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The pain of adoption
In talks and playshops, an adoptive mom explores the sadness that, she says,
underlies all adoptions
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
GABRIELLE GLASER
Jane Brown is an adoption social worker and educator who long ago gave up on
the notion of being popular. She gets reams of scathing e-mail, and at talks
she leads around the country, she gets insulted by the very people who pay to
hear her. But she will not back away, she says, from discussing the painful
truth of the whole social enterprise: that loss is central to adoption.

With her soft voice and warm demeanor, it is hard to believe that this
diminutive woman could be a lightning rod for anything. But she is unyielding
with her message -- and it is only modestly tempered by the fact that five of
her eight children were adopted from China and South Korea.

Brown insists on laying bare the sadness she believes flows through adoption in
steady undercurrents. It is her mission to sensitize adoptive parents to the
pain children feel over the loss of their birth parents, and, for the
increasing number of international adoptees, the loss of their homelands,
language and culture.

"Once I believed I could shape how my kids thought about adoption, too," said
Brown, 50, in a recent interview from her Phoenix, Ariz., home. "I had to learn
that I couldn't. I can't. And neither can they," she said, speaking of other
adoptive parents.

According to the U.S. Department of State, nearly 22,000 foreign-born children
were adopted by American citizens last year, up from about 20,000 in 2002 and
8,100 in 1989.

Brown's message is embraced by many adoption officials, who sponsor her
nationwide talks and "playshops," sessions in which she talks to adopted
children about their feelings. She will be in Portland this weekend.

Adoption workers say that many parents who adopt have their own sorrow over
pregnancies never achieved, births never experienced. But Brown says adopted
children struggle with their own pain -- often secretly.

Frequently, she said, adoptive parents underestimate, or gloss over, the void
adopted children experience when they lack a connection to their ancestry,
their medical history, their native culture.

"It is unfair for adoptive parents to try to get their kids to believe that
they are the exclusive parents," she said. "Only if adoptive parents can talk
openly and matter-of-factly about the birth parents, and not be threatened or
jealous, can kids be honest about how they think and feel."

She knows she makes people angry when she tells them that adopted children want
to hear about their conception and births, as all children do. But too often,
Brown said, adopted children are told only about the moment they are adopted.
"This leaves the children feeling like aliens who didn't even come into the
world as other people do," she said.

But what really tends to raise ire is her frank comment that international,
transracial adoption, is a "fifth-best choice." The first, she believes, is for
children to remain with their birthparents; second-best is for a child to be
adopted by, or remain with, a member of the extended family; third-best is to
be raised by people of the same race in the country of one's birth, and
fourth-best is to be raised by members of the same race outside the country of
one's birth.

Yet adoption in many countries, particularly South Korea and China, is uncommon
at best, a fact Brown acknowledges. Her prescription for what to do with
abandoned children is more a plea than a concrete plan.

"Those of us in adoption owe it to these kids to do everything worldwide to
give women more power, so they don't have to make these tough, horrible
decisions, so they don't have to lose their kids," she said.

Kate Commerford is a Portland psychologist with many clients who are adoptive
parents. She said that many clients simply do not want messages such as Brown's
to be true, she said. "The thought is: 'Don't tell me my child is sad in any
way connected to adoption. I don't want them to be sad in the first place, but
I really don't want them to be sad about their adoption.' "

Commerford went on: "Parents are thinking, 'I'm not sad about adopting this
child, I love this child.' Particularly if it is a transracial adoption, the
parent thinks, 'This child has opened my eyes to all sorts of things.' "

But Brown touches a deep nerve, she said. "If you want to have children and you
can't, there's an assault to your sense of self. For many, the pain associated
with that goes away. For some it goes underground, and others, after they
become parents, are just too busy."

Brown reminds people that they are different in a way they didn't necessarily
want to be, Commerford said. "They're thinking, 'Here you're telling me this
difference is hard for my child, and I don't want anything to be hard for my
child.' They don't want that to have to be there. So (hearing it) can be a
shock."

Most often, Brown said, it is parents of young children who are most angry with
her. But by the time children reach the age of 6 or 7, they begin to ask
questions, and share feelings about their birth parents. Sometimes, anger and
sadness are displaced, Brown said. "They'll get a scratch at the playground and
cry buckets over a tiny scrape."

Lynn, a nurse and adoptive mother of two in east Multnomah County who asked
that her full name not be used to protect her child's privacy, said the
trajectory Brown described was familiar. Since she adopted her daughter
domestically eight years ago, she has exchanged letters with the child's birth
mother twice a year. The girl knew little more about her birth mother than her
first name, but longed to learn more.

After attending Brown's playgroups last summer, Lynn's daughter became even
more curious. Once, during a trip to Safeway, the girl heard her birth mother's
name called over the intercom, and asked to go to the front of the store on the
outside chance it was her. "She looked for her everywhere," Lynn said.

So, through their agency, Lynn and her daughter wrote the birth mother a
letter, asking if it would be possible to meet with her. This past summer,
birth mother and daughter met twice. "Now she no longer has to imagine her
mother," Lynn said. "That void for her has been filled."

For Lynn, the new relationship is liberating. "It's not threatening to me at
all," she said. "For her to have all the pieces is so helpful."

Indeed, Brown asserts often that when people don't know their history, it
affects everyone: future mates, children and grandchildren. "It's never just a
single person. You have to see the whole picture."

Of course, there are burdens on adoptive parents, too. Particularly in
transracial adoptions, parents often feel "inauthentic, or unentitled," Brown
said. "We are constantly butting up against the comments of strangers: 'Where
are her real parents?' and, 'Can you imagine anyone letting go of this
beautiful child?' "

To thwart such commentary, Brown suggests that families live in racially
integrated neighborhoods in diverse cities, and that they cultivate
relationships with members of their child's race.

Brown often counters charges that she groups adult adoptees as somehow
"dysfunctional," which she calls "absurd."

"They're great people with great lives and jobs and families," she said. "They
are not walking around as the crazed walking wounded. But they're functional
people who are angry about what they experienced because their parents didn't
know."

She sighed. "Our children adore us. There is no question about that. They love
us as much as they love the parents they were born to," she said.

"It's just that most would prefer not to have lost a set of parents first."



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A good friend will come and bail you out of jail . . . but, a true friend will
be sitting next to you saying, "Damn . . . that was fun!"
-----Unknown