Why Adam and Steve Make The Best Parents After All
Speaking as an adoptee, it astonishes me that anyone feels like languishing in foster care is a better alternative for children than being welcomed into the homes of people who want them. Which, of course, conservatives will tell you they’re not doing; they’re simply concerned that children find appropriate homes. The assumptions underlying which statement are mind-blowing, both in their naivite and in their downright stupidity.
Please, allow me to explain.
First, I’m going to point out that this is not a political diatribe. Nor is it an LGBT rights diatribe. Politics and, of course, faithful adherence to the Constitution–a document promising equal rights to all, regardless of whether their lifestyle offends your religion–are important. But I’m not speaking in the abstract; I’m addressing this issue and you, my reading public, from the perspective of someone who’s been through the system and who knows, firsthand, what’s at stake. Because if you think this is about “traditional families,” you’re wrong. Bottom line.
Finally meeting people who love you, and who actually want you, is the best thing ever. The sad truth is that many, if not most children who end being adopted by others have no idea what that feels like. Many never have. The myth of anguished teenaged mothers and desperate couples, just waiting in the wings is just that–a myth. Sure, babies get adopted, although not as often as you’d think; particularly if they’re not white or if they have medical issues. Even curable medical issues. People want perfect babies and there’s this unspoken agreement that, to be adoptable, you have to somehow make up for the innate deficiency of not being their genetic material. A child with, say, GI tract issues would be accepted into their home if he were born into it but you, you’re auditioning.
And once you’re old enough that people can no longer pretend that you’re their baby–i.e. once you’re no longer a baby–no one wants you at all. This is, believe me, a truth that foster children learn early on. If for no other reason than that their social workers have to discuss it with them. Foster care works, to the extent that it does, by making the facts of your situation just the facts of life. Spend too much time laboring over the emotion of it all and you’ll lose your mind–you and your social worker, and whatever foster family you’re staying with, and just about everybody else involved. What can seem like cruelty from the outside, really isn’t. The fact is, you and your foster care brethren are basically the human equivalent of those puppies you see at mall pet stores; looking out at the world and hoping that maybe, just maybe, this once, someone will stop. When enough people have stopped, and moved on, because you weren’t lovable enough to join their family…someone has to address the issue with you.
Because trust me, kids notice. And if they’re like me, they came to this unlovely situation from an even worse one; where violent and dope-addled parents told them, when they noticed them at all, that they were less lovable than pond scum. Parents who pimp you out to their friends; parents who forget to feed you for days on end. I’m not the only product of the system who knows what moldy bread and toilet water taste like.
When most people think of adoption, they think of years-long waiting lists. They’re trained to feel sorry for the couples whose overseas adoptions fell through, who couldn’t take their own babies home with them. They’re not trained to think of the countless three year olds who were passed over for this honor, toddlers right here in the US of A, who weren’t even considered by those same couples because they were toddlers. I look at my own son and I don’t understand it. He is my biological child, the only member of my family who’ll ever be biologically related to me, but I can tell you perfectly honestly that it wouldn’t have mattered. And I can’t imagine looking at any child and rejecting them simply on the basis of age. To do so seems profoundly narcissistic to me; is another human being’s worth really based on what you can convince yourself of their origins?
No, a child who’s grown up in foster care, or lately arrived there from a crack den, might not have been played all the baby Mozart CD’s or given all the best, most brain-developing toys…but so what?
Nothing challenges your faith in the world, as a kid, by knowing that the very fact of your original parents not loving you has now made you unlovable to everyone else.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, Mr. PJ and I are planning on adopting a second child next year. Tiny Satan will be getting an older sister, or brother. Adopting from foster care is free, incidentally.
There are no waiting lists for toddlers, because nobody wants toddlers. And there are certainly no waiting lists for six year olds. By the time you’re six, you’ve pretty much been labeled as unadoptable–and trust me, you know this about yourself. So imagine what it’s like being ten and being told, again, that no one wants you. The good news and the bad news are the same news: if your experience was anything like mine, then the idea didn’t come as any great surprise. The idea that someone might actually want me was what came as the surprise, and to this day it isn’t an idea that I can really credit.
I have a very, very hard time believing that my family loves me or wants me, or that my husband does, or that my friends do. And yes, both therapy and time are wonderful things. Time, in all honesty, more so. As is patience–from all quarters.
But imagine, for a minute, the miracle of someone coming along and saying I DO want you. I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, and can’t imagine anything more wonderful than making you a part of my family. Trust me on this, there is no feeling that an adult experiences, even an exceptionally happy adult, that comes close to this feeling.
And now imagine being told, by people who are perfectly aware of your situation and perfectly aware of the fact that no one else wants you, that a lifetime of abandonment is better for your psyche than being raised by people who don’t fit some sort of abstract ideal. That it’s better for you to have NO family than to have a family that isn’t “perfect.” What constitutes perfect, you may wonder? My family certainly isn’t perfect, but they love me. I know what it’s like to have nobody love me, which means I know what an incredible gift from God love really is.
A particularly hateful person–who’s related to my husband, actually–told me once that “no mother” didn’t want her child, so I must have done something awful. She further opined as how she didn’t think I should be married to her precious relation. I think there’s a lot more of this anti-child type sentiment underlying the issue than we as a society are willing to admit. Too many of us–believe me, I’ve discovered the hard way–just aren’t comfortable admitting that, yes, some adults are just that fucked up. It’s more comfortable to blame the children involved than to acknowledge the fault in our most cherished fantasies. Fantasies that, for example, maternal love is just “natural” and “effortless.”
Conveniently, this same sentiment is used to justify denying gay couples the right to adopt. Two men, or so the (completely ridiculous) argument goes, just don’t have whatever innate “magic” a mother possesses. Which, to someone who still bears a variety of interesting scars (including a nice collection of cigarette burns on both forearms) from my so-called “mother,” is interesting to hear. So nobody else could ever love me that much, eh?
It’s a profoundly damaging point of view to–pardon my pun–adopt.
I didn’t end up with two gay parents, but I would’ve been perfectly happy to. I would’ve been perfectly happy to go to any home where no one was beating or raping me. Or worse. For most of my childhood, I honestly couldn’t conceive of the idea that there was something beyond that. The mere absence of fear sounded like Paradise. It was years, actual years, after I finally was safe that I began appreciating other aspects of my situation.
The people who actually want to take on kids who’ve been exposed to these kinds of situations are the real parents. The people who, I believe, God intends to be parents. Because believe me, they’ve got the unconditional love, and the patience, that His son was all about. Anyone who claims to be a Christian–and, after all, it’s some fool notion of what the Bible supposedly “intends” that keeps getting trotted out to justify prejudice–should recognize that.
I was lucky.
Knowing that other kids won’t be so lucky, because some bloviating blow hard can’t stop touching his Bible, makes me sad.
