Earth mother, sky mother
My husband and I were at the Lake Harriet bandshell, sitting on our blanket among hundreds of people, too far back to see, but close enough to hear Neal and Leandra singing in the summer night. Looking up at the clear, starry sky-it came to me. We can do this. It’s a lot of work, a lot of money, we’re getting old, there are hundreds of practical reasons not to, but we can. We can and we will adopt a child.
I was the leader of this brigade. After nine years of marriage, my husband maintained he could go either way, a position both comforting and frustrating. He was happy with our slow, steady lifestyle: two cats, pleasant jobs, childless friends, nieces and nephews to play with and send home again. I was not unhappy, which is one reason why, after years of not getting pregnant, I hesitated to push too hard. Did I really want children that much? I wasn’t sure. But as I approached-and passed-40, a nagging continued inside of me. Never have children? It made me sad. But the idea of massive fertility treatments made me ill. Drugs, ovarian stimulation, daily ultrasounds, in vitro…it was fine for others, but my own body recoiled at the thought. But adoption? The money, the risk, the unknown, the hassle…this was not my first choice either. I wanted it to be easy, a happy surprise that evolved into a healthy pregnancy and a cheerful child. But that didn’t happen, and that night I realized what I wanted most of all: to look back at the end of my life and say I raised a child.
I later learned that among married couples considering adoption, it’s common for the wife to push forward, while her somewhat reluctant husband hangs back. This was true for us. But once we made the final decision, my husband got on board with no looking back. We started the process by going to a conference sponsored by RESOLVE, The National Infertility Association, where we began learning the ins and outs of adoption. After more research, conversations with other adoptive parents, and plenty of talking and thinking of our own, we chose international adoption, and we chose China.
Why China? There were several reasons, both rational and intuitive. China has a very regulated process, which historically has offered very few surprises. Would-be parents work with an agency to submit paperwork to a central government office in China. Nine to 12 months later, they reach the front of the line, so to speak, and a match is made. After years of “trying” to get pregnant, we didn’t want to “try” to adopt. We wanted a predictable path that led to a child. Most domestic adoptions require prospective parents to submit some version of a Dear Birth Mother letter, which goes into a book for pregnant women to page through when searching for the right couple. It may be days, months, or years until a couple is chosen, and even then the choice can be wobbly. At the RESOLVE conference, we ate lunch with a couple who described the phone call announcing the birth of their youngest. “After 11 tries, we sure were thankful,” the woman remarked. Excuse me, but 11 tries? “Oh there were 11 other birth mothers that contacted us, but none of those worked out,” she explained. No, that process was not for us China made sense for other reasons, too. We are both 44, an age at which many countries were closed to us. We were required to travel to China to receive our child, which we liked. Some countries, such as those in Eastern Europe, require two trips, which we did not like. We had both traveled in Asia and remained interested and familiar with aspects of Asian culture. China felt right. So we found an agency, completed piles of paperwork, a home study, fingerprinting, and INS approval. Our dossier was sent to China, and we began to wait.
While adoption was not our first choice, in retrospect it feels like a great choice. We’ll miss some of the joys that biological parenting brings, but there are other joys that are unique to this community into which we are stepping. Helping a child who is already in this world, developing a profound connection with another culture, making a conscious decision to parent-these are all tremendous blessings.
But there are tremendous losses as well. Our child will lose her biological family, her culture, her early home. We will lose the joys of her first months, a biological connection, our vision of what we thought our family would be. And her birth mother-this is the loss I cannot fathom. I know that somewhere in our journey there is a woman who wrapped her baby in a blanket and placed her in a public location, who then turned away, understanding that she would never see her daughter again. I know this was done for the simple reason that her baby was a girl. Do we question our part in this system? Do we grieve this reality? Of course we do. The adoption process is filled with shadows; adding poverty and politics and cultural differences to the mix blurs things even further. We believe in our decision, but it’s not a simple one.
Last night, I stood at our stove making turkey soup, stripping meat from bones that had been stewing for hours. It was quiet-no radio, no TV, no distractions-and I imagined our daughter. She has probably been born, but is she still with her birth family or is she in an orphanage by now? Then I tried to imagine her mother, this Chinese woman who will be linked with us in such tremendous and anonymous ways. What does she think about as she cooks for her family?
I want to tell her so much. I want to explain that we will do everything, everything in our power to give her daughter a wonderful life. I want to reassure her that we are good people. We will be older parents, so we may have less energy but more experience with the world. We have stable jobs as teachers, summers off to play, a sufficient income, a summer cabin, loving families. We live in a neighborhood that appreciates diversity. We will do our best to teach her daughter to love herself and the culture she was born into, as well as the culture in which she will be raised. This will be trickier than providing her basic needs, but we will try. There are groups to help us-Families with Children from China, cultural classes and camps, and Chinese children in the grade schools and day care centers that we are considering.
Most of all, I want to assure this woman that her daughter will have two mothers. I will love her and hold her, play with her, and pay for her day care and dental work and college tuition. But her other mother will be there as well. A long time ago, I read a children’s book about a little girl who didn’t know her birth mother, but missed her terribly. Her adoptive mother explained that when she felt this way, all she had to do was look up at the sky. There, in the beauty of the clouds, the colors, the changing, wonderful, all-encompassing sky, there she could find her birth mother-her sky mother-always there, always protecting her, always loving her. Maybe that’s who I saw that night at Lake Harriet. Maybe it was just the stars, but maybe it was my daughter’s sky mother calling out to me. Now I am calling out to her with a promise. I will teach her daughter to love both mothers-her earth mother and her sky mother-and to understand that both of us will love her forever.
Sherry Kempf is a Minneapolis writer and teacher. She and her husband will travel to China this fall to meet their daughter and bring her home.
