we’re here, we’re queer, we’re a family

There is just so much good writing on adoption blogs (not necessarily this one!) and it amazes me how much insight I can pick up on my Google Reader, how many people are willing to share their experiences so I and their other readers can understand more and improve ourselves.

I’m humbled every time eight-year-old J, whose mom Lisa is probably my most frequent commenter here, writes about her struggle to overcome past abuse and attachment disorder to be able to love. I’m just as impressed by moms like Lisa and Torina and so, so many others who are honest and open about the huge struggles but also successes they have parenting struggling and damaged children.

This is probably a silly way to put it, but I get so much in-the-trenches practical adoption information from the special needs bloggers, international and domestic. But I’m also a failed philosophy major (dropped it rather than write a thesis with the only professor I ever met who thought that because I was female I must have less brain than the boys in the room) I have constant need for some theory in my life, too. To get my dose of politicized language and messy, nasty ethics I go to adoptees like Mia and first moms like paragraphein and adoptive moms like Dawn.

Dawn’s the one I’m thinking about now. She said and I think has said before that Shannon talked to her about how open adoption has made Dawn’s family queer. I like this concept, and it’s one I think about a lot. Now, I’ll say it doesn’t mean that Dawn’s family is gay the way mine is. Dawn’s daughter Madison does indeed have two mommies, but that’s only a small part of what I’m talking about.

Let me step aside for a minute and talk about the family we’re building. Some people have wondered — though thankfully only a few — whether we’re doing a disservice to our future child by not giving him or her a mom and a dad. Honestly, I think we’d get that more if we weren’t adopting an older child from foster care. It’s hard for people to make the argument that it’s better for a child to stay in foster care (although I think there are probably situations when this is the case, though I don’t really want to talk about super-gray ethical zones with random judge-y acquaintances) than have two loving moms.

At any rate, talking about adoption seems to bring out the Perfect Nuclear Family ideals in even people who don’t have families anything like that themselves. I’m not totally sure why this is, but I think it’s related to the discourse around saving a child and who’s a deserving parent and all that. I mean, isn’t it better for a baby to be raised by a wealthy, straight married couple who can provide for all the baby’s needs rather than a young, single birthmother who might not have a lot of extra money? I’d say no, not necessarily and certainly not for those reasons (and, uh, NEEDS are not the things that cost so much, generally, or wouldn’t be under decent universal healthcare coverage) but that’s because I’m an adoption blogger person and not some general guy on the street. And even on adoption blogs, in the last week I’ve seen comments saying that maybe it’s better for children not to even know they’re adopted, that it’s fine and appropriate for white adoptive parents of black children to raise them without even discussing race.

I guess I should feel lucky that in a family where we’ll be adopting an older child there’s never going to be any chance to not notify that child that he (or maybe she, but I really think not at this point) was adopted. And since this child will be living with two moms, it should be pretty clear to everyone that we’re not both biological parents. And since one mom is black and one mom is white, well, I’m not actually sure how that will play out. If we end up with the child we think we will, who seems from photos to be at least as dark as Lee, will people assume he’s her bio child and I’m a partner who came into the picture later? Will I get less of a side-eye from judging strangers when I’m wandering around town as a white woman with a child who reads as black rather than one who looks more racially ambiguous? We have no idea yet, but we’re thinking about things like these. Because we’re lesbians, because of the choices we’re making, our family is going to look different and be different than a monoracial mom/dad/biokids family and we’re okay with that or we wouldn’t have been looking to adoption as our first choice anyway. Our family is queer — not constrained by those heterosexist norms — because we want it to be and choose it to be.

I think what Shannon may have been going for is that this is the kind of life Dawn and her family chose, too, in adopting Madison and continuing a strong relationship with her first mom, Pennie. They decided to parent a child who wouldn’t look noticeably different, and they chose to do that by educating themselves and being sensitive to Madison’s needs and identities. It seems to me as a reader that Dawn and Pennie have a particularly close relationship, and that Dawn as the adoptive mother clearly encourages Madison to love them both and consider them both her different kinds of mothers. In open adoption, Dawn and her family are rejecting the idea that family is merely their little household unit and instead extending it to include a wider range of roles than most families have. It’s clear that Madison is thriving and while I don’t mean we should judge all this by anecdotes, I appreciate getting to read about these interactions and how all these relationships within this adoption triad grow and change over time.

And here I’m completely speculating about Dawn and about what Shannon thought in the first place. It was just that Dawn’s comment made me think about why I find open adoption so appealing and I think it’s because of the way it undermines this prevalent idea that you should make a happy paper doll nuclear family even if it means people have to tell lies and wear masks. I don’t know to what extent our adoption will be able to be open, but I know when I wrote our “dear birthmother” letter it was easy to say that we obviously already understand loving more than one mother and would hope a child would have been healthy and attached enough to love a first mother and perhaps a foster mother too and would encourage love and understanding — whether or not there can safely be contact with birth family — as much as we could. Maybe that makes our family even queerer than it would otherwise be, but I’m hoping it will make us better and more effective mothers as well. As I said, I know I’ll parent better because of what I’m learning from others in blogland and I remain so grateful for that.