Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  My parents considered adoption toward the end of their fertility struggle, right before conceiving me. My mother was willing—like me, she always knew she wanted to become a parent—but my father was wary. He worried that he would not be able to fully love or love in the same way a child whom he adopted, a child that wasn’t “his.” My mom didn’t understand this feeling; she worked as a special ed teacher for nearly forty years, in classrooms full of infants and toddlers. Long before she became a parent, she had fallen in love with dozens of children that “weren’t hers.”

  What’s more, my mom has never been particularly close to her own biological family, with the exception of her brother. I’m in a similar boat; other than my parents, my experience with “blood family” is extremely limited. I’ve spent my entire life on a continent where the only people related to me were my two parents. My only tie to dozens of family members in India is through my parents. I love those relatives in theory, but I don’t really know them. A few awkward phone calls (now emails or Facebook messages) a year coupled with three visits to India have generated affection but not closeness. The people who feel like my “real” family are the ones my parents raised me with, fellow Indian immigrants and their first-generation kids, “uncles” and “aunties” who aren’t related to me at all but with whom I share history. In my experience, blood has never been a prerequisite for bonding.

  While I felt some loss at the prospect of missing out on an experience I’d envisioned for so long, I realized that essentially what I would be missing was the experience of doing things “like everyone else.” My fantasies related to pregnancy had been wholly aesthetic: how I would look, how people would respond to me, the things I would buy and wear, all the material shifts in my being and our life. None of these concerns dealt directly with the actual child I’d be giving birth to or changed the fact that, ultimately, the end result would be the same—I would become a parent.

  * * *

  When you tell people that you’ve adopted, or are planning to adopt, they tend to respond with gushy enthusiasm. “Oh, that’s so great of you!” as if you just donated money to charity or gave blood. People mean well, but their ability to respond in a useful or meaningful way has been short-circuited by Hollywood dramas and British children’s books about orphans, which is why the conventional narrative about adoption is transactional and incomplete. The implication is that adoption is a sad but necessary societal structure, a tragic yet noble experience undertaken only by desperate people.

  Everyone knows what to say when you announce that you’re pregnant, but adoption is different. It’s like its own mysterious, subterranean world: when you enter into it, you disappear from view. Friends and family don’t know how to comment on your experience the way they would if you were four or six or eight months pregnant; they don’t know what questions to ask, and most of the questions they do ask are unhelpful.

  So much of the predictable “chatter” around babies has to do with speculation around who that baby will look like and whose mannerisms the infant will inherit, but none of that works when you’re adopting. Even a baby shower can be a tricky matter; some adoptive parents match with a birth mother at five months, others get a phone call once the baby has been born. While expectant parents are sent on “babymoons” and spend their weekends “nesting” in the baby’s room, if you’re waiting to hear from an adoption agency, you’re advised to hold off on decorating or acquiring too much baby stuff—should the adoption fall through, these things serve only as painful reminders.

  Because most people have little knowledge of what the experience of adopting is like, they tend to comment on it by contrasting it to what they do know. I had more than one woman comment that I was “skipping the hard part,” a statement that might have been devastating had I been someone who’d struggled with infertility, but one that also managed to elevate the work of biology while discounting the effort that goes into adoption, not to mention the work of actual parenting once a baby is born. To undertake a comparison is inane—I’m not interested in participating in some kind of suffering Olympics—but much of what is challenging about adoption is its invisibility. Due to the unpredictable nature of the process, the decision to adopt is often kept secret for many months. You are expecting a child, yes, but no one looks at your belly and smiles or provides you with special parking at the grocery store. No one sees the small mountain of paperwork you’ve filled out: medical forms, financial documents, recommendation letters, floor plans of your living space, FBI background checks. Other parents do not have to engage with the Autobiographical Instrument, a fifteen-page document that our agency required both of us to fill out, full of questions like What was the biggest disappointment or loss you have experienced in your life and how did you cope with it? Describe yourself as a marital partner, including both your strengths and weaknesses. On my least charitable days, I resented being put through such a rigorous discernment prospect when seemingly everyone around me was managing to have babies without their fitness as parents being questioned.

  For Jill and me, adoption also revealed the extent to which most of our straight friends were out of touch with the reality of what it meant for us to be a same-sex couple. They seemed to assume that simply wanting a baby would be enough to qualify us to get one, but as two women living in Texas, Jill and I had to tread carefully. Our refusal to pretend to be “roommates” in the pre-Obergefell era led us to choose private adoption over public, but nearly all private adoption agencies are religiously affiliated, meaning almost exclusively Christian. Even nondenominational agencies can have incredibly narrow sets of qualifications for adoptive parents, including age, marital status, and health history. As a couple who could not yet legally marry, we were out of luck almost everywhere, and even though we found a wonderful agency that welcomed us, we still—because of the law—had to apply to adopt separately, which meant a longer, more expensive, and emotionally fraught process.

  * * *

  Conventional narratives about adoption tend to focus on the adoptive parents, holding them up as heroes or rescuers, highlighting how much they “deserve” to be parents; birth mothers are either pitied or judged, the fullness of their stories and circumstances mostly ignored. It took me some time to realize that I, too, was entering into the adoption process with an incomplete narrative at work. My focus was on Jill and me, on our experience, on what we wanted; mainly, I wanted the process to be easy.

  For this reason, I resisted at first the partially open adoption process that our agency, like most these days, utilizes. “Partially open” means that birth parents and adoptive parents meet before the baby is born, that adoptive parents have access to medical information and paperwork, and that birth parents have the right to receive updates and pictures at least once a year. Though intellectually I supported the fact that the transactional, anonymous procedure of the old days was, for the most part, no longer in practice, the new way sounded harder. The thought of meeting with a birth mother, seeing her and speaking with her, reminded me that I was not becoming a parent the “normal” way. It reminded me of the complication and messiness. Reminded me that this wasn’t simply about my lifelong desire to become a parent, but that there were real people at the center of this circle—namely a birth mother and the child we would share.

  * * *

  June 2012: I am in the kitchen at a friend’s house, about to give an informal Indian food cooking lesson. After taking my phone from my pocket, I scroll through my email quickly, planning to put my phone away for the next couple of hours. Instead, I read an email from our adoption agency, telling me that a birth mother has expressed interest in meeting Jill and me. She is nearly eight months pregnant.

  After several jubilant phone calls and a fair amount of crying, I still manage to teach my friends how to make bhindi masala. Jill is out of town (though she makes plans to return quickly), so we conference call with our birth mother that night. I am standing on the rug in the middle of our living room, too nervous to si
t down, and in the darkening light I hear an unfamiliar voice come through the phone and it’s as if time stops. What do you say to a person who is considering giving you their child? How do you make small talk with a stranger with whom you will be inextricably linked for the rest of your life?

  We learn that she’s been having bad heartburn, which means the baby probably has a lot of hair. She’s having trouble sleeping, can’t get comfortable in the bed, and has been craving barbacoa tacos and Dr Pepper. She’s excited to meet us in a few days, at a lunch date that the agency has arranged. We tell her we’ve been referring to our someday-baby as “Peanut.” She likes that. She will refer to him that way exclusively for the following year, until she falls out of touch.

  Our son is born seventeen days after we meet his birth mother for lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant, the most awkward and intimate meal of my life. Over the course of those days, she is incredibly generous with us, permitting us to remain in the hospital delivery room with her as Shiv comes sailing out of her body.

  * * *

  There is a natural limit to the number of compliments that can be afforded newborns; contrary to what parents may think, most of them look swollen and terrible. Babies can’t do much of anything, so there’s no real opportunity to comment on their abilities, which means that well-wishers tend to connect the child back to their parents in their congratulatory remarks: “He’s got your nose!” or, “She’s beautiful, like her mama!”—even if these are a stretch, they seem to bring some comfort, some assurance. But they were inapplicable to us.

  Well past Shiv’s birth, my family and its dimensions continue to bring to light how much of the language we use to speak about parenting and families is premised on one specific type of family, or an imitation of that type of family. Think of the maternal threat I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it! Or of the power that the possessive pronoun confers; I want to have your baby is seductive and alluring in a way that I want to have a baby is not.

  Everywhere, the language of parenting, and especially motherhood, excludes my family; even those who ought to know better often don’t. At my last appointment, my OB-GYN had to catch and correct herself midsentence: “Women who haven’t had children— I mean, who haven’t given birth…” Friends will use the term “real parents” when they mean “birth parents,” then see the involuntary look of hurt on my face and stumble. A co-worker seemed disappointed when she learned that I had adopted Shiv, whom she’d met when I brought him to school. “Oh,” she said, “I thought he was yours.”

  Sometimes people will try to impose a sense of biological belonging on our family experience, revealing the extent to which our collective vocabulary remains limited. “I swear, Nishta and Shiv have the same smile!” or, “Look at how Jill and Shiv have the same cheeks!” These remarks are intended as compliments, but they are also silly. Shiv does not look like either of us, nor does he need to for us to be fully “his” parents and for him to be fully “our” child. Even Shiv himself, though he knows perfectly well the story of his birth and adoption, will sometimes ask, “Was that when I was in your tummy?” because that narrative is so pervasive and all-encompassing.

  As frustrating as these moments of incongruence are, there are times when it is undeniably tempting to give in to the dominant narrative, to try to make our story fit with everyone else’s. My first experience of this came with breastfeeding, so often the battleground for moms these days; for me, though, it was a personal experience that both set me apart and allowed me access to the mainstream.

  Almost immediately after we matched with Shiv’s birth mother, I began to try to induce lactation, which not a lot of people know you can even do. With the help of medicine and a whole lot of pumping using a rented hospital-grade machine, I was able to produce tiny amounts of milk just a few days before Shiv was born. Once he began nursing, my supply increased, but we continued to supplement with donated milk and formula.

  I’m not going to lie—successfully inducing lactation made me feel like a total badass. Though I know it wasn’t a reflection on my inner virtue or even my fitness as a parent, there were times when others implied this and I didn’t correct them. Shiv was “so lucky” to have a mother who would go through all of this trouble to feed him; in the eyes of militant breastfeeding advocates, I was a living reproach to mothers who “gave up” on breastfeeding or who chose formula outright, heaven forbid.

  I don’t regret nursing Shiv, but I do feel a little bit complicit each time I “talk shop” with breastfeeding colleagues. As I am unable to discuss or relate to the experience of pregnancy or giving birth, it’s so nice to be able to join in on a conversation about how awful it is to pump at work. Jumping into those conversations often requires some explanation, which serves only to draw more attention to my own story.

  Drawing this attention is not all bad—it helps to open up people’s understanding of what breastfeeding can look like and who can be a part of that club, while also sharing a bit about the singularity of the experience for us “hidden” members. Indeed, this is what I’d like to see more of overall: a way to honor the fact that my experience as someone who became a parent through adoption is, in many ways, different. I would like my experience to be included in the broader conversation. I would like there to be more room to depict underrepresented experiences not as novelties to be gawked at but as honest narratives that might help expand our collective imagination around the work of parenting. I want there to be more room for what palliative care physician B. J. Miller refers to as the “strange beauty” of human experience.

  * * *

  I thought becoming a parent was the tricky part, but what I failed to realize was how fraught the identity politics of motherhood are once you’ve brought your baby home. Every choice is polarizing, throwing you into one camp or another: co-sleeping or crib, on-demand feeding or scheduled. When Shiv was born, I was completely unprepared for the way that our parenting choices, made inside of private, thoughtful conversations, would prove divisive to the point that it affected relationships with friends. We are people who cast a fairly wide net when it comes to friendships; we socialize with people who hold different political and religious convictions from ours, who have different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but parenting style is the one dividing line we can’t seem to bridge. Differences in opinion are inevitably seen as condemnation of the other. To even talk about our choices seemed to register as an assault to friends making different ones.

  Jill and I were also unprepared for the extent to which we were expected to change after becoming parents. All around us was this assumption that motherhood would now become our primary identity, that it must naturally and necessarily have overtaken all other facets of our identity. “You know how you go out to dinner but all you end up talking about is the baby?” The first time a girlfriend said this to me, I realized that I was supposed to nod along in agreement even though it wasn’t true for me and Jill, even though the thought that I would suddenly be unable to talk to my spouse about anything other than our child, when we had spent a decade before his birth engaging in all kinds of topics, was incredibly disturbing.

  Even though I am a person with a child, I resent the implications made about what parenthood (particularly motherhood) is or isn’t and what it does or doesn’t mean; not only does it leave a lot of people out, it also insults other women and limits us. We reinforce the same stereotypes about ourselves that we say we want to break. Childless friends vent their frustration at motherhood being wielded as a kind of impunity, an inarguable excuse for any and all behaviors that might otherwise be seen as rude or inconsiderate. If you don’t have kids, you can’t possibly understand, and you’re not allowed to disagree or judge.

  In our cult of motherhood, we ignore all the work that’s done in support of parents, work that makes parenting possible, work parents can’t do that others tackle. Colleagues volunteer to cover a class so that I can leave school for my son’s doctor appointment; Shiv’s
grandmother provides child care that allows Jill and me to spend time alone together without having to pay for a babysitter. As a teacher, I know that my son’s teachers see and understand him in ways that I never will, and I know that they provide care and instruction he needs but can’t get from me. Shiv’s “aunties” and “uncles,” our friends who have adopted him into their own lives, provide essential love, nurturing, and relationships. In fact, it is primarily the aunties and uncles who are themselves not parents, or whose children are grown, who have the energy left to give to my son. This work is often invisible or erased, all credit going to the parents.

  When I voice my dissent or fail to chime in on the chorus, I sometimes hear remarks along the lines of It must be because you didn’t give birth to him. The implication is that I don’t love my son as much as “real” parents love theirs, or else I’d see their parenting choices as the correct ones and adopt them myself. And the truth is that many of the choices Jill and I make do relate to the fact that we didn’t give birth to Shiv—we are careful not to think about him as “ours.” There is a kind of freedom in the adoptive experience, a reminder that our children do not belong to us. Shiv’s autonomy has been paramount from the start; he is a separate being, with his own will. We are responsible for him, but we do not control him.