Follow-Up to Frustrating Adoption Conversation

Since no one's biting on the financial advice post, I thought I'd address some comments on the post from a few days ago. I dashed off that post fairly quickly, so now I'll go back and try to explain my reaction a little bit more.

I suppose I'm using a framework of foster care adoption to look at private adoption. Removing a child from their parents is not about judging a family as grade C or D and improving the situation by placing the child in a new, grade A or B family. It's about (or should be about) removing the child from an "F" situation because it would be almost impossible for things to get worse.

I know a lot of people who grew up having less than ideal family lives... as I suspect do most people from all walks of life. For example, my stepfather grew up under the thumb of a narcissistic, abusive alcoholic. I've only met a very few who really think that being placed into a new family should definitely have been their fate.

So I'm fairly set in my belief that giving up your child should only happen in an "F" situation. This doesn't mean an "F" mother. The quintessential "F" situation is that you have a terminal illness and no trustworthy relatives. If that was the case with me, I would start making an adoption plan in a heartbeat.

I don't think it should happen if you're in a "C" or "D" scenario and just think it might get worse.
I've heard a private adoption reform slogan -- "adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" -- and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't want to sound too judgmental about women who relinquish children not out of massive desperation or psychological pressure. I don't agree with it, but I don't agree with a lot of things people do. Private adoption needs serious reform. But if a woman is determined to relinquish her child, then that child absolutely deserves a new and loving permanent family, not to be held in limbo for years. Replacing all private adoption with the foster care system would be a disaster (especially since the foster care system is practically a disaster anyways). I guess it's a fine line... children shouldn't have to suffer to prove a point, or to satisfy the ego of an adult, but they also shouldn't have biological connections severed out of fear of potential suffering.

There are a lot of examples in my own family that push me towards thinking this way... although other people from nontraditional backgrounds won't necessarily share my point of view.

My mother wasn't married when she had me. She was drifting aimlessly throughout South Asia and Africa with occasional pit stops in Europe and a later stay in Japan. My father sent some money now and then, and dropped in on us for weeks or months in periods between jobs, and my grandparents wired $20 a month. This went a long way in countries like India and Afghanistan and Kenya. She stayed with friends she met on her travels. My mother carried me on her back. I had almost nothing, just a little crocheted bear and a set of wooden blocks. As for drugs... well, she was a hippie, it was the 1970s, enough said.

I remember that time as a kind of privileged paradise. Constantly exposed to new people and places and things and food... I was happy all the time. I had one of the happiest childhoods imaginable. In fact, I don't think I knew what it meant to be unhappy until I started to go to school in Japan and then later in America. During the rough times to come, at least I could always look back and think about what a wonderful life I had lived.

I don't think the life we had was ideal for everyone. We lived in a monastery outside of New Delhi for a while, and my mother told me that Western heroin junkies washed up there like human flotsam, because the monks never turned anyone away, and a few of the junkies came with sad scrawny children.

In short, my mother lived an extremely irresponsible life. She eventually settled down and started to earn a living. But I didn't suffer for that period of irresponsibility, and I'm fact I'm extremely glad for it.

And again, there's my relative who had the baby with the (failed) crack dealer. I wish she hadn't done certain things in certain ways, yes, but today her baby is wanted, loved and well cared for.

"V" has less good sense than my mother or my relative, but at this point in her life "V" could and should pull herself together and start being a good mother instead of a mediocre-to-bad one. However, I doubt anything I say will affect whatever (probably bad) decision she will make.