Must Read News Article
This article comes from FT Magazine, and is the story of a journalist in Beijing who happens upon an abandoned baby.
I’ve said before that the image China wants to give to the world right now is that they can take care of their own, and she echos that.
There is also word that A Bright Moon has closed. From their website:
Families who have posted photos on A Bright Moon website searching for their child’s birthparents will receive a prorated refund. Our office in Beijing was constantly questioned by the police relative to families desiring to search for their child’s birthfamilies. This was troublesome for our staff and caused them to worry about their own futures. As such, we decided as a whole to close the Beijing office (BECCC and A Bright Moon) as of August. While we wanted to do this important work, we did not want it to cause our staff any hardships.
Since I’m told that some on her staff were Chinese citizens, that’s understandable. Chinese law doesn’t give the same privacy protections we have here in the US, and those employees were being put into a very difficult position of refusing to give information that they probably had access to. Much better to do this from across the ocean. It is a reminder that if you actually find your child’s birthfamily that you do everything in your power to protect their identity.
The article I linked to above is fairly long, but it’s a good one. The journalist admits to being secretly relieved that she failed to find her own daughters’ birthfamily. That gave me some food for thought… if we don’t find GlitterGirls’ birthfamily, will it be a relief or a disappointment? I think it will be 90% disappointment, because I know how badly GlitterGirl wants to fill that big empty spot she feels. But I think I’ll have to admit to 10% of… not relief exactly, but an acknowledgement that we don’t know if finding them will give us good answers or just more difficult questions.
I’m searching for GlitterGirls’ birth family because she wants me to, and because I don’t think it is likely that she is going to change her mind. I feel that she is emotionally old enough to make the decision, and I don’t see her deciding at any point in her life that she doesn’t want these answers she so desperately craves.
I am not searching for TwinkleToes’ birth family because 1) she doesn’t feel the same big empty spot, she pretty much lives in the present and doesn’t see the need to look to her past, and 2) she’s only six and even if she did want to search for them I’m not sure I would begin the search until I felt comfortable that she isn’t going to change her mind a dozen times between now and adulthood.
Some adult adoptees resent that their parents searched for their birthparents. They say it was their decision to make and their parents had no right to it, and they make a good enough argument that they’ve convinced me. Not everyone sees it that way, but I do.
I think there are three basic camps right now: 1) If my child wants to search she can do it when she is 18, 2) if my child wants me to search then I will do so when I feel she is old enough to make the decision (the age varies greatly depending on the family and child), and 3) I’m going to search and I haven’t checked in with my child to see if it’s what she wants because it’s what I feel is best.
Wherever you land on that spectrum is fine. I’ve done a lot of research and have landed on Number Two. That’s my decision. If you’ve come to one of the other decisions then I will assume that is the right decision for your family. Just please understand that every family is different, and every child is different.
Yes, there are risks with searching, and families need to understand those risks before they begin the search. But for those of us with children who desperately want to be able to fill in that big empty spot in their history… we’re willing to take those risks to get our children their answers.
Their birth families will also have to be willing to take risks in order to contact us. That will be their decision to make. A match is only going to be made through a search site if both sides are willing to take the risk.
August 13th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
You know there are so many what if’s in life anyway, and for our family, we are searching because one of our kids wants us to.
Someone we know who adopted from Russia back at the time we adopted one of our children searched for her dd’s birthmother. She had a pretty good idea the type of circumstances her dd came from, and they discussed this in great detail. Her dd still wanted to go ahead with the search.
I believe it was easier for her to do the search because some adoptions from Russia do have information about the birthfamily.
Her dd did meet her birthmother, she had a substance abuse problem. She met her biological family as well. Her birthmother had a really sad childhood. She shared with her photos of her relatives. She did not have any siblings.
The adoptive mother was really concerned about how this would affect her dd. When they returned to the US, she said that she was so happy, and felt whole as now she knew who she really was. She had a better understanding of why she was placed in an orphanage and a lot more compassion for her birthmother. For her is was a positive experience.
I agree, every child is different. I kind of read newspapers from around the world. There was an article about a man who over the course of 15 years found several abandoned girls in China. He raised 4 as his dd’s and he worked hard along with his wife to educate them. He also had a son.
Although, this story seemed unique, according to him it wasn’t that unusual. The article said that a family in China took in a malnourished abandoned baby boy who had special needs. They received a kind donation to help with his medical needs.
August 13th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
I have three children, all adopted domestically as infants. The older two, we exchange pictures and letters at the request of the birth families. Their birth families have both wanted VERY little contact from us. I always felt sad about this, and wished their was a little more interest on their part. It felt like rejection from them.
My third child’s Birth Mother is very young. She wanted a lot of contact, and a very open adoption even though she lives several states away. I thought since she lived far away, that contact wouldn’t happen that often, and would be great. It isn’t. It is very hard. She was calling every week, and wanted to visit her several times per year with her whole family. She feels like an intrusion and makes me feel like I am not really my youngest child’s Mother. Her family calls us both her Mom and we are not both her Mom. I am the one who stays up all night when she is sick, I am the one who takes care of her every need, I was surpirsed by how much the language (calling her Birth Mom her Mother) bothered me. I had to set boundaries. It was very difficult. They didn’t understand. They felt insulted. And now I fear what my youngest will think of me limiting her Birth Mother’s calls and visits one day when she is old enough to understand.
I am sharing this because I want you to be aware, that when you find them, you may get more than what you expected. It may be harder than you thought. You may feel and think things you never expected. I always thought I was this totally open person who wouldn’t mind having my kid’s birth Mothers in their life, and then I found myself feeling threatened. I was shocked I felt this way, but I did. You really need to make sure you are okay with the possibility of sharing your child for the rest of her life.
August 13th, 2011 at 2:45 pm
waitingforjoessister: thank you so much for posting about your experiences. While I would be open to finding my dd’s birthparents and meeting them etc I would not be happy to have an ongoing relationship as you’ve described. When we looked into domestic I found that what I would be comfortable with is sort of a semi open adoption. I admit I don’t want some other family involved in our lives on a regular basis… I just don’t. I don’t think that makes me a bad person or insensitive to my dd at all.
IMO Life is complicated enough without adding that to it. In a lot of ways its the same way I feel about step family relationships. I see so many of my friends dealing with this and, in some ways its positive, but usually there are a lot more negatives.
August 13th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
I absolutely applaud your post. You emphasized the importance of individual families making individual choices. I think this is so important for us to recognize as a community. There is no blueprint, or manual for parents. We need to educate ourselves, and listen to our children. From there, make the best decision for our own families. Thank you for recognizing that.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Very true ladyesquire and chickensoupforchina,….everyone has different feelings about it. I thought I wanted more of a relationship with Birth Families, and as it turns out a letter and some pictures every few years, is just about perfect for me. I didn’t realize that,… until I had a very open adoption.
Due to the geography, if some of you find Birth Families in China, I can’t imagine you have the issue I had with too much contact for comfort. On a positive note, it has greatly improved since my Social Worker wrote up a contract for all parties to sign and agree to,… regarding contact, call, visits, etc. I guess it just needed to be spelled out ahead of time, and it wasn’t.
It will be interesting when we adopt our last child from China, because she may be our only child that doesn’t have any information and/or pictures of her Birth family. We will have to cross that bridge when we get there. :-)
T
LID 7-28-06
August 13th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
I wonder why my comments are always moderated. Is it a word I am using?
August 13th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
I recently watched “Off and Running” a documentary about a young African American women adopted by two white women. It really opens your eyes to all sides of the story. I recommend it.
Also, RQ can you tell me how old GG is? Thanks.
August 14th, 2011 at 9:14 am
This is just a theory and I could be way off base but I think the whole question of who should search and who owns the search is pretty generational.
My adult adoptee friends (Korea, Colombia, Chile) who are in their late 30′s all knew they were adopted from day one, but also were told by their AP’s that “We don’t have any information about your BP’s” and some variation of “We can help you look for them when you grow up.”, with more or less sincerity on the part of the AP. The search itself: to search or not to search is for one friend a non-issue. The other two, especially when we were teenagers, built up the idea of searching and finding birthparents into almost a fairy tale scene. As an adult looking back, the truth could never measure up to their expectations. It’s easy to understand the feelings of adult adoptees saying that searching is the province of the adoptee, because it’s something that’s been on their minds forever and it helps to complete them.
In my case, with my very young (IA and DA) kids, I have full BP info and a way to contact BP’s for one child, and I chose to do a search for my other child’s birthparents of whom not much was known. In this day and age, the search for us was simple and we obtained information for my children that will be stored with their other information and important papers pertaining to their adoptions.
We will share with them as questions arise and in age appropriate ways. The search itself for the names of birthparents, locations of BP’s, will never be the issue for this new generation of adoptees IF they’re raised from the beginning knowing their own information. The search never has to achieve that mythical status, so it’s a non-issue. The actual reunion is now (for my children) the biggest deal and something that is their decision to pursue or not.
With regards to whether or not AP’s should search: adult adoptees looking back through the perspective of growing up with no birthfamily information are coming from a different place than kids who’ve always known who and where their birthparents live, and accept this as part of their own unique adoption story.
I mean, would anyone advocate closed original birth certificates for adult adoptees “so they could go through the motions of a search” including court orders and private investigators in order to own the search? Or would one believe (as I do) that OBC’s should be open from day one, and therefore the entire search a non-issue, with the true focus and emotional work being that of reunion (if desired)?
August 14th, 2011 at 5:21 pm
I asked SoccerGirl today if she would like to search for her birth parents. Having met SoccerBaby’s first family and knowing it wasn’t a pretty picture, she knows more than most what it might entail. In all honesty, I was expecting her to shrug her shoulders and say “I don’t know”.
Her response startled me. “Could we find out from whom I get my long second toe? And what about my freckles? Do you think one of them will have freckles? Oh, and my….”; she had quite a list of questions. She doesn’t want to know why they gave her up. I think she’s afraid of what the answer might be. But she wants to know who they are, what parts of her are like them.
So, I’ll have to think long and hard about it. I don’t know if it’s possible to find some answers without the others coming along as part of the package. As her mom, I want to protect her. But I also know that giving her the truth, the answers to her questions, might be more important than keeping her “unhurt”.
I know that seeing the clothes that she was found in really hurt her. They were nice clothes. She had convinced herself that they were too poor to keep her, but the clothes suggested otherwise. This was hard for her to face. So, I don’t know.
Part of me would like to search for them now, thinking that the more time that passes the harder it will be to find them. But what we find out would probably determine when I share the information with SoccerGirl. I don’t know what she’s ready to process at this point.
Like I said, it’s a hard decision.
August 14th, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Does anyone know anything more about the family asked by China for a DNA sample?
August 15th, 2011 at 9:09 am
I think another thing to consider when using the opinions of adult adoptees on this issue is where they were adopted from and how it might be different with respect to Chinese adoption. With respect to the largest population of adult adoptees, those from Korea, I would suggest the situation is quite dramatically different than it is from China for a few reasons. First, it is my understanding that birth family information is often readily available, or at least can be searched for through “official channels”. Secondly, I suspect there is a lot more stability around the location and details of placement of the child, both from a geographic location and a pace of change perspective.
Then there is the point that JenT04 makes with which I agree completely. It seems logical that the attitudes that adult adoptees have on this issue were influenced by how adoption was dealt with in their families as they grew up and since we know that much has changed in this regard it seems reasonable that the attitudes of recent adoptess may be quite different.
Finally, when I read the stories of those who have made successful searches or even those who have gotten information from finders or foster families, it seems to me that in many of these cases they would never have found this information if they waited 10 or 15 years.
Ultimately I think the choice comes down to which is the higher risk; that your child will be unhappy with you for having done some of the searching without their informed consent or that they will be unhappy with you for having left it so long that you diminished the chances of having any success. Personally I would rather deal with the former.
August 16th, 2011 at 9:21 am
“Some adult adoptees resent that their parents searched for their birthparents. They say it was their decision to make and their parents had no right to it”
RQ, I was wondering if you could point me to a blog or forum where an adult adoptee WHO’S AP’S SEARCHED says this? I’ve seen some adoptees who’s APs DID NOT search who say they would be upset, but have never heard it from one who’s APs actually did search for them.
August 16th, 2011 at 10:53 am
DaniWestRN – i’d be interested too. i’ve read a lot of adult adoptee blogs and i’ve never seen this. i can’t imagine my daughter resenting my trying to help her find answers early and forge a relationship with her BF. what if i don’t look and she wants to look someday and they are dead? i have a friend who was adopted domestically who easily found her birth family when she was in her 20′s and her birth mother had died. she was devastated and angry her parents never searched. choosing not to search now may be taking away the only chance my daughter will ever have to know her family. as her mother i make decisions for my daughter all the time that she may disagree with some day. research clearly shows that open adoptions are better for adopted kids.
that being said, i recognize that it’s an individual/personal decision that varies by family. i find the answers most families give for not searching have to do more with the AP than the adoptee. if you don’t search and it’s more about you than you child, i think it’s important to acknowledge the distinction.
August 16th, 2011 at 11:47 am
I agree with windthrow, information gets lost, orphanages move and people forget. This doesn’t have to be a black/white issue. I think in regards to China, an early contact can yield much information that would be lost if you wait for your child to make the decision. In my case I took my daughter back at 5 and was able to make contact with the foster family who had several priceless photos of my daughter at 5 and 7 months that they gave me. We visited and took photos of where she spent the first year of her life, the home she lived in people she knew and neighborhood. I also met the person who found her and the orphanage director was the same person and all were able to recount every detail of the who, what, where of the abandonment and first year of life and I photographed every page of her file. I think this is important because if this becomes a priority for my daughter she will know I did everything I could to learn about her beginnings. She will also have all the pieces to begin a search. Other pieces can be a rock and trinket from her hometown and stories about what happened that first year of life.
August 16th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Hi noendinsight.
I personally know an adult adoptee. She is now in her twenties and was adopted from India. I had long talks with her about the search or not issue and she told me she would have been livid if her adopted parents would have searched. Quite resently she found her birthmother and visited her in India. She explained to me that the journey and adventure of the search is a precious experience as well, and that it´s her journey to make not ours.
I doubt about what to do on a weekly basis, but her story sticks in my head, I don´t want to take the journey away from my children.
Best wishes
August 16th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
I did my research on this back in the early 2000′s and had stopped by the time we began the process of bringing TT home. What I learned back then I learned on bulletin boards, forums, and email loops. I don’t really know what is out there right now, or even where to go these days if you want to get into the really deep therapy-inducing forum discussions on the subject, where adoptees support and help each other through some very gritty emotions. I doubt you are going to find those discussions on blogs, though.
In a few cases the a-parents had searched and discovered dead ends, so the adult adoptee didn’t have the opportunity to do their own search. They validated what their parents had already found out, but they resented that all they could do was follow what their parents had already done, and that they knew from the start that it was going to be a dead end.
One person’s parents had found her birthfamily, the reunion had gone horribly wrong, and the adoptee blamed her a-parents for it, instead of the b-parents, but in reading what she said happened, it seemed clear to me that the cultural issues that were there were the main problems and those problems likely would have been there no matter how the reunion happened. Still, the adoptee felt that if she’d searched as an adult that things could have been different if she’d gone to her b-parents without having her a-parents in the picture. She felt they had no right to have gotten involved. She did try to recontact her b-parents as an adult, and similar things happened, and again the a-parents were blamed for all of the problems.
There were more, but I really don’t feel I can speak in anything but very general terms without violating people’s privacy. The places I went had pretty strict privacy policies and it just doesn’t feel right to outline things too much.
In my own case, I laid breadcrumbs, created a starting point, and then stopped. I’ve talked to the people who found my girls, and I’ve documented what I could of how, when, where, and by whom that they were found.
As I said in my original piece, I don’t think there is a single correct answer. You do what you feel is right for you and your family, and respect that others are doing the same. I delved deeply into the subject, and was an emotional wreck while I was doing it. Because of the way my mind works, it needed to be done, but now that it’s done I don’t really need to go through it again. I learned what I needed to learn, got the perspective I was looking for, and I hope I’m a better mother to my girls as a result.
I try to answer questions, give information, and make decisions with the idea that one day I will be accountable for these things to the adult women that they become. That’s not always easy to do when you are answering the questions of a six year old, but I do my best.