thank you

i just wanted to take a minute to say thank you to all of our friends and family who, when first hearing about our plans to adopt responded with  “congratulations!” or “how exciting!” (some of you were even more excited than I was allowing myself to be!)  I’ve also gotten some pretty lukewarm responses from people–some just feel awkwardish and say, “oh!”  and I UNDERSTAND these responses–I may have given them myself at some point in the past–but I wish there was some way to communicate with society at large that this announcement is SORT OF like announcing that you’re pregnant.  You’re having a baby.  And it’s appropriate to at least say, “congratulations!” or “how exciting!” or even just “wow!”  I’ve mentioned our plans to a few of my high school friends over Facebook and (except for my best friend) none of them have actually replied at all.  It might just be coincidence, but… it feels a little … awkward.  Maybe it’s society’s way of (unconsciously) acknowledging the inherent grief involved in adoption.  Or maybe it’s just ancient history hanging on.

Today, in one of the books I was reading, the introduction to the book gave a very brief history of adoption and explained the background of why some of the cultural/racial differences exist.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Between 1945 and 1965 most of the country’s “waiting children” [children “waiting” to be adopted] came from middle- and upper-class white families.  Tens of thousands of white women found themselves forced to spend a period of time in maternity homes or were sent to another family’s home because they were bearing a child “out of wedlock” or a child not fathered by their husband.  Once they delivered, the girls or women were usually coerced into giving their infants to an agency or physician who would in turn offer the child to white adoptive parents…..

African American unwed mothers during this same twenty-year period…. were excluded from white-only maternity homes.  Black unmarried women or girls sometimes put their children up for adoption, but more often kept the babies, or, the babies were informally adopted by “other mothers”–aunts, grandmothers, friends and neighbors–so that extended families merged into other extended families, thus maintaining the historic practices of communal societies throughout Africa, Asia and North America.”  –from The Adoption Reader, ed. by Susan Wadia-Ells

I read that and suddenly a lot of the tension around transracial adoption makes much more sense.

The quote doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the original point of this post, but I still wanted to share it with you.

Thanks for reading.