[Bella’s intro: E. Kay Trimberger, author of the wonderful book, The New Single Woman, has contributed guest posts here several times before. One of the most popular was about single women in India. When she asked me a few days ago if I would be interested in a post about the challenges facing single people who want to adopt, I realized that in all of my years of blogging, I had never addressed that topic. So of course, I welcomed her contribution. What she has to say may be a bit controversial – see what you think. I’ll add a note of my own at the end.]
The Challenges of Single Adoptive Parenting: Guest Post by E. Kay Trimberger
Last week I happened to hear an NPR interview with writer Joyce Maynard about her decision at age 56 to adopt as a single parent two Ethiopian sisters age six and eleven who had lost their mother to AIDS. Only fourteen months later, she announced that the adoption had failed and that she had re-homed the girls to another family. The interview was short and not very informative, as was a blog post that Maynard wrote in April 2012 about her decision to terminate the adoption.
Maynard’s story led me to reflect on my own experience as a single adoptive mother for more than thirty years. It also seemed like a concrete example of recent exposures of the perils of international adoption and of parents using the web to find alternative homes for adoptive children they can’t handle.
Single people, like couples, have the right to parent, and many have proved themselves as effective models (e.g., the mothers of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton). But it is harder to parent without a partner, and one needs more outside support from extended family, a network of friends and a community. Adoption provides additional challenges as does trans-racial parenting. Maynard is a case study of someone whose individualistic perspective about parenting precluded such considerations. In her blog letter, she says: “There was no experience in life I’d loved more than raising children. I had love enough for more, and a blind faith that love was sufficient to get us all through the challenges I knew would lie ahead.”
Maynard’s adoption story is an extreme case. She was in her fifties, divorced and single, and had three, grown biological children. Few people over age fifty are permitted to adopt through conventional channels. She probably used a lot of money to bypass age restrictions. This thought immediately brought to mind a recent NY Times Magazine article about corruption in international adoption, including the buying of children in Ethiopia.
At her age, Maynard was unlikely to have friends and associates with young children. She transported these two African girls from a life of poverty in Ethiopia to Marin County in California, the fifth richest county in the US in terms of income per capita, a county that in 2010 was 73% white and only 2.6% black. After deciding to abort the adoption she admitted that the girls needed “a big, wide net of a support system that I could not give them, myself.”
Maynard tells us that she found a large family to take in her two girls, a family that included two other Ethiopian adoptees. She tells us nothing about how she found this family, but probably she found them on the web. In early September, Reuters News Service published a five-part series, “ The Child Exchange: Inside America’s underground market for adopted children ,” based on extensive research into practices of re-homing. Reuters found a number of websites where parents advertised children available for re-adoption. Such exchanges are accomplished with a notarized letter of guardianship for the new parents and with no involvement by social workers or other state or legal representatives. This process is illegal in only a few states. Reuters revealed numerous examples of child abuse by new parents who were unqualified, a few even being pedophiles with criminal records. Maynard’s disclosure that she has had no contact with her former daughters mirrors many situations in the Reuter’s report. How can she claim that the change was good for her daughters, when she has had no contact with them?
THE BASICSMost of the re-homing practices reported by Reuters involved couples, not single parents, but Maynard’s experience helps me articulate issues that single people should consider when contemplating adoption.
When, at age forty, I privately and domestically adopted a five-day-old mixed race baby boy, I was clear that as a single professional woman, I could not effectively parent a child with disabilities. I loved parenting my bright, attractive, extroverted and talented son within a supportive network of friends, most with children. I lived in Berkeley, near the Oakland border in an area with a large black and mixed race population, but transracial parenting still held challenges, especially since all my close friends were white. What I did not anticipate was that a genetic predisposition to addiction would appear when my son was a teenager, confirmed at age twenty-five when I helped him find his birth parents. I had a hard time recognizing what was happening, having had no contact with the birth families and no experience with addiction in my biological family. I did too little intervention when he was young enough that it might have made a difference.
More recent practices of open adoption, where varying levels of contact are maintained between birth and adoptive families, might have helped, although the three-thousand-mile-distance between our homes would have been a barrier to information and to creating an extended family. Without extensive contact and interaction between birth and adoptive families, adoption itself can be considered a disability. Adoptive parents are trying to raise a child often quite different from those with which they are familiar in their biological families, and adoptees are cut off from their biological and cultural roots.