As I write this, I am about 3 years in the soul-wrenching process that will hopefully allow me to adopt a child. How I break that piece of information to people is always a bit of a mind-twister – just the opening sentence of this post took me a dozen iterations. And it’s not just how, it’s when (or if at all), what for and to whom. Do they need to know? How much info? If I tell them, do I mention it is by choice and not necessity (at least was)? But why would I do that, the details of my fertility don’t feel like the most appropriate conversation topic in most cases? But then am I creating some sense of unease – like “oh poor her”? And how will they respond?
Now that last one tends to be rather predictable: overall, there’s a limited number of responses I have heard and I’m even starting to predict quite accurately who will say what. I was going to say none of them are good or bad but then again, that’s not true. Some of them ARE BAD. And all of them still do elicit a reaction in me, even though I wish I could just have the wisdom not to take the hook at times. So apart from the obvious red flags, which will be clearly sign-posted, please don’t take the following observations to mean any conversation with a prospective adoptive is bound to be a minefield. This is just food for thought.
So here is the nicer one: “you are such a good person!” – or some version of it. I’m not going to say I don’t get a little ego boost at the validation, but it doesn’t come without its share of shame, guilt and anguish. The thing is that there is a human child at the end of the process: not a project, not a social case, not a victim receiving charity. A full-blown child with the same rights as any other child, and owing me nothing more than any other child owes their parents. And the other thing is, I’m doing this for me as much as I’m doing it for the child. It’s not charity, it is my choice of how I want to become a mother, not a life-long volunteering mission And at the same time some part of my brain is fighting the sense of validation as if it were a betrayal of my child, all while trying to acknowledge the good intentions of the person who is marvelling at my newly-found sanctity.
Another classic: “so they’re fine with 16 year old girls drinking their weight in Guinness and getting knocked up, no papers asked, but you give them a responsible adult woman with a stable situation and personality and they’ll make it a mission for her to be considered an adequate alternative to life in a gang for a child who needs a mother”. I mean it makes sense and believe me, that one did make me feel validated in all the frustration I was feeling with the lengthy, uncertain, rather arbitrary and often humiliating process I have been going through. But the truth is, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. And more importantly, while instinctively it makes sense to want to support your friend by showing that you understand their frustration, more often than not, what prospective adopters need is friends who can calm them down rather than egg them on – or put them in a position where they end up reluctantly defending the whole process and feeling schizophrenic about it. So that one sort of still works at the beginning of the journey, but it can become counter-productive later on. The worst is with my parents, when they keep coming back to it and getting wildly frustrated, and I have to manage their frustration on top of my own – even if I know it all comes from love.
“You will never know what it’s like to be a mum”. Bit of a favourite that one, left me rather puzzled the first time I heard it. Guess who never said that to me. Mums. Or women. Not once. I’ve only ever heard that from men. Oh the fascination with motherhood, as if it were that one solid and well-defined thing that all women can equally experience, recognize and brandish as the unequivocal us vs. them frontier. The one thing we got on you, the one thing we can do and you can’t. Oh the fantasies. Now I’m obviously no mum yet, but it’s obvious to me that all mums have their own experience of it, and various degrees of enjoying it or identifying themselves to the role. Various understandings of what said role is. Don’t get me wrong, I know that the experience of being pregnant can be very special. I have been and I can remember that constant feeling that my body is not about me but about the being that is growing in it. But I’m not sure you can reduce “being a mum” to that experience, or that of giving birth. So my answer to the “you’ll never know what it’s like to be a mum” comment is generally “do you?” – which clearly occurs to them as a non-sensical answer that only confirms that I am a weirdo, a mildly lost soul (after all I don’t have a man to guide me) or a dangerous hippie.
The mild version of the above would be “didn’t you want to have your own child though?”. Let’s ignore that “own child” phrase – but for the sake of clarity, adoption isn’t a form of borrowing. It’s a legit question but rarely asked in a context where it is appropriate. Either it’s a plan A, in which case the answer to the question is sort of obvious – although it can’t be a straight no because again, we WANT to have our own child, and THAT is how we want to have them. Or there’s another reason, which will ALWAYS be in the realm of the intimate, and why would you demand that I bare my soul and reveal my deepest vulnerabilities to you by asking me such a blunt question? Unless we’re intimate – on any level – in which case it might be a clumsy way to ask but it can lead to a meaningful conversation. Not the majority of cases when I have been asked this particular question.
But now please ladies and gentlemen, make room for my all-time favourite! It’s a date special. And here it is: “why don’t you adopt me instead?”. Now if you are a man reading this, my personal statistics seem to indicate that it might not particularly occur to you as the weirdest fucking thing to say to a woman you are on a date with. But if you are a woman, your amygdala just lit up like the fireworks at the opening of a Celine Dion’s concert on the 4th of July… and screamed: run!!! And don’t fool yourself, there is an above 50% chance that a man will say that at some point in a dating situation (and writing that, I’m conscious there might be an element of how I pick them, but then again maybe not). I first thought it was the sign of some form of narcissism. Surely no man in their right mind would say something like that as you would have to really consider yourself the centre of universe for the thought to even occur to you. But some very kind and considerate men have been known to say it and a male friend, an evolved one, told me that he was pretty sure those men thought they were making a particularly hilarious quip. Let me spell this out: it is n-o-t funny. It’s not triggering in the sense that they’re joking about something I’m serious about, I joke about adoption all the time. It’s just fucking creepy. Ok, level 1 first, knee-jerk reaction: it comes across as pathetic and needy. The opposite of sexy. Plain and simple. Level 2: potentially insensitive. And level 3: fucking creepy. Do they realise that they are comparing themselves to my future child while still harbouring the hope that they will end up in my bed? Do they realise that in that context, they have just dug a very deep hole for themselves? I’m not saying it is 100% impossible to dig themselves out of it, I’m a forgiving soul and I understand that in some cases I’ve just dropped a bomb on them and they’re trying to diffuse it. But still, get a grip.
This anthology of the typical comments I get when I break the news of my intention to adopt wouldn’t be complete though if I did not mention an absolute winner, my boss’s reaction. Now in context, it was just after COVID, during which period a pregnant stray cat had invited herself at mine and proceeded to birth 4 kittens (and then doubled down before I managed to take her to the vet, the little hussy), so I might see where he was coming from. So when I reached the point where the adoption services needed my work to share some paperwork, I decided to inform my boss, a middle-aged, unemotional, understated British white male who while totally respecting my contribution always seems a little anxious before I open my mouth in public and bewildered when the sounds start coming out of it. Also bear in mind I didn’t blurt it out out of the blue, I set up a time to have a conversation. And his reaction was… first silence, then a simple, to the point question: “you mean a human child?”
So maybe take all the above with a pinch of salt, apparently the idea that I might want to adopt a human child seems like a stretch to some, so some of the weirdest responses might just be people trying to deal on the spot with the extent of the cognitive dissonance they are experiencing. Who knows…