see it, too much deference is shown to adoptive parents, including their interests, their needs and their troubles. As long as the media only focus on one group within the adoption community, the public will remain unaware of the myriad stories out there and start believing that only certain people have anything to say about adoption.
Then there's this regrettable quote he spots from an adoptive parent:
The difference in lifestyle and opportunity was evident by comparing Emily to her twin sister who resided with her birth family. Emily enjoys hearty meals, a generously-sized wardrobe, a good education and the chance to join in extracurricular activities such as dance, choir and sports. In contrast, her sibling lived with parents toiling to buy enough clothes for everyone in the family and put food on the table.
He contacted the reporter to arrange to offer a different view — which apparently ended badly, in a manner he'll hopefully describe soon. Read the whole thing. It's angry. But as I've said before, adoptees have no obligation to make adoptive parents feel good about adoption.
Last week the Archives on Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine published a new study on the comparative mental health of adoptees. The findings are of concern to everyone involved in the adoption process.
NBC has an upcoming program called "America's Favorite Mom":
Teleflora presents America's Favorite Mom," an NBC prime-time television event hosted by Donny and Marie Osmond. In addition, there will be special cameo appearances by Christina Aguilera, Tony Hawk, Alicia Keys, Hulk Hogan, Naomi Judd, Amy Poehler, music by the Dey (www.thedey.com) and more throughout the broadcast. At the end of the special, the Osmonds will crown one lucky winner, "America's Favorite Mom."
I'd rather de-grout a prison camp shower stall with my tongue than watch that. But in addition to being an aesthetic abomination akin to Hallmark throwing up on a collection of Hummel figurines, its producers are also assholes about adoption.
I've added an adoption forum to our forums. For now, it's private and can only be seen by people added to the adoption group — send me a PM on the forum or email me at ken at popehat dot com to be added to it. The focus will be international adoption and related issues, but all people sincerely interested in adoption discussions are welcome.
I've spent quite a bit of time at another forum related to the well-known adoption agency my family used. Why start a new forum? I have a few reasons:
Ansley over at Noble Seoul has a characteristically thoughtful post about attachment issues with adopted kids.
We've certainly seen dramatic differences in stranger anxiety and abandonment issues between our first two kids (who were adopted at 4.5 months and 5.5 months, respectively) and our third (who was adopted at 10 months.) Elaina is much less happy about being out of our sight, and church has been a problem — she doesn't want to stay in the child care. So, as Ansley suggests, we're taking it slow.
Scenes from a beach:
Evan is frolicking in the ludicrously cold surf, Abby is assembling a vast shell collection, I am sitting in a beach chair a dozen yards from the surf line, just at the edge of the wet sand, and zoning out in the sun. It's Monday morning and the beach is sparsely populated with a handful of families and grim-faced joggers.
Enter Talkative Man and his family.
So I stopped procrastinating and added a bunch of links to the adoption section of our blogroll to your left. Click away. Especially if you are an adoptive parent, you may well have your views of adoption (and especially international and transracial adoption) challenged, possibly in a hurtful way. Sorry! (Well, kind of.)
Discussion of adoption on the internet is balkanized.
Alternative title: "Seven Habits of Very Annoying People," all of which involve abject failure of the brain's "should I say this, or would it make me sound like an utter dipshit?" function.
I've blogged before about the answers I fantasize about giving to the supremely obnoxious adoption and child-related questions that walking, unthinking mouths tend to ask parents.
Lest you think this is just a problem that I face — possibly due to some patent defect of character or appearance — consider this adoptive mother's top ten list of annoying questions and comments she gets while both visibly pregnant and accompanied by her two children born in Haiti.
The fact that she can articulate that list without going into a rant makes her a much better person than I. It makes me stabby.
Via Multiracial Sky.
Last week Steven Sueppel, a bank executive facing federal embezzlement charges, bludgeoned his wife and four children to death and managed to kill himself after several abortive attempts by crashing his van. He and his wife had adopted all four children from South Korea.
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