by Scott Simon
Today, Thomas is close to both of his parents and believes them when they say that notwithstanding what happened with his sister, they would accept and support his finding his birth parents. But right now, he says that he has no such interest. “Maybe later,” he says. “Or when I hit fifty. But now, it’s just great.” Wherever Pink Martini performs, from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl, the rows are filled with friends that Thomas has made along the way, from Indiana to Portland to Harvard and all their stops on tour. He gives parties wherever he goes, amasses friends, and exults in new enthusiasms.
But whenever Pink Martini plays Oakland, Thomas Lauderdale likes to end the set by announcing, “If there is anyone here tonight who gave birth to a baby boy here on July 14, 1970—come on back. We’ve got a lot to talk about!”
Adults Say the Darndest Things
THE PEOPLE we meet are nice to us almost without exception. But I don’t want to be blind to the misconceptions and even outright prejudice that adopting families can encounter. Or perhaps I should say deaf. Caroline and I have both heard people say, right in front of us (sometimes right in front of our daughters), that someone they know (typically portrayed as the black sheep, knave, or ne’er-do-well of the family) is “not really their child, you know. He’s adopted.”
Breast milk enthusiasts are in their own category. They believe so fiercely in the power of mother’s milk to enrich, nourish, uplift, and enlighten that they will corner you at parties to tell you that breast milk is the key to human development. “Why don’t you tell the world?” they’ll demand. “Breast milk builds strong, healthy bodies, twelve different ways! B-r-e-a-s-t, breast milk makes the very best!” A couple of times, when I’ve ventured gently to reply, “Well, we adopted our daughters. That just wasn’t on tap,” they seem oblivious to the offense it might cause parents to be instructed that our chance to do the best thing we ever can for our children was forfeited before we ever got them.
I want to be careful in flinging around a word like “prejudice.” Certainly I prefer to blame my own stupid and insensitive beliefs on honorable ignorance. But families who have adopted are quick to pick up on language that reveals those people who claim to detect differences between birth children and children who are adopted. Of course there might be some differences; let’s not be silly about that, or afraid to speak of them. But there are differences between birth siblings, too—just look at the Kennedys, the Bushes. No parent has exactly the same relationship with each child, by birth or adoption.
Most studies indicate that adoptive families are at least as strong as any other. In fact, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the American Educational Research Association, suggests that parents who adopt may lavish more time and care on their children because they waited and worked for them. The study says, “adoptive parents enrich their children’s lives to compensate for the lack of biological ties and the extra challenges of adoption.” I wish they’d added “and extra pleasures” of adoption, but will add that here myself.
People who infer that somehow children who are adopted have less of a sense of identity or affinity with their parents (“not really their child, you know”) may have it exactly backward. After all the bromides about bonding have cleared, the ties between parents and children in adopting families can be more intense. Maybe adoptive parents simply work harder because they feel that they cannot assume their child’s reflexive love. Perhaps adoption lends perspective that sharpens and deepens what children and parents mean to each other. Maybe it forces us to say what we are too scared and shy to state when it is easy, in more conventional families, for so much to be assumed.
But all of those are guesses. What we can report from our own experience is what Caroline calls “the extraordinary bond by adoption.” Notice the preposition she chooses: not of, but by adoption: adoption is the agent performing the action. Adoption itself is the tie that binds.
“I Got Their History”
MAYBE THE MEASURE of a happy adoption isn’t to strive for a child to feel no different from any other kid, but to turn that difference into a sense of purpose. Steve Inskeep was adopted when he was ten days old, and he felt that starting out a little differently in life conferred a distinction on him as he grew up in Carmel, Indiana.
Both of Steve’s parents were teachers. Roland and Judy Inskeep had tried to start a family for ten years before seeking advice from their family minister, rather than a doctor, lawyer, or therapist, and they received Steve from the Children’s Bureau of Central Indiana. Because Steve was considered (even by himself; especially by himself) as a smart-alecky little kid with a gap-toothed grin and a rangy gait, some of his friends looked at the map, sketched out some figures, and surmised: David Letterman was a student at Ball State in Muncie at the time Steve was born. Hmmm … The math, if not the facts, work out.
Steve is now an accomplished globe-roving broadcaster (cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition), but he grew up snug and secure in Carmel. When his parents took the family to see a basketball game in Indianapolis (Roland Inskeep was also a coach), they would drive back home to Carmel the same night rather than stay in a large, strange city.
“We went all the way to Disney World for vacations,” Steve recalls, “which was pretty sure to be clean and safe. But we never drove to New York or Chicago to see the sights. Those were the places we saw on television, with all the crime.”
He sighs at the idea that being adopted was something to get over or recover from. But Steve volunteers that he availed himself of the peculiar celebrity of being adopted to explain any sharp edges: “I was always a little smart, flippant, and challenging. Some people would say, ‘Clearly he’s insecure.’ Now I can’t say it was because I knew I was adopted. But in any case, that was the story I had in my head. That was my plotline. But I was comfortable being the outsider, the stranger who has somewhat different attitudes than everyone else in town.”
An outsider with a different attitude who tries to fit circumstances into a plotline. Steve Inskeep was becoming a journalist.
He remembers how he used to look at his face in the mirror. Steve’s features are angular, handsome, and piercing, his eyes a cool greenish-blue. If someone suggested that he must be Scandinavian, you might detect it in his eyes or chin. If someone claimed to notice a strain of Chippewa or Iroquois in his sharp profile, you could see that, too. His ruddy, thatched head of hair? Scottish. Dutch. No, German.
“The thing is, in America, I could be one-eighth this, or a quarter that,” Steve says. “You couldn’t know my history, look at my face, and rule anything out. I rather liked that! And I think it made me more sympathetic to others who were a little different, too.”
Right now, Steve knows nothing about his birth parents and says he is not especially curious about discovering them.
“If I got a phone call?” he says. “Well of course I’d return it. But …” Uncharacteristically, Steve lets the rest of his sentence fall away. He doesn’t seem hurt or angry, just a courteous man who would return the call to be kind to a stranger who may need the emotional contact more than he does.
Steve and his wife, Carolee, have a daughter, Ava. They live down the block from two women who have adopted a daughter from Central America, and after they confided to Steve that they were eager for her to have a little contact with a sympathetic male role model (there should be a card for that kind of thing these days), Steve has found himself eager to oblige, and takes the little girl bike riding. He finds himself touched by the chance to connect and be of service to another outsider. It is tempting to credit that instinct to Steve’s own adoption. And he seems to have used being adopted as some kind of spur and inspiration. But he also traces his character to the quality of kindness and the life of caring that he saw in and received from his parents.
Judy Inskeep was the first person in her family to go to college, and Roland was the child of rural schoolteachers who never had much i
n the way of wages or job security or saw much of the world beyond Indiana. Steve went to college at Kentucky’s Morehead State because, he still jokes, “I thought that was as far away as I could get from home.” Now he routinely jets between capitals and datelines.
Steve Inskeep sent me a note one day as he sat on a long bench to renew his passport. He says he always seems to wait until the last possible minute to renew his passport or driver’s license, or receive a visa, and wonders if sometimes people who are adopted feel that, “Maybe, on some level, you are not absolutely sure you belong, not absolutely sure you have a right to be where you are.”
But he doesn’t forget the wonder of the life he has, and says that he is grateful to his parents for instilling that. They were not the kind of people to let good things go unappreciated.
“I confess that I’m kind of happy with who I am and the parents that I got,” says Steve slowly. “I didn’t get their genes. But I got their history.”
ADOPTION RECORDS have been opened over the past generation. They were unbolted by the efforts of activists, often people who had been adopted and were outraged that the basic facts of their own lives were locked away from them.
But opening those files did not always occasion warm family get-togethers. No doubt a few seamy old family stories got dug up. Not every adoptive child, at sixteen or sixty, will be eager to learn about their birth parents, and certainly not necessarily eager for any reunion with someone who is, after all, a stranger. They may have been idealized; they may have been detested—most likely, a little of both—but almost always in a way that was distant and unreal. Feelings and priorities, though, may change from year to year as we grow older. We learn that the people we may want to meet may not last until we think we are ready to meet them.
Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe
PAUL SIMON and his wife, Jean, were both members of the Illinois House of Representatives when they married in 1960 and began to have a family (I wonder if their courting could withstand today’s ethics laws). They had a daughter, Sheila, and tried to have a second child. After a series of miscarriages, they decided on adoption; they specified that they would like a baby boy. Within a few months, they got a call from their minister. He’d learned of a healthy baby born to a teenage mother who decided that she could not keep him. Would Paul and Jean be interested? They were.
“One thing, Paul,” said the minister. “I don’t know how you and Jean would feel about this. The boy?”
“Yes?”
“He’s American Indian.”
Martin Simon has some of the same deep basso chuckle as his father as he tells the story.
“My father said, ‘Well, that’s just fine.’”
IT WAS THE 1960s. Paul and Jean didn’t go to workshops or culture groups or take their son to Native American conclaves. But they treated their son’s heritage with interest and respect. By the time Martin Simon was growing up in the 1970s, America had taken a turn. Native Americans were portrayed not only sympathetically but heroically in popular culture. Many children were more eager to be Indians than cowboys on the playground. Martin grew up with the Paul Revere and the Raiders song “Cherokee Reservation” ringing in his head, and walked around singing, “Cherokee people! Cherokee tribe!” He could feel the blood of great, shrewd, and dauntless Cherokee chiefs surging through his veins, and he identified with their noble, sad history.
When Martin became a teenager and had trouble raising a beard, he looked at his smooth, angular features in the mirror and found that they made him even more proud: he had the profile of a Cherokee warrior.
Paul Simon was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and joined the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He attended hearings on reservations, and while he never pretended that he possessed extra knowledge because of his son, he acknowledged that it gave him an extra interest. In 1989, he signed a petition asking the University of Illinois to replace Chief Illiniwek as the official symbol and mascot of its sports teams (which, at length, it did, but only in 2007, after the NCAA had barred the university from postseason play if it didn’t). The Economist wrote about the Chief Illiniwek controversy and gently noted that “Mr. Simon’s adopted son is Native American.”
As the Simons moved around between Troy, Springfield, and Carbondale, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., Martin says that he cannot recall being razzed by other children, either about being adopted or about being Native American. Which is not to say that he wasn’t conscious of being both. When he felt anxious or alienated, he told himself that adoption must be at the heart of it. His parents loved him; he felt that. But there were empty spots in his heart that they couldn’t fill; he felt that, too. Today, he believes that being adopted may actually have helped him sort through feelings of anxiety, identity, and the inadequacies of love as a cure-all.
“It gives you license,” he says. “It lets you blame everything on one thing. Once you trace everything to that, other things become easier.”
Martin says he can’t recall ever wanting to run away from home, and after a certain age, he ceased even to think about finding his birth family. He had learned enough about Native American communities in the United States to know that there was more likely to be a sad, depressing story surrounding his birth parents. He preferred the cool of being the great-great-great-grandson of an Indian chief.
MARTIN SIMON was twenty-eight years old, a White House news photographer, and living what he calls a carefree life when he picked up the phone one day and got a message from the woman who had given birth to him. Her name was Nikki. She had become pregnant (“in trouble” was the way it was phrased then) at the age of fifteen, when she was a student at an esteemed high school in one of Chicago’s poshest suburbs. Her family hatched a plan for her to go away for seven months. Suburban teenagers sometimes took leaves from school in those days, to go into treatment programs for drugs, drinking, or anorexia nervosa—whatever people believed was deemed preferable to thinking that a smart young girl from a modern family had permitted herself to get pregnant.
Nikki had given birth to her son and handed him to a hospital nurse. In time, she met someone, and they married. But they didn’t have children, and she didn’t tell him that she had ever had a baby (Martin wonders now if she thought that this might have been somehow disloyal). Nikki thought of her son a lot over the years. But she held herself back from trying to contact him—even when she had a bout with cancer and worried that she might die without ever meeting her son—because she had read that adoptive children needed to be at least twenty-eight before they had absorbed enough of life to meet their birth mother and have a chance of grasping why she might have given them up for adoption.
Martin and Nikki talked on the phone—a long time. He had been reared by two compassionate parents, and he found himself touched by Nikki’s story. And moved by her concern for the son she had never met, which had kept her away for so long. They made plans to meet in two weeks.
Martin took a breath and called his parents. Jean and Paul Simon said they were pleased, and a little breathless. Jean said, “Thank God this didn’t happen when you were fourteen,” which I translate as her thinking, Thank God this is happening now, when you’re already standing on your own two feet. Parents who adopt, however well we have been prepared by books, workshops, and counseling to welcome such contact, and however grateful we are that our children have the chance to know those who gave birth to them, may forgive ourselves for harboring a lurking vulnerability. If and when we receive a call like that, we will be genuinely pleased for our child. But we may also grieve and gnash somewhere inside.
As Martin, who is now a father of two teenagers, says, “It’s every parent’s fear: If given the chance, will my children really want to leave me?”
It is impossible for a parent not to compose an unuttered speech to their child: We reared you, supported you, changed your sopping, stinking diapers, caught your colds and coughs, and held your barfs and sneezes in our hands. We helped you memorize the multipl
ication table. We set a place at the table for you and laid your clothes out even when you were a teenager and told us we were witless, thoughtless, and personal embarrassments—and we never stopped loving you. We’ll be goddamned if someone who gave you up can just waltz into our lives when all the hard work is done and walk away with your love, like a woman who wins $50 million on a three-dollar lottery ticket. Just because you entered this world through her uterus!
There is also an instinct of parental protectiveness. These people hurt our baby once by not being there, even if they had good reasons. Who’s to say that they won’t finally meet them and hurt them again?
Nikki lived on the West Coast. She and Martin made arrangements to meet in Chicago. In two weeks, they found themselves circling each other, dazed with amazement, in the baggage claim area of O’Hare, detecting and delighting over similarities they could see in their faces, in the ways they stood, walked, and waved.
Nikki had light brown hair, like Martin’s. She looked about as American Indian as Diana, Princess of Wales.
Hours later, after they had told their stories, swapped stories, laughed, and done a little crying for each other, Martin asked, “Are we … Indians?”
Nikki looked puzzled.
“It was on my birth certificate,” he explained. “All these years, I’ve grown up thinking …”
“Oh, that,” Nikki said, as something suddenly snapped into place. “At the hospital. They asked me to tick off some box. You know, white, Negro, Asian, whatever. And I said, ‘Oh, we’re all American.’”
THEY MADE PLANS to meet again in Washington, D.C., where Martin lived, and where Jean and Paul Simon lived, too, when the Senate was in session. Jean Simon told Martin how happy she was for him. Her words were warm, but Martin thought that they sounded a little brittle, a little unconvinced. Jean was a deft politician herself. She had applauded, saluted, and cheered for many candidates over the years who had shared a party line with her husband, and knew how to roar with zest for contenders she didn’t know, and even louder for those she knew well enough to detest. Jean Simon knew when she had to make a good show. Paul had advised Martin, “Son, you’re gonna have to be especially good to your mom for these next few weeks.”
