Categories: uncategorized
Date: 24 August 2006 14:46:52
I recently spoke to an American friend of mine (hi there, if you're reading) about adoption etc. She's is adopting a wonderful wonderful little baby boy from Guatemala (I've seen the photos! So CUTE!). And I admited to not really understanding how the adoption process works in the U.S. and she more or less told me "every country is different in that respect! And we're adopting from Guatemala, so that will be different too."
I have figured out from all of my adoption internet research that the adoption cultures in America and the UK are very very very different. So many of the American sites that I've seen have photos of babies and the US adoption shops have adoption announcements aobut "our new baby" and the books talk about breastfeeding adopted babies and the children's adoption books are about "chosen babies". . . it's a different world from here.
Yes, I realise that in America there are many fostered children to be adopted too. But here in the UK, no one talks about meeting a birth mother before she has given birth or the "gift she is giving to another woman" or the positives of "relinquishment". (ok, there's that word again. "relinquish" is the word that is used in the UK when they talk about a woman who chooses to have her new baby adopted rather than the state removing child in danger from a birthmother. i don't like the term, but i refuse to use the term "given away". how does that make a child feel? and the adoption language that is used in the U.S. such as "to make a family plan" just isn't appropriate here. It's not making a family plan, it's sometimes staking out a house til the abusive parent leaves then taking the child into custody!!! this is too long of a parentheses. language for another entry then.)
Here it is so rare for adoption to be a birth mother's choice that it simply isn't spoken of, or even proffered as a possibility. Whereas I have even seen American adoption agencies who try to match up adoptive parents and birth mothers as soon as she's made the decision to have her unborn baby adopted so that the birth mother and adoptive parents can begin a relationship between them that will include the birth mother in the child's upbringing. That's making a family plan.
In the UK the majority of adoptions are of older children who have been stuck in the foster care system for years going back and forth from foster mum/dad to birth mum/dad (after help from social services) then back again when it doesn't work out the second, third and so on time. (I still don't know how many times could be the most) Finally social services will decide that that's it, birth parents can't get it together and it's not going to work, time to adopt.
Now in the UK, birth families (mums, dads, grandmas, siblings etc) are often involved (this is called "open adoption.") either through prearranged meetings with the child on neutral and supervised ground through the social worker/adoptive parents, or through "letterbox contact" where the birth parent will send a letter to their birth child to the agency who will forward it on to the parents (to keep addresses and whereabouts secure. In the region of the UK in which I live, they won't even arrange an adoption in the same geographical area in order to avoid those uncomfortable trips to Tescos where child and "old mummy" unexpectedly bump into each other over the ice cream freezers.) Open adoption is stressed as often being very important (I say often because, sometimes in individual situations it will be more disruptive than nurturing) and although some adoptive parents find this a very difficult issue to come to terms with, our (naieve??) feeling is that we'll be ok with it.
Think about it. Children love their mum and dad. Even if mum and dad can't nurture them and the state decides that the child will never thrive in the birth parents' home, and the child gets new parents, they will have suffered such a loss. They won't stop loving mummy because she forgets to feed them. And you can imagine how most birth parents must feel when they lose their little one to someone who is now called mummy and daddy. That's why our pre adoption trainer instructed us to say to our child when they ask why they aren't with mummy anymore that "your mummy couldn't take care of children so now we're you're mummy and daddy becasue we can" (or something like that) instead of "your mummy couldn't take care of you" which causes the child more grief and feelings of it being their fault.
phew! that stuff is deep down and tough.
I asked a couple of (british) adoptive parents "If your children call you mummy and daddy, what do they call their birth parents whom they still see?" She said "They call them "old mummy" and "old daddy"."
woah! Not ready for that bit yet. But I also realise that the further you go down this road, the more that the culture of it becomes normalised to you. Things that are everyday thoughts and beliefs to me now completely freaked me out at first. And no matter how much you can have gut feelings and intuitions about what is right and what is wrong about the world as we know it or about adoption in a hypothetical sense before you do it, you've got to trust the ones who have been there before. There are tried and tested means, and sometimes you've just got to trust.