One night, ten years ago, my brother and his wife called me from a hotel in a small town: "We have our baby girl," my brother said, "and she's so beautiful." They had learned only the day before about the birth of the daughter they were about to adopt. After picking up a car seat and a few pieces of clothing, they rushed to catch a plane to pick her up and bring her home. They had waited so long for her arrival, and now they barely had an extra diaper. "Where is she going to sleep?" I asked. "We tried the drawer, but she cried," they answered.
Sarah was my brother's first child, and our family's joy in her was immeasurable. We were transfixed by her; we sketched her luminous face as she lay sleeping, and danced around the room with her when she was awake. But we had numerous questions, too, about what being an adopted family would mean.
Raising a family, any family, demands what is best in us and often brings out what is worst. It requires us to understand what we sometimes don't, tries our patience, and rewards us with an unparalleled kind of love. Would an adoptive family be even more demanding? How difficult would it be to answer Sarah's questions about being adopted? Would even the smallest problem be seen as an "adoption problem"? We wondered, too, about how Sarah would feel about being adopted. Would she feel a sense of loss? Would she know deep in her heart that we were her family? And how might her thoughts and feelings change throughout her life?
These questions weighed on me, as well as on her parents, not only because they are valid questions, but because my brother's and my own childhood resonated some with Sarah's adoption. As the children of parents who grew up in rural central European villages and survived the Holocaust, my brother and I had had to integrate our parents' vastly different lives, and their dramatic, bewildering history, into who we were in our normal, modern life in America. Both of us wondered if Sarah, as an adopted child, would face similar challenges integrating her bewilderment about her origins and the different way she came to her family into a solid sense of who she was. For myself, the only way to address all of our questions, I decided, would be to listen to the stories of other adoptive families.
Once I began talking to people, almost everyone revealed some personal experience with adoption; a recent study states that six in ten Americans have such a connection. Whether they themselves, a family member, or close friend have adopted, or were considering doing so, adoption was clearly more a part of people's lives than I had imagined. Though comprehensive national statistics on adoption are virtually nonexistent, we do know that there are six million adopted people in America and that more than 120,000 children are adopted every year. The number of international adoptions in this country has more than doubled since the early 1990s, and 8 percent of all adoptions are interracial.
Today, attitudes about adoption are more open than ever before, particularly among the generation that waited to become parents later in life and who have turned, in record numbers, to adoption as a way of creating a family.
The families that appear in these pages all adopted children younger than six months old. After that period, infants become more attached to their first caregivers, and the separation from them tends to change the nature of their future attachments. Since I wanted to learn how much or little adoption comes into play when all other influences in a family are equal, it was important to have a level playing field--that is, relatively similiar conditions for bonding.
Given issues of privacy, I couldn't represent every aspect of adoption or every adoptive situation. Parents and children experiencing difficulties were uncomfortable speaking publicly for fear of compromising their privacy. But many of the older adoptees I interviewed were quite open about their childhood problems, and whether or not they thought those problems had any connection with being adopted.
Finally, though I interviewed gay and lesbian parents, I did not include their stories, because their children's issues spoke more to their unique family structures than to having been adopted.
To tell the story of the adoptive family, I spoke with parents, children, grown adoptees, and birth mothers in almost every kind of adoptive situation: domestic, foreign, open, semi-open, and closed. I also spoke with families in which there is a mixture of biological and adopted children, which brings still another dynamic to the family.
In open adoptions, which are becoming prevalent today, there is direct contact among birth parents, adoptive parents, and children, either from the beginning or after the adoption. Most adoptions are semi-open, meaning contact between families is made via letters, pictures, gifts, even meetings, all arranged anonymously through an intermediary, such as a lawyer or an agency. Closed adoptions allow for no contact between birth parents and the adoptive family. Most, though not all, international adoptions are closed.
All of these life stories are by turns moving, wonderful, surprising, and always impressive with both individual and universal truths. Nearly every adopted child, young or grown, told me he or she felt "special" because he was adopted. Some children felt the possibility of having been simply rejected by their biological parents, while others understood why their biological parents couldn't raise them. Many parents echoed over and over the words of one mother--"In the end, I think all of us do feel that we got the children meant for us"--though some worried that their children might feel a sense of loss in being adopted.
Grown adoptees described some of the emotional dynamics that occur at different life passages. Many warned that it's not unusual for an adopted adolescent to say, "I don't have to listen to you. You're not my real mother." As devastating as this may sound, each person said he or she had never meant it, but knew it would have the desired effect. These and other observations provided such valuable insights and lessons that I felt tempted to put up a billboard letting all adoptive parents know what might be coming, but not to worry. On that billboard I would also write, "Be honest; your children can handle it."
"I know one thing for sure," said one nine-year-old girl, "your parents are your parents. The people who raise you and take care of you are your parents." In the year and a half I spent meeting and interviewing the people whose stories follow in these pages, I felt fortunate to hear such wisdom and so much good sense about the role adoption plays in a family. My perceptions were widened by seeing the open hearts and minds who created these inspiring and quite regular families, and by the people who grew in understanding because of their particular experience of life. I hope their stories tell you what you need-and long-to know.
Excerpted from Be My Baby. Copyright c 2000 by Gail Kinn. Reprinted with permission by Workman Publishing.