UnchartedParent.com

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Okay, kids need a lot more than this. But at the foundation, children need unconditional love and support. Does it matter if they get this love and support from one adult or two? If they are biologically related to the adult or adults or not? If the adults are straight or gay, the same race or ethnicity as the child or different, from the same religious background or not? Yes. Also no.

These questions matter because our backgrounds and experiences make up a large part of who we are. So it stands to reason that they will affect the ways in which we raise our children.

But more important is the central question of how we will love and support our children as we raise them. Kids–all kids–need to know that they can count on one or more adults in their lives to guide them, to explain the quandaries of life to them, to show them how to open themselves to the experiences of the world and to model caring, compassion and resilience so they can develop these qualities themselves.

Biological parents can do this. Adoptive parents can. Gay parents, straight parents, same-race, interracial, same-faith or interfaith, mixed-political parents–these values and skills are possible across the spectrum.

The national ground is shifting on the question of whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry and therefore obtain legal recognition for their families, and thank goodness it is. The American Academy of Pediatrics is the latest important body to state publicly that it supports marriage and adoption rights for same-gender couples, releasing a statement earlier today noting that “[c]hildren thrive in families that are stable and that provide permanent security.” These families already exist, and we do them a disservice by failing to afford them the same legal recognition and protections we grant to heterosexual families in this country.

It’s heartening to see leaders like President Obama, Secretary Clinton and even Republican Senator Rob Portman come to the same realization.

What is not good about the forward motion of the legal recognition of gay and lesbian families is the collateral damage opponents are carelessly inflicting in their desperate attempts to stave off progress. Arguing against gay marriage in the Supreme Court last week, the National Organization for Marriage’s John Eastman called all adoptions, including those of Chief Justice Roberts’s two children, a “second-best option.” (more…)

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to run a guest post than I am to run this one by writer and mom, Veronica Brooks-Sigler.

That’s right, I said, “mom.”

Longtime readers may remember Veronica’s previous posts in which she shared some of her experiences as a prospective adoptive parent, including the heartbreak of a failed adoption.

Today, in her first of two posts, Veronica returns to share with us the best of all possible news: she’s a mom!  I encourage you to read this post if you’ve ever wondered if parenthood will ever happen to you, if you’ve ever been desperate, if you’ve ever thought, “How can I get past the sadness and keep going?”  Most importantly, I encourage you to read it because it’s a wonderful story and I couldn’t be more excited for Veronica.

And if you haven’t already, please join me in wishing Veronica and her family congratulations.  Now, of course, the parenting journey really gets interesting!

I’m a Mom

 “I’m a mom,” I said into the phone.

Silence.

“I’m a mom,” I repeated.

Fearing a student’s parent was calling for an intense discussion, my sister-in-law braced herself.

“Heather, it’s me, Veronica.  They are placing a baby with us.  We’ve named him Kellen William. We pick him up at the agency tomorrow.”

My sister-in-law uttered the exclamations and shared the confusion we heard and experienced from nearly everyone that day and for at least a month afterwards.

Why didn’t you tell us about this?

You had a baby?  I didn’t even know you were pregnant.

Huh?

Parenthood, though many plan it, is still a shock.  Much more so for me, my husband, and our families.

In the summer of 2011 my husband and I went through an adoption process that didn’t work out for us.  We had that little boy for less than two days.  Although we understood the birth family’s decision to keep the baby, we were devastated.  I began to feel as if I would never be a mother.

During November of 2011, I underwent surgery that was intended to jumpstart a potential biological pregnancy.  If you’ve ever been in this situation, you understand how desperate I was to become a mother.  I couldn’t stop smiling at other people’s children; I was sure these little people were telling their parents about the creepy lady in the checkout line at Rouse’s who kept staring at them.

My mother came to stay with me for a few days as I recovered from surgery.  Anyone who knows me knows it is hard for me to sit still or let other people do things for me; when my mother left, my husband insisted I spend a day in bed watching a marathon of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.  Feeling silly, I agreed.  Being in bed didn’t mean I couldn’t work on my computer and check my e-mail.

At 8:15 A.M., we received an e-mail from our adoption agency about a potential adoption situation (more…)

(Photo credit: WizzyWigg via Flickr.com)

Have you had “The Adoption Talk” with your child yet?  I haven’t, and I don’t plan to.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t talk about adoption.  On the contrary.  The topic can–and does–come up all the time.

Last Friday evening, for example, seven-year-old “Emmie” and I went out for a mommy-daughter sushi dinner.  Somewhere between the miso soup, the nigiri salmon and the whiplash-inducing conversation (regular readers know how Emmie likes to switch topics faster than the speed of light, and without warning), Emmie found herself attempting to describe a tiny object.

She held her thumb and index finger very close together.  “It’s like when I was this small in your tummy.”

Now Emmie knows well the facts of her origins as we’ve gone over them countless times.  But just to be safe, I didn’t want to let this slip go uncorrected.  “You weren’t in my tummy, remember?  You were in your birthmom’s tummy.”

Emmie: “When ‘Jack’ was in your tummy.  Whatever!”  Translation: Mommy, that’s not the point.  Duh!

Before we left this subject behind, however, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving her with any confusion or uneasiness.  I decided to offer one more comment.  “You were that small once, you know.  It’s just that you weren’t in my tummy then; you were in your birthmom’s tummy.”

She put on her contemplative face.  “Right.  So, I have a question.  Are you my real mom?”

I noticed that the dad dining with his young son at the table next to ours had stopped playing and become very quiet–as had his son.

“Well, honey, I think ‘real mom’ is kind of a silly term.  I’m your mom who loves you and takes care of you and will always be here for you.  I help you when you need help, we talk about things, I take you to dance and make you dinner and we do things as a family and we have fun together.  We laugh about things together.  I’ll always be here for you.  So yes, I’m your real mom.  But I’m not the mom you were born from.  That’s your birthmom.”

“Oh.”  She stuffed a piece of sushi into her mouth.

“You know, someday, when you’re older, you will learn about something called ‘genetics.”  Genetics is all about…”  At this point, I realized I had just stepped off the cliff and was about to lose my audience.  The light was flashing red.  “What I mean is that there are some things you got from your birth parents, like the color of your hair, and your skin.  Those didn’t come from me and Daddy.  But other things you do get from me and Daddy, like the things that we teach you…”

Emmie’s face took on that wry look that makes her look like a teenager and that is all her own.  “Well, you don’t really teach me that much.  That’s what school is for.  It’s my teachers who teach me.”

I burst out laughing, and we moved to another topic entirely.

____________________________

The asking and answering of The Big Question–Are you my real mom?–is one that many adoptive parents dread. (more…)

(Destiny? Photo credit: Jai Sanders via Flickr.com)

The words, “you were meant to be mine,” are so powerful, so full of love, that it’s tough to argue with them.  This phrase is uttered often by grateful adoptive parents in answer to questions from their children or third parties asking how a family came to be.  The response is meant to encourage, to celebrate.  “We were meant to be together.  Everything worked out as it should.”

But sometimes the best intentions can go astray.

At first glance, it’s hard to argue with the notion of destiny in adoption.  Fate can feel like a powerful force, and when a child in need of a home reaches parents who have been longing for a child, sometimes for years, we all rejoice.  We thank the destiny that has led us to this point, finally believing that all the hardships we’ve traversed on the road to parenthood had a purpose: to bring us to this child.  And this is what we tell ourselves, our families and friends, and our children, as discussed most recently in an August 15 post on the New York Times Motherlode blog written by Matthew Hutson.

I don’t deny that when I look at my two children–one my biological child via infertility treatments, one my child via international adoption–I have moments where I feel that somehow, destiny intervened to bring my children to me.

But even in those moments, I know that the notion that my daughter was somehow predestined to be mine reduces a crucial aspect of her identity.  She has a history, a part of her that is all her own that I can’t claim.  It’s made up of choices made by her birth parents and by me and my husband, and those choices combine to create her beginnings.  On different continents and without knowing each other, we each made decisions that would bring my daughter to me.  You could call it destiny.  But the truth is that if any of us had decided differently anywhere along the way, or even if a government delay had taken a month longer or a month less, my daughter would be someone else’s daughter right now.  Does it cause me a pang in my side to write that truth?  Yes.  But it is the truth nonetheless.

Any adopted child’s story begins with loss, the loss of her birth family.  To say that destiny preordained her membership in her adopted family is to say that destiny intended for her to be separated from her birth family. (more…)

(Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum, Royal Tenebaum’s “adopted daughter” in The Royal Tenenbaums)

Why do so many media stories qualify an individual’s child as his or her “adopted” son or daughter in stories having nothing to do with adoption?

There’s a tendency in the media to label unnecessarily the adopted children of some public figures.  These figures can be celebrities we idolize, like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, or people we hold in contempt, like Jerry Sandusky.  The media treatment their children receive is the same, because often, it has nothing to do with the actual story.

For example: as news of Cruise and Katie Holmes’s divorce spread like a pandemic in recent weeks, some discussion of Cruise’s older children from his earlier marriage with Nicole Kidman was inevitable.  And there it was: in this Hollywood Reporter article (found courtesy of Lisa Belkin at The Huffington Post), the gratuitous mention of “Cruise’s adopted daughter Isabella.”  In May, numerous articles ran highlighting nineteen-year-old Isabella’s independence and supposed reconciliation after a strained relationship with Kidman, and more than a few of these threw in the “adopted daughter” reference in the same manner.

In a more negative light, every story I saw about Matt Sandusky after he came forward alleging sexual abuse by his father referred to him as “Sandusky’s adopted son, Matt.”  What is the relevance of how Matt Sandusky came to be part of his family here?  How does whether or not he was adopted change the impact of any abuse he may have suffered?

Of course, if the purpose of a story is to discuss a child’s origins, or if a reporter is writing a piece about, for example, a celebrity’s adoption of a new baby, that’s different.  In that case, the adoption is the story.   But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Remember that movie from 2001, The Royal Tenenbaums? (more…)

Any way you look at this, it hurts.

On the most basic level, an innocent boy was shot to death.  A promising life was cut short and that is always a tragedy.  As the mother of two children, I can’t help but imagine for a terrifying half-second, “What if that had been my child?”  Then, unable to sustain that threat within my mind for even a full moment, I push it out, think of something else, something further from my own heart.

But that insupportable, irrevocable loss is only the opening point of this deep, deep wound.

The fact–yes, fact–is that I, as a white parent, enjoy a luxury that many parents of color in the United States in 2012 do not.  Like any parent, I worry for my children’s safety.  As my kids grow older and venture further into the world without me, I have to bite my lip to keep from constantly proclaiming to them all the world’s dangers.  But I don’t have to teach them that some people will twitch with an uneasy, visceral reaction to them, find them dangerous merely because of who they are on the outside.  I don’t have to teach my children that because of the color of their skin and their gender, their very existence may put their lives in danger.

What a horrible, terrifying lesson to have to impart to your child: that when he is out in the world, some, if not many of the people he encounters will view him as a lesser degree of human than everyone else.

But the African American parent must teach this lesson to her son.  She must, because if she doesn’t, he won’t be prepared for the realities he’ll encounter: the people who will cross a street to avoid walking next to him on a sidewalk, the police officers who will stop him to question him about “what he’s up to,” the self-appointed, armed neighborhood watchman who will decide he looks suspicious and will follow him, confront him and and injure or even kill him.

I have peeked into the tiniest corner of this world, and I’ve experienced, too, the denial of its existence.  When I first had to explain anti-Semitism to my own, seven-year-old son in response to a question he asked, I wrote a column about it and was accused of “using the [question] to frighten and warp her young son’s mind.”  I dread the talks I’ll someday need to have with my Asian daughter about the sexual objectification of Asian women, something I myself couldn’t believe I was seeing at first when I witnessed older white men directing inappropriate attention at “Emmie” before she was even four years old.  These are just a few of the racial and ethnic realities I have to integrate into raising my children.  Deny it all you want, but I am an irresponsible parent if I don’t prepare my children to cope with the realities of the world outside our home.

Yet, none of that compares with the father or mother who must teach his or her son the risks of walking on the street while being a young black male.

Ten-year-old “Jack” asked me about Trayvon Martin a few days ago. (more…)

It’s that time of the year: tax time.  (What?  You’re not excited?)

For the adoptive parent, adoption may be all about love and building a family, but there’s no question that it’s an expensive proposition in many, if not most cases.  The good news for adoptive parents is that the federal adoption tax credit offers some financial relief.  The bad (but not shocking) news is that the adoption tax credit is, well, let’s be blunt: it’s taxes.  So it’s complicated.

Please join me today in welcoming writer and tax professional Linda Lawrence to Uncharted Parent.  She’s going to untangle the adoption tax credit for you so that you can determine if the credit applies in your case, and, if it does, how you can claim it.*

Claiming the Federal Adoption Tax Credit for 2011

If you have adopted a child or were in the process of adopting a child during 2011, you may be eligible for a tax credit.  Depending on the total amount of your adoption expenses–as well as the circumstances of the adoption–you may be able to claim a portion or even the full amount of out-of-pocket expenses that you paid for the adoption when you file your 2011 year-end income tax return.

How Does the Adoption Tax Credit Work?

As previously stated, if you adopted a child or were in the process of adopting during the 2011 tax year, you may qualify for the adoption tax credit.  According to the IRS, the credit that you receive will lower your tax bill dollar-for-dollar.  Furthermore, if your adoption was finalized during the 2011 tax year, you may be able to receive a credit for additional expenses that you paid in past years.  Adoption expenses made in 2011 are considered to be refundable, which means that you may be entitled to a refund even if you owe no taxes.  (Note that unless Congress acts to change the law, the adoption tax credit will not be refundable for 2012.)

Children Who Are Considered Eligible

In order to be eligible for the tax credit, the child that you adopted must meet either of the following criteria:

• The child must be age 17 or under.
• The child can be any age if physically or mentally unable to care for himself and is either a US citizen or resident alien.

What Expenses Qualify for the Adoption Tax Credit? (more…)

(Photo credit: ellenantill via Flickr.com)

Wait, what?

“I thought I’m not supposed to do that,” you say.  “Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?  Aren’t you always saying to mind my own business unless I’m interested in possibly adopting a child myself?  Didn’t you write that snarky article, ’10 Things Not to Say to Adoptive Parents’ to try to get people to stop asking intrusive questions?”

All basically true.  But…

Recently, someone I didn’t know well at all asked me about six-year-old “Emmie,” and it was a conversation that began, “So, Emmie is adopted, right?”  This could have been one of those classic conversations that starts downhill and runs right off the rails of appropriateness.  But it didn’t.  This person managed to ask a series of questions about Emmie and her adoption, and at no point did I feel like she was violating any boundaries, being disrespectful of Emmie’s or our family’s privacy or passing judgment on any of us.

Snark, take a holiday.

I and others in the adoption community have written so much about how not to conduct oneself around adoptive parents, I feel obliged to share at least a few things I think this particular woman (let’s call her Sue) did right when asking me about Emmie’s adoption:

• Sue was not some random stranger approaching me in the grocery store. – I don’t know Sue well, but I know her.  Our sons have played on a sports team together for a while, and will be doing so for the foreseeable future.  The kids are getting to be friends and it makes sense for our families to get to know each other better.  Sue had invited our whole family over to her house for a small party.  In other words, our conversation about Emmie’s adoption took place in a larger, I’d-like-to-learn-more-about-you context. (more…)

(Photo credit: shainelee via Flickr.com)

You may remember writer and prospective adoptive parent Veronica Brooks-Sigler from her guest post in May, when she wrote about her first encounter with some of the surprising questions people ask about adoption–and the snarky answers she couldn’t help conjuring in response.

Veronica joins us now to share a very different chapter in her and her husband’s quest to become parents.  There isn’t any snark here, only one family-to-be’s story that will resonate with anyone who has found the road to parenthood longer and more winding than expected and, having finally reached the presumed destination, opened the door only to find more road hidden behind it.

 Nothing Abides

Children are just passing through. Whether we have them for eighteen years or five seconds, we don’t get to keep them.  Eventually, we have to give them away to the world, to another family.

Our agency, the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans (also known as “Catholic Family Charities”), sent us a note a couple of months ago instructing my husband Jeff and I that we needed to call as soon as possible.  We hopped onto Skype and discovered that they had presented our profile to a birth family without asking us first.  They had seen no potential “glitches.”  The birth family had chosen us and wanted to meet.

I bought a new outfit.  The mister paced the floors.  Then we had our first meeting with the family, whom we liked immediately.  In an open adoption this is crucial; we could envision ourselves having a holiday meal together.  We could see this family was just worried about logistics, being able to take care of yet another child.  Leaving the meeting, Jeff and I were positive but felt a bit strange as this family had so much love to give.  How would they be able to hand this new baby boy to us?

With the possibility of a placement, Jeff and I began to put things together in the baby’s room.  He surprised me by assembling the crib, the changing table, and a bookshelf on his own.  Always afraid he will make a mistake, he does not jump right into such projects.  I bought various pieces of local artwork for the walls.

We met the birth family again.  Anna* was adamant that adoption was her choice.  We exchanged numbers and e-mail addresses.  Though she was a bit reserved about contact, her father kept us in the loop.  The day Anna went into labor, her father sent me a text to pray for her.  I did.  I prayed, also, that the right thing would happen, no matter what that might be.

Upon giving birth, Anna had second thoughts (not surprising to us at all). (more…)

(What it felt like on the streets of Washington, D.C. last week--otherwise known as Salvador Dali’s famous painting, The Persistence of Memory)

I lived in the Washington, D.C. area for a long time–a total of ten years.  I always swore that if I moved away, I would never, ever return as a tourist during the hot, sweaty, crowded summer months.

So naturally, that’s exactly what I and my family just did.

We meant to take this trip in April, but for various reasons, it didn’t work out.  So last week, my husband and I packed up our kids and our minivan and headed to Washington, D.C. for a little vacation.  In what turned out to be the hottest week of the year on the Eastern Seaboard, we spent time with friends, sought out some rest and relaxation and revisited a few of our favorite area spots–with our kids.

I could provide you with a laundry list of what we did on our trip, but let’s be honest: you don’t really care.  Instead, here are some highlights of the sort that really matter:

Rest is boring

You would think I’d know by now that vacations with kids are not synonymous with rest and relaxation, but I guess I just keep hoping.  This means, of course, that I have to relearn my lesson every time.  By day three of our trip, I was so tired I felt like I was living with an infant again.  Why was this?  Let’s see…

• Morning 1: Son wakes me up at 6:15 to ask me if he can get up.
• Morning 2: Daughter wakes me up at 6:00 to tell me she’s awake.
• Morning 3: Carbon monoxide alarm at house of friends with whom we’re staying blasts us awake at 4:00 a.m.  We all trudge outside in our pajamas and toss everyone’s sleepy kids into our minivans as we wait for the burly Bethesda, MD firemen.  They show up in shorts and T-shirts against the 80-plus degree heat, check the house, give us the “all clear” and tell my friends to buy a new carbon monoxide alarm.  (Okay, so I guess I can’t blame this one on the kids, but I was already tired from the previous two mornings, so, you know…)

And so on.

There’s always mac and cheese…

Another way vacations with kids are not the same as before kids: they do not buy into that whole “variety is the spice of life” notion.  “What do you mean you don’t want to eat at any of these cute, fun cafés?  There are so many options.  Come on, we had pizza yesterday.  And the day before that…”

He loves me, he loves me not

I learned on this trip that my nine-year-old son, “Jack,” really loves me.  How do I know this? (more…)