You Want Humble? Try Adoption.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders doesn’t deserve a response. But I’m writing one anyway.

“So you’re not Cassie’s real mother, then?”

The woman’s face was innocent and open with curiosity. My then four-year-old daughter was standing beside us, impatiently waiting for the story-telling hour for toddlers to begin. I automatically shot a glance at her, wondering if she had heard. But her attention was on the Thomas the Tank Engine table, around which several little boys were clustered, arguing over who would get to be Thomas. The woman asking the question was the manager of the toddler reading program at our neighborhood “progressive” bookstore, the person parents go to for instruction and guidance when they are picking out books for their children.

Four years later, my blood already simmering from having read reviews of the book, I open Rebecca Walker’s Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence. I skim for the offending passages, and there they are, even worse than the reviews had portrayed them: “It’s not the same. I don’t care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your nonbiological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood” (69).

Walker goes on: “I find myself nodding,” she writes, “as I read a study that finds children living with a stepmother receive a good deal less food, health care, and education than they would if they lived with their biological mother” (73).

I know about these studies. When I was teaching about theories of the body, I used to subscribe to a listserv called “Evolutionary Psychology” (in the old days, that would be known as “Biological Determinism”) and spent many mornings fuming over the latest theory about genetic investments in biological offspring and “natural” preferences for those who carry our DNA. Non-related parents, the “evolutionary psychologists” argue, are more likely to abuse their children because they have no genetic investment in them.

Sounds a little like J.D. Vance’s argument that people without biological children have less investment in the future of our country, doesn’t it?

He’s tried to wiggle out of it, claiming he really meant only people who don’t want to have children. That’s offensive enough. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ scorn for Kamala Harris, who in fact has two non-biological children, gives the GOP game away. It’s not really about children. It’s about women. They’re exploiting anger against women who don’t follow the rules from back when America was “great” and our primary job was to get pregnant and give birth, not to pursue fancy careers.

Of course, Sarah has a fancy career herself. But that’s different because her children keep her “humble.”

Here’s what Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff said to that:

 The Sonogram

Before I go on with my own response to Sanders, cheers and hugs to Doug Emhoff!

Whatever political gains Vance and Sanders hope to accomplish in their campaign, they’ve angered a lot of us who haven’t lived our lives according to their preferred script. That includes me, an adoptive mom who can smell from a mile away any suggestion that only biological parenthood is “real” (or “humbling,” as Sanders implies.)

I didn’t try to get pregnant until my early forties. Once we began trying, I was amazed when it didn’t happen as it had, unplanned, when I was thirty, the very first time the birth control barrier was down. Movie stars who were my age were radiantly pregnant. People magazine was celebrating: “It’s never too late!” So I was startled when my doctor sternly put a damper on my enthusiasm. “It’s going to be an uphill battle,” he warned, writing out a prescription I was sure I didn’t need.

We tried, it didn't happen, and I was distraught. My ears got plugged up with grief and when I told my therapist about having trouble hearing, I brought in a picture I’d drawn of what I imagined the inside of my ear to look like. “What’s that?” He asked. “My fallopian tubes,” I answered. I’d meant to say “eustachian.”

Adoption never occurred to me; my fantasies of being a mother were completely entangled with the desires to be pregnant, give birth, and reproduce our flawed but precious family line. So I let it go—or so I thought. Ten years later I was appalled to realize, for the second time, that I had forgotten to have children. This time, however, a paradigm shift had taken place in my psyche: biological connection (besides being beyond possibility) felt utterly superfluous; adoption felt wonderfully right.

And, if it was to happen, quite urgent—I was fifty-two.

My husband balked. Edward was seven years older than I and perfectly happy with our lives as they were. A dedicated teacher of college Russian and a brilliant pianist, his lap was already occupied, either with student assignments to grade or with his silent practice keyboard, which came with us everywhere.

But I was in terrier mode and wouldn't let go. I gnawed and nipped at his heels, and eventually wore him down, promising that I would be responsible for 90 percent of the childcare, that he could be as uninvolved as our own dads had been. Sure.

Ours is an "open" adoption-a term that is used to cover a continuum of practices ranging from exchange of identifying information before birth to ongoing communication, even regular visits between adoptive and birth families. The bare bones of our version: My husband and I met Cassie's birth mother Amy and her family three months before Cassie was born, and I returned and stayed in Abilene—no trees, many churches, and decidedly (don't believe the song) not “the prettiest town you've ever seen" — for three weeks before the birth. Amy was 15, her mother VisSue was 36, and I was 52. When I was not reading baby books or making emergency calls to my friends, family, and psychiatrist, I was with the family: Amy, teenage siblings Nicole and Kane, ViSue's cowboy boyfriend Brett, and numerous exes, grands, and steps.

During my time in Abilene, I learned that poverty looks different and barbecue tastes different in Texas, rediscovered the pleasures of unrestrained bitching among women, and went with Amy to her doctor’s appointments. At one of them, she had a sonogram.

When Dr. Bass handed that first photo of Cassie to me I readily took it, weeping with joy. Then Amy, who had been lying silently throughout the procedure, jumped up from the table, dressed hurriedly, and ran angrily out of the office to the parking lot and into her mother’s car, slamming the door behind her, refusing to talk to any of us. I ran after her and begged her to open the door, but she remained stony and stormy. The next day, I took her to the mall, bought her chic-fil-a—her favorite pregnancy meal—and tried to break the ice. Not successful. My husband and I left Texas shortly thereafter, sad and anxious, knowing that there was a good possibility the whole thing had fallen through.

 I had many sleepless nights after that, and not only because I was afraid Amy would change her mind. One morning, in fact, sobbing to my husband that I couldn’t take Amy’s baby away from her, I almost changed my mind myself. In retrospect, I was horrified at my behavior at the doctor’s office. I had stood there, conducting transactions over the prone, semi-undressed body of a silent, sad, and clearly depressed young woman, and let myself be lost in the illusion that it was all okay because she was so young.

Amy may only have been fifteen, but that sonogram, as it turned out, meant a great deal to her. It was for her a concrete symbol and reminder of the fact that although she was going to relinquish Cassie to me after her birth, during those nine months she was still her mother. She needed us all to acknowledge that. Instead, we were treating her like a pregnant child.

 Desire makes one stupid and selfish.

I immediately sent the sonogram back to her, express mail, with an apologetic note. But from that moment, the fantasy that everything was just fine crumbled. I had gotten to know Amy and her family well enough to realize that it would be far from a disaster for the baby if they decided to raise her. I wanted what was best for Cassie. I wanted Amy, who I eventually became close to, to be okay. And I wanted to be happy myself after so many years of sadness. I was so full of conflicting emotions that I sometimes felt I didn’t know who I was anymore.

One day quite near the time of Amy’s term, ViSue confided in me that as they rode to the doctor’s a few days before, Amy had plaintively asked her, “Mom, can’t we keep her?” When I heard this, all the clichés immediately came true: my heart nearly stopped, a cold chill went through me, I began to tremble uncontrollably—and I quickly placed a call to my doctor back home, requesting extra Xanax. Adequately medicated, I tried to not interfere and let it play itself out in its own time, but I couldn’t. A few mornings later, in a state, I visited ViSue to get an update. Seeing how anxious I was, she put her arms around me and then took my face in her hands. “You poor honey-bun,” she said, “don’t worry. We’d never take your Cassie away from you!”

 My Cassie? I hugged ViSue in relief, but it took me a long time to believe in that privilege myself. Unlike those adoptive mothers, who speak of immediately feeling that this child was meant to be theirs, I was caught in the existential strangeness of it. After Cassie’s birth, I couldn’t fully take in the fact that where there had been no baby, now there was one. She was mine? In what sense mine? There, on the bed, lay Amy, her birthmother, exhausted and trembling from the delivery, fifteen years old, stalwart but grieving for the little girl she had to give up. And then there was me, fifty-two years old, with all my book-knowledge and a bunch of paperwork in a file. Who was the mother here? Me? Not yet.

For a long time, I was haunted by Amy’s loss—by the violence life had done to her in not giving her the resources to raise her baby— resources, both emotional and material, that I had in such shameful abundance. At the same time, Amy and ViSue had advantages that I envied desperately. A three-time mom, ViSue seemed to know exactly how to hold Cassie, feed her, bathe her. My education in baby-care was largely from books; we fought about the safety of talcum powder and Q-tips as though our maternal authority were on the line. Later, during their first visit to Lexington, when Cassie was just four months old, at Amy’s request we had her ears pierced. Watching Amy soothe her crying, rocking her body as naturally as though it were still connected to her own, I felt like an incompetent and a fraud.

Six months later, that had changed. On her second visit, I caught Amy gazing at Cassie and me with tears in her eyes. “Are you feeling sad?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “I just love the way you talk to her. I wish I had been talked to like that.” But there were many times when I caught her gazing at Cassie with an expression that’s hard to describe. It was as though she was saying to her: “Beautiful Cassie, I wish I could have kept you. I’m so glad you have Susan and Edward. And I’ll always love you.” Such generosity of heart. Cassie has that too.

Humbling enough for you, Sarah?

Wisdom From Khalil Gibran

Even many who have been appalled by the Vance/Sanders political campaign use language that privileges biological ties. Speaking up (and against Sarah Sanders) for blended families like his own, Joe Scarborough refers to Kamala as not having “children of her own.”

That “her own” is part of the mythology of biological connection, as though that unbiblical cord confers some sort of quasi-ordination or ownership. But as Khali Gibran wisely writes, our connection with our children, biological or not, doesn’t mean they are “ours.”

Actually, I've come to believe that there are distinct advantages to children in not being related to their parents. Growing up, I was told that I was "just like Aunt Etta" (code for stubborn, impatient, and lazy); I felt as though there was an immutable family script in which I was destined to play a predetermined role. Raising Cassie, in contrast, has been a constant revelation of the folly of both biological determinism and the opposite view, popular among many academics, that children are a blank slate ready to be imprinted with "cultural discourse.” In so many ways, Cassie is "just like Amy," her birth mother. Her superb athleticism and dazzling good looks “comes from” both her birth parents. But the contribution of Edward's and my personalities, habits, and the way we’ve interacted with her is undeniable. My daughter is one of the few people who can defeat me in argument—and she’s proud of it. Like Edward, she’s outwardly reserved but mush inside. They both save odd artifacts from beloved animals who have died. (Come to think of it, so do I.)

All children, whatever their genetic connection with their parents, are separate beings whose individuality should be respected and nurtured and whose love cannot simply be assumed. Non-biological parents, I believe, have a unique potential for consciousness of these facts. We cannot tell ourselves that we were immutably bonded in the womb. We are daily confronted with noses, smiles, abilities, deficiencies that don't "run in the family." We know there is another family out there, in whom they do "run." All of this can lead to anxieties about bonding. Concerns about not feeling the way "one is supposed to" about one's infant. Jealousy of others to whom our children are attached, biologically or emotionally. Discomfort with our children's differences from us. None of these fears are unique to adoptive parents; they often lurk-denied, unexpressed, attended by shame and guilt—in the hearts of biological parents as well. But adoptive parents are forced to face them, and one hopes, work through them.

Adoption revises the traditional nuclear family in another way, too; it levels the biological playing field for male and female parents. As I watched a recent television series on adoption, I'm struck by how freely tears flow when adoptive fathers, both gay and straight, single and married, talk about receiving their adoptive children. Is it because of the often long struggle with infertility, the other numerous obstacles and disappointments that are so common in the adoption process, the almost religious gratitude many of us feel-particularly those with nontraditional profiles: those of us who are older, single, or gay—as we finally are granted parenthood? Perhaps. But maybe, too, adoptive fathers have not had to suffer the feeling, expressed by many biological fathers, that pregnancy and birth belong to their female partners. Avery Corman writes in Kramer us. Kramer, describing Ted Kramer's thoughts about the birth of his son, "It seemed to have little to do with him—her idea, her baby, her miracle" (Corman 1977, 2).

In contrast, Edward and I entered our late-life parenthood unencumbered by memories or fantasies that either of us had ever been "one" with Cassie, had suffered more bringing her into the world, had had the "natural" advantage of a biological intimacy the other couldn't claim. In fact, at the beginning Edward was readier than I, felt more entitled than I, to make this little stranger his daughter. I was too dazzled by her, too awed by what was happening, to feel much connection. Edward, on the other hand—someone who as far as I was aware had never held a newborn before—was instantly confident, playful, and competent with her. The moment he took her in his arms I knew, despite all his objections and foot-dragging during the adoption process, he wasn't going to be anything like our fathers, who called for their wives when a diaper needed to be changed and parceled out tidbits of affection and praise to their children as if they were candies that would rot our teeth.

From Kramer us Kramer, again, about Ted: "In the beginning, when Joanna was first pregnant, the baby did not seem to have a connection to him, and now, the child was linked to his nervous system" (Corman, 1977, p. 171). That's the way both Edward and I feel about Cassie.

Reality

 Once, when Cassie was still a little kid (she’s now 25), at a meeting of a site-based decision board at her school, I brought up the subject of the importance of the language that we use in talking about adoption. The principal pooh-poohed over my concerns about the word “real.” “Hell,” she said, “I’m adopted, and I got that stuff all the time. I grew up just fine.” Perhaps, as one trained in philosophy, I do attach too much importance to words like “real.” The bookstore lady may have thought she was just asking about the biological status of my relationship with Cassie, and Cassie’s principal, tough broad that she prided herself on being, may believe that it’s no big deal. But there was another adoptive mom at the meeting, and when the principal dismissed my concerns, her eyes sought mine like magnets. We both know what it feels like to be told we are not “real” mothers. I felt equally angry, however, when Rosie O’Donnell said that her adopted child’s nine months in her birth mother’s body was God’s “mix-up,” a cosmic mistake. Birthparents, adoptive parents, stepparents are all real parents.

 I’m not a Platonist. I don’t believe in Timeless Truth. The definition of reality that I like the best is science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s: “Reality,” he writes, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” It’s particularly apt in the context of adoption. For whether they are living or dead, down the street or across the globe, known or unknown, hated or loved, every adoptive child has at least three parents. You can try to forget it, close your eyes and ears and imagination to it, tell myths about it, tremble before it, erect barriers to it, but it will be in your life. Attempt to deny it, as our adoption practices did for decades and as some adoptive parents still do today, and you will merely create another version of it, nurtured by imagination rather than knowledge.

Even the best decisions—which we all felt our adopting Cassie to be—do not magically banish loss and grief. The reality is that Cassie, who it is impossible to imagine my life without, was born, changed my life entirely, dragged me and Edward out of our comfort zones just as much as any biological parent has been dragged. And as over the years I recognize more and more of my stubbornness, my snarkiness, my iconoclasm, and my tender-heartedness in her, I also see Amy’s shyness, and the physical power and presence of her birthfather (who disappeared from the scene, as many birthfathers do, shortly after Cassie’s birth). She is my daughter, but they live in her body and through her body will forever shape her grasp of the world, her situation in it, and the “project” of her being.

Humbling enough for you, Sarah?

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For my reflections on adoption post-Dobbs, see

Works Cited

“Born in My Heart: A Love Story.” Barbara Walters’ ABC Special. ABC Barbara Walters, Rosie O’Donnell, Connie Chung. 20 Apr. 2001.

Walker, Rebecca. Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence. New York: Penguin, 2007.