Language Barriers and Border Wars

Nuestro Himno -read about it, and give it a listen here.

Gender Preference Revisited - Now with more nuance!

I received a comment on my post below, and as I started to respond to it, I realized it deserved its own post. Hope that's okay with the author:

Lola: I can understand the preference of having a girl over a boy- if you are a single female. I really do feel that young boys benefit by having a strong male role-model in their life- and girls- a woman... I believe single parents can raise children of the opposite sex. But myself as a single female am worried about raising a young boy-- let's face it- I don't know much about men (they are completely different then women in a lot of ways), and I think it would be more beneficial to the child to be with a same sex parent. I agree about entitlement- no one is entitled anything- although when you work and live and try hard in life, it is sometimes frustrating to miss out on things you would like to share in..

Oh, Lola,

I'm completely sympathetic to all of that. I realize that my post didn't sound like it - franky, neither did my response to the conversation detailed here, and for that I'm really sorry. For starters, I have to repeat that we did actually ask for a girl. (After our domestic craziness, (and my revisiting the issue of whether I really could ever meet with another mother and not take her hands and tell her - parent. But that's another post) we had a little form in front of us, and it asked us what we wanted. At first, we thought, that's crazy! We just want another child! But dh, ds and I all realized that there was an I. shaped hole in our family. So we said "girl."

I do get why a single woman would be more confident raising a girl, though I must say that some of the best grown guys I know were raised by single women, and that I'm actually quite terrified about what kinds of experiences of being a girl I will accidentally pass on to my daughter (again, that's for another post). In a way raising a child of the opposite sex alone might be a little like transracial parenting - I can do everything in my power for I., but I cannot be black. Fortunately, we are surrounded by loving aa friends, colleagues and teachers who have offered to pitch in and provide great role models (and braid hair, thank God).

I just think that not every program can, should or must allow for gender selection, or that everyone can or should demand a baby as young as possible. There are ways of selecting a daughter: China is really backlogged (my heart breaks for those waiting mommas every day - I've been reading countless stories of having to redo fingerprints because they've expired as they've waited). The backlog is particularly so for singles, as China has a quota for single parents. But you can still choose gender through some agencies in Ethiopia and Haiti, and a couple programs match single women with girls for the very reasons you state. You can also, through our agency, choose a waiting child from Ethiopia - they tend to be a little bit older (20 mos, for example), but still healthy, and believe me - very beautiful and beautiful-spirited girls.

What burns me up isn't at all the "feeling more confident to parent a girl." It is the expression of frustration that after everything else someone has lost, she deserve to parent a baby (as young as possible) girl and is being denied that right. At a very basic level, I'm defensive of my kids. No kid is a consolation prize, and even if they were, my kids aren't second or third best. I'm also very protective of first mothers, whose losses are effaced in the assertion of "rights" or "deserving" to parent someone else's child, as well as children like my daughter, whose losses of their first families could get lost in parents' grief or needs-fulfillment.

I'm not asking single women to do anything I haven't done - I don't want to see anyone give up on the dream of parenthood - but I do think it's sensible to realize that the dream might not be what you thought it was and that once you take stock of all those losses (and grieve them, which is so important) really wonderful things can happen - so long as you don't get hung up on entitlement:

First I thought I would have another pregnancy (what was I thinking? As I approach the fifth anniversary of the 54 hr labor I am amazed that I considered this a viable option). Then I thought my child was in China. Then I thought he would be a newborn boy, here in the US, through domestic transracial adoption. It turns out my child is a fifteen month old Ethiopian toddler girl. And nothing feels more right.

That does not mean that the process of getting to her has been painless. It has been the most painful thing I've ever done (and then I remember why the 54 hr labor isn't so bad afterall). I get what you say about working, and living the best you can, and still seeing dreams moving farther and farther out of reach. But then, you keep reaching, and something else happens.
I guess that's what I mean by not getting "what we deserve," but by getting better than we deserve.

I wish for you not just what you deserve, but even better things - things you never would have imagined had things been easy. And I wish that sometimes, some things, could be easy . . .

Love,
A.

Happiness through shopping

I'm feeling a little more peaceful tonight, and a little sorry I was so harsh - not sorry enough to change anything about my post, just sorry enough to wish I had shown, maybe even felt, a little more humility. At the bottom of all this discussion of rights is someone who feels very threatened, threatened by the real loss of a potential child, a loss I am familiar with several times over. But while I wish I had been more merciful, I wish others had shown more grace. Too much of this (happiness) feels like a zero sum game for too many people, and then everyone loses.

We bought baby's first photo album to send to I. so she isn't shocked when Daddy shows up, or when ds and I come to meet her at the airport. We also bought her a bathing suit - purple with little flowers. I cannot believe sometimes that there's going to be an actual need for a purple-with-little-flowers tiny bathing suit here in just about five or six weeks.

Righteous Anger

She's even madder than I am.

Heartbreak (Race and Fosteradoption Part III)

If you've been following the story, the foster family lost. They will not appeal again because they do not want to delay his attachment to his new family.
My heart breaks for him, and for them.
I hope this never happens again, and I hope for the best for Kevin.

Race and fosteradoption part II

Thinking of this family all the time . . .

Parenting a Girl is Not a Constitutional Right

The time has come for another gender preference post from the least able to speak on the subject with authority (a woman who requested a daughter):

I've recently made a couple people very mad, and while I hate having people mad at me, I hate the way they are behaving, so maybe we're even.

On the message board for families adopting from Ethiopia, the discussion regarding whether one should have a gender preference or not has returned. A single mother posted wanting to know -it seems - if she could request a girl even if she's a first time mother (and hence not permitted to, according to our agency's new policy) and if not, if she could decline the referral of a boy. To do the latter, she would have to effectively lie on her homestudy and in her application, which I don't think she had fully considered.

Someone else posted about her "God given right to prefer a girl."

I have no idea what the hell that means. Of course you have - I suppose we believe in the United States - the God-given right to prefer anything over anything else. It's a free freaking market. Let alone the big decisions and that whole big thing about the pursuit of happiness. But you DO NOT have a constitutional, God-given, or in any way or under any other authority have a right to a baby of any kind.

That's hard. I had to face this before. Didn't I deserve a healthy pregnancy as much as anyone else did? Didn't I deserve to be as healthy as anyone else? Didn't I deserve a pregnancy when (and here you've heard this all before) other people can thoughtlessly get pregnant and carry a baby they can't even parent?

I'm a good(ish) person. But in any real way, did I have a right to or deserve a child? No.

Had I gone into adoption still beating on that entitlement drum, the whole process would have been so much more daunting and I would have missed out. Instead, I got a referral for a beautiful little girl, and I don't deserve this happiness. I really don't. That's the beauty - not that we all get what we deserve, but that sometimes, we get better than we deserve. The appropriate response to that is gratitude.

When a mother of little boys posted that she found it offensive to read that a potential mother "deserved a baby girl" and demanded "nothing less," other mothers seemed to defend what they believed to be the "right to a preference," when I think the mother of boys was just trying to say that how you conduct such a discussion has consequences. If someone demands "nothing less than" a baby girl, is my toddler girl less than? My boy too difficult to parent by virtue of being a boy? Outrageous.

Of course everyone wants some element of control over the process, and maybe choosing gender gives you just that little bit of control. I'm not going to lie. It did - just a little - for us. But then what happens? It turns out that your baby girl isn't healthy, or that parenting a girl isn't all that it's cracked up to be, or that what happens to your children and in your family isn't in your control.

People, of course we all make choices about the process of adoption based on what we believe we can and cannot handle. But "at least getting to choose the gender of the child you will nurture for the rest of your life" (a quote) is not a compensation for infertility, medical illness, pregnancy loss, or single status.

It's one thing to say you are more prepared to parent a girl, and to find a program/agency/country to accomodate that, and another to insist it's your RIGHT to do so, and that the policy of this agency is "silly and needs to be revisited."

Great. Now I'm madder than I was when I started posting.

More than my fair share

When we were filling out our Gallup Family forms (no this wasn't a joke) dh was glad to see that he and I had the same answers - not on religion, or politics (though we did for that too) but on how the household chores, including shopping, are divided. We both put "Share responsibilities with one other household member." I think he was afraid I'd be mad that he'd said that.

I'm going to say something almost entirely foreign in the blogosphere (where lots of women are righteously angry that fathers don't do a share - let alone their fair share - of the parenting):

My husband is amazing. He cleared his schedule this afternoon because this is one of those weeks where I just can't get all of my full-time work done with part-time daycare/preschool. And in a few moments, he's taking ds to the grocery store - like he has almost every week since January.