The magazine Adoptive Families (AF) is since long the go-to magazine of the powers that be in adoption. It is supported by ads from adoption agencies and other businesses in the human reproduction industry. The AF writers are professionals in the sense that they make their living in adoption, as social workers, academics, free lance writers. The focus of AF is so much on the parents and the happy mythology of adoption success, a narrative the parents (and the agencies) need to keep going and adopting, that I call the magazine in my mind Adoptive Parents. The less happy perspective of – not to confuse with stories about – first parents and the perspective of adult adoptees in the raw and unsanitized form is completely lacking.
The imagery of the magazine shows its true colors: sweet and cuddly babies and toddlers in all colors and here and there a picture of a sad, but not too sad mostly black orphan. When I receive the magazine by mail and read it, and compare it with what I have read on adoption in books, blogs, magzine, newspapers and websites since the last issue was published, I don’t see any similarity between their adoption world and my world. Their world is happy, and, yes, with troubles for sure, but troubles you can overcome, stories with difficult starts but good endings: adoption soup for the soul. In their world adoption is a ‘loving’ choice for a ‘safe and stable’ home of a ‘forever family’. My adoption world is of one of paradoxes, ADHD, re-homing, race issues, irreconcilable feelings, stories with unclear beginnings and endings, fraud, corruption, coercion, American neo-colonialism and exceptionalism, and discussions on adoption ethics. In my world ‘adoption’ is a solution of last resort, a questionable solution for problems that often could have been solved in a less earthmoving way. My ‘loving’ choice is to be real, because I think our kids are best helped with the reality of their own lives and their first families; and because I believe that they need unadorned, not sugary, make believe love. For me, and my husband our kids are not born ‘in our hearts’, but they grew in the wombs of their mothers and had a vaginal birth.
Sometimes reality kicks in even in Adoptive Families. Not intended, however, but accidental. This season – like every season – Adoptive Families has a photo contest. Readers were this time asked to send in a photo under the motto Mommy & Me and many of them do so of course. On the webpage (http://www.adoptivefamiliescircle.com/...) you can see a parade of cuteness and under each of the images you can see how many times visitors viewed the picture.
The median amount of views is 250, but two pictures stand out. One is called ‘The Last Day’. It shows a mother on the day before she gives up her child. It has 2500 views. The other is called ‘The moment I’d waited for all my life’. You see an adoptee hugging her now elderly first mother at their first encounter after relinquishment hundreds of years ago. It has 2350 views. There is nothing cuddly in these photos. They are dramatic, heartbreaking. They show the painful perspectives of the first mother and the end of the difficult road to reunion of the adoptee and her first mother. The fact that these two pictures, which were send in by first mother activist Claudia d’Arcy of the renowned blog Musings of the Lame, and by Catalin Davies, the fact that these two pictures got the most views by far, shows that the adoptive parents who read that magazine might be more enlightened than the editors. The parents seem to be interested to be informed about the other side of adoption, about those others in the world of adoption which they entered most of the time quasi ignorant.
This little somewhat subversive invasion of the ‘others in adoption’, the first parent and the adult adoptee, will force the editors of the Mommy & Me competition at least to think, because they will see the same numbers as I did. Are they going to let one of these popular photos win? And: If there is so much interest in the other side of adoption shouldn’t that reflect in their editorial formula?
The competition closed last Friday and I will update this post when the winners are announced.
This post is part of a piece I wrote for a presentation at the 8th Biennal Adoption Initiative Conference: Sleeping Giants in Adoption: Power, Privilege, Politics, and Class. May 29-31, 2014. St. John’s University, Queens, New York