Dear my fellow adoptive parents who spend too much time on the internet (especially those who adopted from China),
We have a lot in common, do we not? Mostly that we have kids that grew in another (likely Chinese) woman’s body and we spend too much time on the computer. We are sisters that way. Kindred spirits, even.
I have been watching the discussion unfold over at Rumor Queen as adoptive parents are faced (possibly for the first time) with the possibility that Chinese birth families might come looking for their children. My sisters, you are driving me crazy.
I can’t help but shake my head at the combination of panic and horror I am seeing. Oh, It isn’t the terrible terrible circumstances (such as confiscated or lost/ not abandoned children) that seem to be freaking you out, but the possibility that birth parents might come looking for their kids that is making you frothy with panic.
And you are also so cute, with your astonishment that it might be possible to (gasp! sputter!) search for birth parents in China, of all places. Especially when you were ASSURED by your ADOPTION AGENCY this would never, ever ever, ever be something you would have to think about.
Oh, how quickly things change from “honoring birth parents” to running in terror from the very idea of meeting them face to face.
My dear astounded friends, you have spent so much time composing long explanations about why you are not searching, it makes my head spin. There are too many of you to reply in person to you all, but fortunately, there is a strong groupthink to your posts.
If only I could tell you what I think when I read them. Oh wait, I have a blog. I can tell you what I want to reply:
- “I won’t search. It is my child’s decision to make.” Yes, but by not searching now, you ARE making a choice for their search to be much much much more difficult-if not IMPOSSIBLE- if they choose to search later.
- “I will help my child search once she is 18.” Were you a pillar of mental clarity at 18? I was a wreck. Why would you wait until the very minute your child moves out and doesn’t have your day to day support to begin such an emotionally risky venture? Why would you let him or her build their entire identity on unknowns before you try to find out the answers?
- “I don’t have the money to search.” Searching cost us less than $1000, including translations and all extraneous costs including DNA tests.
- Closely related to the one above: “I have heard birth families all want money.” Who did you hear that from? I know some adoptive families who offer financial assistance on their own terms to birth families, but I have never heard of any Chinese birth family trying to extort money from an adoptive family. And if they did? Well, it is certainly reasonable to say no. In fact, I know that many birth families are very uncomfortable with the very idea of receiving anything from the adoptive families.
- “I talked to an adoptee who told me they wouldn’t have wanted to know their birth parents when they were growing up.” Really? I talked to several who WOULD have wanted to know their birth parents. Maybe we should square all these adoptees off in an Ultimate Fighting Championship so we can get one Official Adult Adoptee Opinion On Open Adoption (OAAOOA) to base all our parenting decision on.
- My personal favorite: “I don’t believe in open adoption.” Uh…it isn’t a unicorn or a gnome. You don’t get to not believe in it. You get to choose not to participate in it (for now, at least) but let me assure you, it is real.
Myadoptive parent sisters (and even a few brothers), all this stuff is just excuses. It is a smoke and mirrors to avoid the real reason: You just don’t want to search. You don’t want to deal with the hassle of searching or the complicated situation of managing a relationship with a birth family. Heck, most of you want to be the only parents. You don’t want to share.
I understand that. Jeez, after the emotional upheaval of reunion, believe me, I understand it.
What I don’t understand is the need for all the excuses. Who is asking you to search? Certainly not me. Please don’t take my decision to search to be any kind of invitation/indictment/encouragement for other adoptive families.
I absolutely don’t think you should search. Heck, I don’t think half the people who are searching should search. They are clearly NOT READY. This is not something to be taken up on a whim. Searching means you are ready for a lifetime commitment to dealing with whatever you find at the other end.
The adoptive parents I have the most respect for are the ones who are honest and admit it: I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to share my child.
Just own it. Stop with the bullshit excuses.
I decided to search because there was one argument that canceled out all the rest for me: Knowing is better than not knowing. We can deal with the truth better than we can deal with a thousand imagined scenarios. An adopted child has a right to know her story or as much of it as is humanly possible to provide.
You could pile a thousand excuses on the other side, but I still believe knowing is better than not knowing.
If you don’t believe it, well, of course you wouldn’t search. Not only would you not want to, you shouldn’t.
I beg you, anonymous excuse-making adoptive parents on the internet, please don’t.
Yours Truly,
AmFam
P.S. To random strangers who don’t read my blog or know anything about me except that we found our daughter’s family: stop sending me private messages that say “Please tell me how to search!” I have written extensively on this topic. Do your research and THEN ask me. I am not wasting my time or sharing my private story with people who can’t even use GOOGLE. If you can’t figure out google, I guarantee your search and/or ability to manage a relationship with a birth family will not be successful.
PPS. To nonrandom strangers, people who have done their groundwork and regular blog readers: I am happy to give you advice about searching if I think I have anything to say you may not have considered. But don’t waste my time if you aren’t serious.
I would give you a big squishy hug right now if I could. And possibly, (okay I would) buy you a drink or six.
love it! i have often felt the sisterhood…but then there are all these sub groups, et. like how i’ve stopped reading rumor queen b/c i can’t stand that branch of the family anymore…
I would give you a standing ovation if you could see and hear me. So glad to see someone with real experience on this subject speak out. Thank you.
I don’t read Rumor Queen, but I’m guessing I know what brought on all of this surprise. If this is the first that adoptive parents have thought about meeting their child’s Chinese parents they certainly don’t have a child like mine.
She has been inquiring since she could speak about her Chinese parents – at the beginning of Kindergarten this year she drew a picture of her family – at the top, her Chinese family which included brothers and sisters, at the bottom just her and I.
I have started to gather as much information for her as I can, but I haven’t actively started a search. Like many we keep finding that information doesn’t match up and it is frustrating to say the least.
Do I think my 6-year-old is ready to meet her Chinese family, no – will she be ready when she’s 16 or 60, how could she ever be ready. There is no way I am going to let the path grow cold so that when she decides to search (and I know she will) there will be nothing left for her to find. Every once in awhile the subject of her Chinese Family will come up and she’ll say, “You’re doing everything you can to find them, right mama?”
How could my answer be anything but yes?
I know you are not a religious person, but may I just say, “AMEN, preach it sister!!!”
I’ve had my share of mixed feelings about looking for my girls’ birth parents, but ya know, those are MY feelings and not a mandate about what to do for the well being of my children. This happens often. I believe it is called parenting.
You are my hero.
~$1000 in expenses? I was given the impression the cost would be three times as much or more, and right now we don’t have that kind of money. That’s the #1 thing that has kept me from searching for my girls. #2 is time, but that’s another topic.
Thanks again for an insightful post.
Where did you get that impression? Most of the initial legwork didn’t cost anything at all.
I get the feeling many adoptive parents just want to pay someone to take care of the whole thing. In most cases, using a searcher is very likely to be unsuccessful anyway. Your best bet is probably to create a personal relationship with someone local. Thanks to the internet & google translate, that can be completely free.
Got the impression from a Birth Family Search group I was a member of a couple years ago. There was only one “right” way to do it, and it cost lots of $$, and you have to find the right contacts, and blah-blah-blah. You can probably guess who I am referring to. Fed right into the old inferiority complex.
Again, thanks for giving me hope that me and my kids can do this on our own.
I was SO glad to read your comment over on RQ (I “recognized” you in your comment.) I was dying reading some of the comments and honestly was embarrassed. Made me realize again why some adoptees do not look highly upon AP’s. I realize why some AP’s just don’t get it at all – because some kids have absolutely no interest in knowing about their past and their parents’ minds have never gone there either. A friend’s daughter, also adopted from China, is 11 and has no interest/desire in talking or knowing about her first family. Whereas our daughter is 4 and asks/talks about China and her family there all the time. What you have shared about your own search and your thought processes all along the way have helped me in so very many ways.
I was embarrassed by some of those APs, too. I can see how very angry I would be as an adult adoptee reading many of those comments.
Right on.
I don’t understand not wanting to know. I am probably among those “not yet ready” as we have only been home 18 months and I have not yet done my groundwork, emotionally or practically. But I am reading all I can. We just got contact with my daughter’s foster family and that is our first step. I am shocked how many people don’t know why we don’t want that contact either! How could I not want to know the person who raised my child for 14 months?? Boggles my mind. I understand wanting a closed adoption when you start – I did too. But years of reading later, and a real child in my arms, and I want all the history we can find.
Thank you for blogging and helping people like me make the first steps.
*like*
Hi and thank you for this post as well as the others over the past few months. I have really enjoyed reading about your family. you have opened my eyes to the possibilities as well as the emotions that are swirling around this topic. As a waiting parent is there any thing I should do when we are traveling to china to get our daughter. If you could do it all again, and this time start before you even pick her up, would you do any thing diffrently?
Speak it, write it, scream it loud and clear!!! I don’t read that site for reasons you have mentioned here, most of the readers make me want to wretch.
I found your blog through the much needed comment you left at RQ. We’re an expat family who has lived in China for almost 10 years.
I cannot imagine any Chinese family directly asking anyone for money. The entire society works off guanxi. Eventually, a family might ask for something, but that’s after years of having a relationship. And when they ask, they know they will somehow have to pay you back to save their face.
I’ve read each of your open adoption posts. They have given me a lot of food for thought. When we first adopted our daughter 16 months ago, I wanted to start searching for her birth parents, but then life got in the way… attachment… a move… a pregnancy…
I’m ready to do my research & prepare a plan for how to best search. Ironically, our move took us to our daughter’s province. So we now only live 4 hours or so from her birthplace. I do feel that this is our window of opportunity. We should try to find them while we live so close.
Thank you for your honesty.
I don’t think I have slogged through all of the comments over at RQ– it can run a gamut over there to say the least.
I like your reasoning, “Knowing is better than not knowing.”
I think that is basically what came out for me, although, I likely went about searching in the not best of ways– at this point, anyway.
In terms of searching and who should or shouldn’t– some adult adoptees are very adamant about it being their right to make this decision. I don’t disagree with them. I’ve also talked talked with adult adoptees whose a-parents waited until they grew old enough to say they wanted to search for their birth parents only to discover that their birth mom had already died. They indicated that they would have appreciated their a-parents searching. It is sad.
The truth is– there is no right or wrong answer to the searching questions. It really depends on the individual, family– a lot of factors. I do agree, stop with the BS excuses–own whatever it is you feel.
Commented.
Holy god.
You are fantastic.
I actually got banned from RQ years ago for voicing a contrary opinion, so I can’t read it any more. Glad you are over there providing the reality check-cheering you on!
I’ve been stuck in front of a brick wall on my search for a while, but I got a random email last week from someone in her home city, so I am starting again.
S is only 4, and gets very sad whenever I have to answer her question about her birthparents’ names with “We don’t know.” Perhaps she would be less conscious of this if we didn’t know so much about her brother’s birthparents, but I think this is mostly who she is and how she feels about things. She wants to know that they’re ok. I always intended to search at some point, but I thank you for making me realize a couple of years ago the urgency in terms of information disappearing. And I thank my son’s birthmother for making me realize that, however dire her circumstances, she just needs to know he’s ok.
great post. the same sort of reaction is happening on one of the guatemala adoption websites and it makes me livid.
Haven’t been around the blogosphere much in recent months, so this is going to seem like a drive-by comment, but I wanted to reiterate what Reena said – we APs need to do our best to identify and own our own “stuff” as we make decisions about searching on behalf of our kids or not. Like Reena, I have had the ear of many adult adoptees who find it appalling that APs would initiate a search on their child’s behalf, because that represents one more facet of that adoptee’s experience where a choice was taken away from them. I have also had the ear of equally many adult adoptees who find it appalling that APs would NOT initiate a search on their child’s behalf because they feel that searching is part of the AP’s obligation to fostering their child’s emotional well-being/identity development. With adult adoptees voicing two very disparate but valid recommended paths for APs, I think each needs to be considered carefully, and looked at in the context of ones’ particular child or children’s emotional needs. But APs have to identify and “own” their own investment in either path to be able to get to making this question about your child’s needs and not your own.
i am with you. ihave used the no money thing to not search. i am going to start an account today to save up to search
b4 i was an aparent, i wanted closed adoption. being an aparent makes me regret that thought process. hindsight is 20/20.
Thanks for the sanity. Have you ever screamed at the computer? That’s how I felt reading RQ the last couple of days.
I’d forgotten why I left alot of yahoo chinese adoption groups and that discussion just brought it all back.
I did chuckle to see your comment appear as I’d been wondering what you were thinking.
Now back to real life..
Thumbs up. I wondered what you thought of that post and all the comments, though I haven’t read through everything yet (just got back from mini-vacation!).
How does one find a local contact in our child’s area? We do keep in contact w/ the orphanage staff (via snail mail, they didn’t have email back in 2005 and still don’t! !!!) but it is difficut since none of them speak English and the only time we have had a reply was via video, when we sponsored someone to go there (she was also not from that province but traveled there for us). Our guide from our adoption travels a lot and no longer resides in the province full time, our daughter’s foster mother has moved to another city w/ her adult children and the orphanage is steadfast in refusing to give us her new address. Not much English is spoken even in the capital of our daughter’s province and it has been discouraging, to say the least. I have suspicions that our daughter’s foster family may have connection to her birth family but this is largely based on a gut feeling, I have almost nothing to back it up. If you have any tips on finding a local contact in a more remote area of China, I would be grateful to hear them. My daughter’s city is area rural, and fairly poor, and access to technology is an issue, I think. We have the resources to make a trip to China in the next couple years and I would love to have some connections by that time.
“You just don’t want to search.”
You are absolutely right. I don’t. (And I wouldn’t even have to try that hard – I have her name and the address where she was living when my daughter was born. That is HUGE, a HUGE amount of information which I happen to have because my daughter is Vietnamese, not Chinese.)
I do keep in contact with my daughter’s foster family. But I don’t think it’s any of my business to contact her birth mother. My name and address were provided to her. I am not hard to find. If my daughter wants to look for her when she’s older, that is a bridge I will cross. But you’re right – the bottom line is, it’s a kettle of fish I will not peek into of my own volition. If she wanted to be contacted, she would have contacted me. This is about her life too (the birth mother) – and I don’t think it’s my place to rock her boat.
On the one hand, AmFam, I see your point, I do. Personally, were I in your position, I would search. But your post crosses a line, I think. There are people who simply do not agree with you. They don’t want to search, like LawMommy, because they don’t want to. Period. It’s their perogative to believe that it’s a bad idea, that their child isn’t ready, or whatever. Your post sounds as though you think that these people are stupid or cowardly or coming up with excuses. Is that what you meant? Because I think that some people just don’t agree with you. And that should be okay.
Further, not everyone has your level of sophisication, your determination, or, for that matter, your amount of free time. As a working mom of two, it would be nothing short of momentous for me to undertake what you did. I am grateful to get dinner on the table and clean socks on my kids’ feet, while still getting my job done and finding time to talk to and enjoy my kids. I would imagine that a lot of other people are in the same boat. I’m not saying that I couldn’t do what you did. I just hope that you can bring yourself to appreciate that not everyone has the hours to think about these issues, much less follow through.
Lawmommy, your situation is so very different from what many adoptive families of Chinese children have. You have your daughter’s birthmother’s name and address, and contact with her foster family, and if your daughter chooses to search when she is older she will have a place to start. Many of us don’t even have that much. Searching is a very different thing in that case, and the fear that if we don’t find out what there is to be find now, the trail will be utterly cold in 15 or 20 years when our kids are adults.
And Jaimie, did you READ the post, or any of the posts about finding Chinese families? AmFam isn’t saying anyone should search. She pretty much straight up says you SHOULDN’T if you’re not ready. It’s the infuriating aspect of all the freaking excuses people are making. Just own it. And the insinuation that AmFam spent time on this she should have been spending making dinner for her family? Really?
And one last thing, before I take a break from this blog (which I am sure will be a win-win for everyone). I did not mean to insinuate that AmFam should have spent time with her family instead of searching. What I meant is, some people really do not have time to search. It’s not an excuse, it’s how it is. How you made that leap, I have no idea, but I’m sorry if I implied that, because I didn’t mean to.
Wait, Amber – your kids wear clean socks?
Heh.You of all people know they don’t. We are lucky if they can find any socks at all, never mind clean ones.
Jen, what I am saying is that maybe it isn’t excuses. Maybe it’s the truth, and that’s honestly what they feel. Maybe not everyone has the ability to do what AmFam did on their own, for free. And even if it is an excuse, SO WHAT?
Who are you to judge? Let them have their excuses, the way that they parent is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. And the way that you parent is none of theirs. People are different and come to different places via different paths. Some of these comments and the post itself (sorry to be rude) have such an air of superiority…..
I am perfectly capable of owning it: I am not searching. I am not ready. My life is a crap-fest of monumental proportions and I just cannot phantom opening that door. I have the means and the time and a frigging chinese-speaking nanny in my house and I’m not searching. And when my kids resent me for it in 20 years, I will own that too.
Then again, maybe I’ll fee different next year or next month or next week and then I’ll scramble to make up for lost time and come back and read your tips and figure it out.
But I agree with you 100%: people make a ton of excuses instead of just saying: I’m not ready, it’s not for me, not now. Maybe not ever. And you know what, that has to be fine too. Not every one will find their birth parents and for some that will be hard to live with.
Now I’m going to go check my kids sock drawers because I’m pretty sure they are still filled with the original 7-pack of babysocks I bought 5 years ago!
“If she wanted to be contacted, she would have contacted me.”
How do you know that? Was it specifically said from her own mouth or from a translator who spoke with her?
I wasn’t aware this type of information was even given to “birth” mothers.
“Let them have their excuses, the way that they parent is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.”
Well yes, but eventually their kids will ask about it. Not every child wants to search. But frankly, that line quoted above sounds like it’s more about the adoptive parents. Searching is usually done by the adoptive parents, since a child is too young to do a search. But you know, it’s about the child too.
I know that they were provided to her because they were also provided to my daughter’s foster mother. And less than six months after we came home, I had an email from the foster family, which they found by googling my name. My name is unique enough that I am the only one with that name that shows up in a google search, and if her foster mother, as impoverished as she was, could find me, her birth mother could. And yes, I am aware that this information is not provided in Chinese adoptions. My daughter was adopted in Vietnam, a country that requires me to send a report about my daughter’s status every year until she is turns 18, and it is my understand that those records are also made available, should the birth mother request them.
I appreciate that my situation is different – different country, older child, a child who was relinquished and not abandoned.
P.S. There is no such thing as being “ready” for what happens during a search. You can never truly be “ready.” There is a mindset of waiting it out until you feel you can handle it, but there is only so much “ready-ness” you can brace yourself with.
“Not every one will find their birth parents and for some that will be hard to live with.”
Not every adoptive parent? Or not every child?
Okay, I can understand *you* not being ready – but what about your child? If the child showed general curiousity, and you had the means to search – would you do it, knowing YOUR CHILD was curious?
If I’m reading this right, you’re saying here: “I’m not ready, and I have the means, but I’m just not ready and besides not every child will want to search and so be it if they resent me 20 years from now.”
You’d rather they resent you for having the tools to search now and get any info they can, rather than going against your own fear and finding the info and having them resent you for doing that without their “permission”?
Really?
Because that honestly doesn’t make sense. I would think you’d want them to resent you for having done the search “for” them rather than taking the chance of not having ANY info in the future. Because if they ever want to search in the future, they’d have nothing to go on.
I’m saying I’m not ready. I am owning that. *I* am NOT ready. So it can’t happen. I own that, and I will own any resentment that brings from my child later on. But I cannot in good conscience do something that I am not ready to do, even if it’s for my child.
I don’t think every adoptive parent *owes it* to their child to search. I really don’t believe that. it’s the right thing for some people and it’s not the right thing for others. Just because it’s not a logical explanation doesn’t mean it’s wrong – it just is.
Now, if and when my kids ask, I will move heaven and earth to help them, and if I fail, I will own that failure too. But you will not convince me that I owe it to them to do it. I am not bullshitting anyone, just like AmFam said: I am owning MY decision. it’s mine and my husband’s to make. We don’t want to open that door, it was one (not the only one, but one) of the reasons we chose closed international adoption.
[...] I was letting it go, really I was, but then you had to go and call me sophisticated and said I have an air of superority.. Damn, sophisticated? I was shooting for [...]
“I am owning MY decision. it’s mine and my husband’s to make.”
And it affects your child too. Even more when s/he grows up to become an adult.
every decision I make every day affects my child: where to send her to school, which religion to impose on her, what food I feed her. Yes, this is a big one with many repercussion, but so was raising them in a Jewish modern-orthodox kosher family. Nothing we decide is done lightly or without a large amount of thought, and no drive-by commenting on a blog is going to convince me to change my mind about a decision that we have made as a family: we are not ready to search.
When they are older, they can resent me for any and all of the parenting decisions we made.
See, I have a ton of respect for FixerMamma because she is being totally honest. She doesn’t want to search and she isn’t ready to search. It is a huge responsibility and and isn’t one you can just coast your way through once contact is made. You need to be damn sure you can do the right thing.
I really don’t think searching is for everyone, but let’s not lie to ourselves and our children about the reasons. Those lies are just one more burden on the adoptees who have to pretend they believe that crap.
One aspect that has influenced my attitude to searching (beyond my prior misconception that it simply wasn’t possible) is that what my daughter’s birth parents did is a crime in China, and, by finding them, it could be putting them in a difficult-to-dangerous situation. I would appreciate it if AmFam could touch on it, since she has had a successful search. I think it is a valid concern, not an excuse, but if I am off base that this is an issue for birth parents in China, I’d like to know. Thanks.
It’s true that not every kid wants to search, but I wonder, sometimes, how much “not wanting to search” is the equivalent of “I know it would upset my aparents and I love then and I don’t want to upset them and therefore I don’t want to search.” There’s a chicken-and-egg argument there — which came first, the aparents not wanting to search or the kid’s?
I’m just catching up and “it isn’t a unicorn” may just be one of my favourite responses ever.
This was a really great post, but I just might have to steal this one:
“Do your research and THEN ask me. I am not wasting my time or sharing my private story with people who can’t even use GOOGLE.”
Mwahahahaha. THANK YOU.
Kristen recently posted..one nice thing about having four kids
Julie said:
“It’s true that not every kid wants to search, but I wonder, sometimes, how much “not wanting to search” is the equivalent of “I know it would upset my aparents and I love then and I don’t want to upset them and therefore I don’t want to search.” There’s a chicken-and-egg argument there — which came first, the aparents not wanting to search or the kid’s?”
If you asked my mom she would tell you I just wasn’t that curious…for exactly the reasons you state. I don’t correct mom’s thoughts now simply because there is no point – what’s done is done.
Sadly when my records were opened by the courts for good cause – I found a grave.
Now I wish I had spoken up as a youngster as they would have found a way…just like when I needed my family health history when I got sick, mom petitioned the courts for me.
You ROCK!! LOVE this post!
You are right right right. Im so sick of reading and hearing “its impossible to find birth parents in China” Our own determined but amateur bumbling investigations have already turned up priceless information for our kids. We will not give up and Im very confident (big statement I know) that one day we will find and meet our kids families in China.
[...] ONE is saying you should search. In fact, I have come around to telling people DO NOT SEARCH. This is not a time to go with the peer-pressure (assuming one can have peer pressure from [...]