Selina’s Favorite “Green Soup”

This is easy-peasy, delicious and super healthful. Selina begs me to make it.

Green Soup

1 head of cauliflower

2 heads of brocolli

1 large onion

1 large potato

1 quart of broth (any kind–I’ve used chicken, veggie and mushroom–all are good)

4 or 5 tablespoons of butter

salt and pepper to taste

Put the broth on the stove to heat while chopping all the veggies. Toss them in the pot and cook until they’re all soft. Puree with a blender or food processor. Add the butter and stir until melted. (You can skip it if you’re vegan or something, but it really makes a difference.) Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve!

A Reality Check for TLC’s Latest “Reality Show,” “Birth Moms”

Correcting misleading portrayals of adoption in the media is a never-ending battle for many of us. And while I often ignore bad adoption references, choosing to roll my eyes at things like Loki being “adopted” or yet another bad-seed-type horror movie, I couldn’t let this one go. I am sure that my readers are aware of the scripted and false nature of so-called reality television, but I wanted to point out just a few of the most obvious problems–mainly enormous breeches of ethics–in the show, beyond the meta-problem of putting these women on television in the first place, with an assumed story line that they will be relinquishing their children at the end of the narrative.

1. Moving expectant moms out-of-state removes them from their own support networks, isolates them and creates a more vulnerable situation in which they are less likely to feel in touch with their own parenting and other resources.

2. Housing pregnant women in adoption-agency housing does everything above, plus creates a sense of dependency and indebtedness towards the agency.

3. Moving expectant mothers to Utah puts them in a state which has, perhaps the worst record of all fifty states on adoption ethics. Utah adoption law is often used to intentionally cut off biological fathers from their children even when they want to and would be able to parent. In Utah, a woman is allowed to sign an irrevocable termination of her parental rights to her child as early as 24 hours after birth.

These times limits–in any state, of whatever length–are almost always explained in these terms: “the birth mother has XYZ hours/days to change her mind.” This completely misrepresents the law. In fact, the mother has eighteen years to make decisions about her child. These time limits are supposed to be helpful to women making adoption placement decisions by restricting them from being allowed to sign papers before they’ve had a real chance to carefully consider the decision, spend time with their babies, contact friends and relatives who might be supportive of their parenting or even allow the drugs they received in labor to fully leave their systems. A state that allows a woman to sign away her rights so soon after birth with no option to rethink her decision is failing in its obligation to protect women from coercive adoption practices.

4. I know that it is a sticky subject, and that there are exceptions to this rule and people on all sides of the adoption “triad” (for lack of a better term) who have had good experiences, but with that caveat, it is not a good idea to have prospective adoptive parents in the birthing room with a woman considering placing her child.

This situation creates an emotionally coercive atmosphere in which the adoptive parents seem like the baby’s parents before they are. It creates a situation in which a birthing mother feels that much more obligated not to let them down and disappoint them by keeping her child.

5. When a mother says “I want to keep my baby,” or “I don’t want to give him to anyone else,” or “I want to raise him myself” but that she feels she has no choice but to place him for adoption because she has no money, no job, no car, no house… a social services worker has a moral obligation to find support for her to keep her child. Poverty alone is not a good reason to place a child in adoption. Virtually no healthy infant adoptions are occurring in countries with strong social safety nets like paid maternity leave, free and subsidized child care, socialized medical care and other benefits. Adoption is a drastic, traumatic life event for both mothers and children and should never happen unless absolutely no other options are available.

6. At least in the way this show was filmed and edited, it looked like the “counseling” session these young women had with a man from the adoption agency was nothing but a give-away-your-baby class. When one of the expectant moms suggested that another’s difficulty in choosing a family might signal her desire to keep her baby, the “counselor” was silent and the woman seemed pressured to prove that she was committed to adoption, when in fact, she explicitly wasn’t. A real counselor ought to have picked up that thread and helped her explore her options besides adoption.

Likewise, when she complained about the lack of racial diversity in the prospective parent profiles, the “counselor” again said nothing. She made an excellent point that the only family she liked already had three biological children–all blonde–and her biracial son might feel out of place in such a family. No one affirmed her hesitations as reasonable or right. No one offered her information about transracial adoption and its effect on children or the ways in which white parents ought to be prepared to raise a child of color. No one offered to put her in touch with adult adoptees who grew up in transracially adoptive families.

Similarly when another expectant mom asked the prospective adoptive parents of her child not to tell her son that he was adopted it ought to have raised a red flag that she was not ready to place. Whatever her troubles–and the show certainly made her look quite troubled–adoption, if she is feeling that much shame about it, will only add to them. At the very least, she ought to have been given some real counseling. She ought to have been given such counseling when she talked to the doctor about her drug and alcohol problems as well. It was sadly clear that no one she talked to–the adoption agency “counselor,” the doctor, the prospective adoptive parents–cared at all about her and what would become of her after her baby was born. All they cared about was getting that baby away from her. And all the show seemed to care about was portraying her as always-already unfit to raise her own children, so that we wouldn’t care too much about her ourselves.

[Just a little update here to say that if you read the Huffington Post's ridiculous story about this woman--which concludes "Are you horrified by her?"--and then read the comments you will get a sense of just how horrifying people are about young women in distress. There is just about zero compassion for this woman. It alarms me that people with that attitude towards pretty much anyone, might go out and become parents--by adoption or otherwise. I am surprised that so many people don't seem to know the basic fact that addiction is a disease, that by its very nature is uncontrollable. The woman with an alcohol and drug addiction could not stop her behavior through willpower or love for her baby, no matter how much she wanted to. But it doesn't surprise me that such a woman might have given up trying to be "good" when everyone is so determined to paint her as evil.]

7. When a baby goes home with adoptive parents and a mother goes home without her baby, that is not the end. Adoption is a lifelong condition that has repercussions forever–into future generations. I am not saying that adoption can never create a happy family (it created one for me) or that all adopted people are especially broken. (We are all broken in some way, but we are also resilient.) But adoption is not automatically a good thing just because it’s adoption. In fact, I was not sure why some of the prospective parents were adopting. It seemed like a couple of them just thought adoption was an inherently charitable act and they wanted to do it to have done this good deed, when in fact, it was unneeded by the mother and the baby. (I am thinking of the family with three children who said “we’ve always wanted to adopt.” Why? And they adopted a baby whose mother wanted to keep him and was already raising a healthy daughter. It was not exactly a “rescue” of a child in desperate circumstances.) There is so much more to adoption than these simplistic stereotypes.

8. A small note about language: A woman is not a “birth mom” before she has given birth and relinquished her parental rights. The term “birth mom” itself, even after relinquishment is problematic to many people. But even those who accept the term don’t accept it before the adoption happens. Calling women who are merely considering adoption “birth moms” is part of the cultural coercion that makes it more difficult for a woman struggling with a crisis pregnancy to see options besides adoption.

Have you got feedback about this show? Please leave it in the comments. If you’re blogging about it, please leave a link.

A Creative Interlude

One thing Nat has been doing a lot of lately, is writing. She often produces spontaneous poems or song lyrics when the mood strikes her. Yesterday, she was especially taken with the baptisms of two babies at church. She wrote this poem when she got home. I share it with her express permission.

Baptized Babies

Tomorrow, babies are baptized in the morning.
We baptized babies in the morning.
Yesterday, I baptized babies in the morning,
On Saturdays and Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Fridays.

by Natasha

I especially appreciate her use of the ancient Hebrew poetic device of repetition to drive home the theological undertones of the piece, don’t you?

Return to the Baby Scoop Days?

Today HDNet is running an hour-long documentary about women who lost their babies, against their will, to the U.S. adoption machine of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. It’s great to see some attention to this in sort of mainstreamish media (as mainstream as an obscure cable channel gets). In honor of that, I’m cross-posting a recent piece I did for BlogHer:

There’s nothing quite like an election year to bring the whackjobs out of the woodwork, is there?

2012 is no exception, and really how could it be, after the past 8 years of a GOP race to the bottom? They “won” by disenfranchising numerous legal voters in 2000 (and getting lucky with a Supreme Court that was seemingly too tired to wait for a recount). In 2004 they turned out the bigotry vote by putting “gay marriage” at the bottom of various state ballots. They tried something similar with “gay adoption” in 2008 to notably less success, but Sarah Palin’s right-wing extremism and anti-intellectualism and the rise of the Tea Party distanced them yet further from civil, moderate discourse.

Now there is almost nowhere (right) left to go. In 2012 we’ve managed to regress so far intellectually, that Nina Fedoroff, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently claimed that the anti-intellectual political climate in the United States, particularly among republican presidential candidates and big corporate political funders, had her “scared to death.”

When you think about it, it’s only logical that a party this out of touch with reality would also consider women’s access to a fundamental health need, namely contraception, to be debatable.

Rick Santorum, who has claimed that birth control in general is “not okay” (like, ever, including within marriage) was one-upped in the extremist comment department by his own billionaire supporter Foster Friess who suggested that the “pill” women needed for birth control was an aspirin between their knees.

Rush Limbaugh liked that one and repeated it in his three-day personal attack on Sandra Fluke after she testified to the U.S. Senate democrats that lack of access to hormonal contraceptives had caused a friend to lose an ovary. Limbaugh went Friess one even further, of course, calling Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute and cajoling that she and her friends ought to put sex videos on the Internet for Limbaugh and his friends to watch.

Limbaugh’s radio advertisers have been pulling their support from the show lately and this may be his last stand. But if saying slut and prostitute out loud about women who use contraception becomes Limbaugh’s downfall, it won’t be for crossing a line — it will be for making the line Santorum and company have already crossed too obvious to ignore.

That line is wide and blurry, sliding from sex workers to victims of rape to young women exploring their bodies and desires to married women who just don’t want to have any more babies, to women for whom pregnancy could be life threatening to women who need hormonal treatment for conditions unrelated to contraception at all. All of these women, according to the right-wing side of the current debate, should be ashamed for needing birth control. All of these women need to be controlled but certainly cannot be trusted to control themselves.

A couple of amusing — though logical — subtexts of this line of thinking have been pointed out. Rachel Madow’s cogent read of Rush Limbaugh’s attack indicates, for example, that Limbaugh doesn’t really understand how “the pill” works. Jezebel recently drew the conclusion that republican men were trying to make vaginal sex so dangerous that women would be more willing to have anal sex.

But the subtext of this “debate” that jumps out for me is adoption. After all, people have been having sex — shame or no shame, birth control or no birth control, ever since God said, (in renaissance English) “be fruitful, and multiply.” They’ll go on having sex, whether women can enjoy it safely or not, and when they do, sometimes, unplanned babies will be born. (In the Brave New Birth-Control-Free World, there will be of course, no abortion. Witness the latest prong of the anti-choice attack that suggests women — compared in the argument to farm animals, such as pigs and cows — should even be forced to carry dead fetuses “to term.”)

And in a world where single parenting (read “single mothering”) is being pathologized by law as leading to child abuse, those unplanned babies will have to go somewhere.

In the 1950s and 1960 and in the early 1970s, when women had little access to reliable birth control, little education about where babies come from (besides being admonished to keep an aspirin between their knees, presumably), the routine for white, middle-class unmarried girls and women who had babies was shame, silence, and the all but forced separation of mother and child by adoption laws that erased the mother’s existence and rewrote a child’s history “as if” born to adoptive parents.

These, seemingly, were the good old days to the likes of Santorum and his billionaire backer Friess. But they were not the good old days for those of us in the progressive adoption reform movement. We call them the “Baby Scoop Era,” when babies were unceremoniously taken from their mothers and often lost to them forever after.

These days, though adoption placement coercion is still far too common, the notion that a woman is unfit to parent her child simply because her sexuality exists outside of legal marriage is most often dismissed. Being young, single, even poor, are not reasons in and of themselves to place a baby for adoption and more and more girls and women — Bristol Palin, for example — know this and have resisted adoption for their children.

But more and more married couples are having fertility trouble these days too, and the wait to adopt a healthy white infant is long — often many years long — and the international adoption market is in flux, frequently disrupted by child trafficking scandals or rumors of them and political upheaval.

I am not suggesting there is a smoke-filled room in which red-faced republican men are plotting a fresh supply of healthy, domestic-born, white babies for the adoption market. But there is a certain symmetry in the push for adoption and the beatification of adoptive families in right-wing circles and this desire to keep women’s fertility in men’s control. The people opining about aspirin between the knees would be more than happy to suggest that the babies of fallen women be adopted by the “right” people — middle-class married couples. They would be proud of such a solution, no doubt.

But those who survived the baby scoop era (for example, the women whose voices fill The Girls Who Went Away) know better than to believe the pretty picture of adoption as a perfect solution in the case of an unplanned pregnancy. Assured that they would forget their babies and move on with their lives — marry, have more children — many of the women who relinquished their children to adoption in the mid-twentieth century tell stories of lifelong anguish, shame, guilt, hiding, even hiding the truth, sometimes from spouses and other children. The children of those women — the ones adopted — tell stories of searching desperately for something as simple as the name their mother gave them at birth, before it was sealed by the court and they were given a new one by adoptive parents.

These are not times anyone should wish to return to. The open records movement is made up of adoptees, first parents, and adoptive parents who believe adoptees have a right to their original birth certificates — the basic information of how they came into the world that non-adopted people mostly take for granted.

But most importantly, the adoption reform movement wants to see fewer babies separated from the mothers who bore them in the first place. Hard as that might be for people waiting to adopt a baby, (and I have been one, so I understand how it feels), it is better for mothers, for children and for our society and its view of women overall, when we acknowledge that women — and girls — have a right to both their bodies and their babies, regardless of when, where, how, with whom and even simply if, they have sex.

I like to think that the worms are out of the can and there can never be a return to the Baby Scoop era. And perhaps there can’t — not exactly in that original form — but there can be something new that is just as bad in its own way. To prevent that we need to shout to the skies that not only do women have a right to have sex without having babies, but when they do, they have a right to raise their children — with or without the dubious benefit of the GOP’s blessing.

Quick Link

My BlogHer piece for the month (the tail end of the month, that is) is about media representation of Stay-at-Home Dads. It’s a bit of a tribute to my brother, who is going to be one in about a month (um…SQUEEEE!).

For more, head to BlogHer.

Home Again, Home Again…

For those of you who haven’t heard it yet via the grapevine, or Twitter (which is the grapevine), I have news: We are homeschooling next year. And we might be homeschooling for a year or two, or three, though at this time, we are hoping to put the girls back in the school we have come to love, once it’s within our economic means to do so again.

The bottom line this year, is that we just can’t afford tuition.

I admit that there is that perverse part of me that enjoys being the wrench in assumed binaries like pro- versus anti-homeschooling. You and I both know there are strong feelings and opinions at the far ends of those supposed poles. But in our case, an initial plan to homeschool was changed when we found a school we really loved and could afford. Now we can’t afford it and have jumped onto the homeschooling track again.

I have always held that all good parents homeschool, they just think of it more or less as homeschooling, per se, depending on their position between those assumed opposite poles. So we’ve been homeschooling all along, and now we are stepping up the “school-like” nature of home to transition the girls to leaving school for awhile.

It’s funny, really. One of the things I like best about their school (which is an intensive Montessori, preK-8th-grade, private school), is that it seemed, as I put it only days before I realized we would be coming back home “like homeschooling off-site.”

Maria Montessori set up her initial school–which was in fact a residential facility for needy children–as a “children’s house” and much of the Montessori “work” in classrooms is based on life skills and the work of running a home. In the girls’ school, for example, there are not only table-washing, and buttoning “works” in the preschool classroom, but a full working kitchen (sans dishwasher, because doing it by hand is part of the lesson!) in the upper elementary (4th-6th grades) classroom where children frequently make meals for themselves and/or the school faculty and staff.

So home fits a Montessori style and/or a Montessori style fits home. And since we do hope to send the girls back to school, we won’t be quite “unschooling” as we had initially planned, because I want to keep the Montessori vocabulary and work style familiar to the girls. I have set up a new bookshelf with shelves labeled for each of the girls and some labeled “share” and have already put some “works” there and the girls have been working at home quite happily when they are not at school. I plan to gradually step this up to a more formal level over the summer, week by week until we are doing about two hours of free-flow “work” in the mornings, then doing field trips, outside lessons and household work in the afternoons by autumn. I plan to change out the works available as needed, probably every week or two.

Of course, who knows what will actually happen. But given the good work the school has done in preserving the kids’ self-motivation to learn and produce work they are proud of, taking advantage of that for a homeschool year or two will be easy enough, as long as I keep a close watch on their interests and learning-style preferences.

One of the pros about coming home is that we will be able to do more activities. Both of the girls have really been enjoying ballet lessons (which sort of shocks me, as I had never planned to put them in ballet. It just sort of came up on a lark and now Nat, especially, really loves it). But that hour on Saturday morning, and two hours of church on Sunday have been all the kids could handle after 6 hours/5 days of school for Nat and 3 hours/5 days of school for Selina. School wipes them out completely. But Nat has been asking for a violin for a while (which gratifies me because I did always plan to put her in Suzuki music lessons) and now we can A) afford it and B) have time for it without exhausting her. We will also probably do either swim lessons or some introductory martial arts or perhaps both, depending on how things go.

So, after fretting about finding a better job, with super-flexible hours so I could continue to solo parent in the coming academic year during the weekdays when Cole is out of town at work, I am now off the market. Suffice it to say, I have a job. And we have reduced financial pressure, so I can breathe easier about that job paying $0. The girls will undoubtedly miss school, because they love it to death. But they love home too, and we will hold onto the friends we’ve made at school for play dates  and summer camps and whatnot while finding a bit of flexibility in the business of making some new friends in new venues.

And that is our biggest news of late. Now you know!

Talking

One of the reasons I don’t write much here anymore is that fairly early on, I realized that Nat is a private person. She is reticent to talk much about important or complicated topics and I didn’t feel it was right for me to go on talking to the general public about her business if it was likely she was going to dislike it when she got old enough to realize I was doing it.

So while I’m not going to tell you exactly what she and I have been talking about lately, I do want to share that we have been talking.

I have heard that many times, adoptive parents assume that if kids aren’t talking/asking about something, they aren’t thinking about it. I have also heard that that assumption is usually proved wrong–sometimes in sad ways that might have been avoided with better communication.

In our case, Nat has typically been very unlikely to raise the topic of adoption or race or having same-sex parents, or any sensitive topics that affect her personally. But we have always talked about those things openly anyway, to try and make sure she grew up knowing that those topics were not secrets, shameful, or in any way threatening or off-limits. I could also get hints that Nat was thinking about these kinds of things from other sources–lately, she’s been writing stories, for example, that, while fictional, are exceptionally transparent! Also, Selina, who is a far less pensive kid, is much more open about these topics, bringing them up casually and frequently.

But in the past six months, Nat and I have had some really intense conversations, all initiated by her. In fact, long as six and a half years might have seemed to wait to hear her broach topics I’ve been chattering about to her all that time, her way of engaging has turned out to be (or at least seems to me, to be) quite precocious. We’ve had some difficult discussions that I had assumed we would have when she is a teenager. She’s only seven.

I wanted to break my general Nat silence to tell you this because you may be or may know an adoptive parent who is shy about bringing up these topics or is waiting for a child to bring them up first. I want to add my two cents to the pile of advice suggesting that we keep bringing things up. I feel like my persistence is beginning to pay off now, because my sweet, almost painfully empathetic kid has gotten the message that no matter how challenging the issue, she won’t hurt me with her honest feelings and I will always be on her side in difficulty.

Keep talking. Even if you get changes of subject, rolling eyes or silly faces, at any one moment, try, try again. Let them know you won’t shy away from any of their truth, no matter how hard.