The Kid by Dan Savage at goodreads.com.

I am sooo glad to not be in a relationship with someone as funny and smarmy as Dan Savage.  On the other hand, these qualities make for a great writer.  This was a really great book to get a thoughtful perspective on what an private, open infant adoption can look like.

It was recommended to me by some folks that I met that were beginning this process. I agree with what they said that it is one of the best books out there for this.  I laughed out loud sometimes, too…I think it is worth a read just for fun.

Even as someone that is pursuing a different kind of adoption, I got a few gems out of it.

Loss and Entitlement

For many people, the process of adoption, and maybe partcularly infant adoption the events that have led them to this decision are quite complex. Many folks have tried to have children themselves, maybe even had them and lost them.  They also may have a sense of entitlement, being parents is a given.  If there bodies functioned as they expected, they would have a baby.  The process of adopting is a huge hassle that they should NOT have to go through.

Dan Savage, being gay, should not even theoretically be able to have a baby and does not have this experience. J- and I, choosing not to have kids, also don’t have this.  We have no sense of loss around our choice to adopt and we never had an expectation that we would have a kid…this method of parenting is the only process that we have ever had attachment to.

Panicking about worst case scenarios

Savage describes the panic that he and Terry experienced when reading on the internet about fetal alcohol syndrome.  The information out there is pretty much a scare tactic to get mother’s to not drink.  The mother of “the kid” was a gutter punk who drank beer regulary in the beginning of her pregnancy. When she found out she was pregnant, she quit.

When they were first chosen as the family to get her baby, they were so elated that they hadn’t really thought about the potential exposure of the baby. When they realized the kid was at risk for FAS they panicked and overwhelmed themselves with information.  A friend calmed them down and gave them some perspective…their advice was don’t read about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

Our fear came up around Reactive Attachment Disorder.  Because children in the foster care system have been moved around a lot and were potential born into situations of neglect or abandonment, they may have developmental delays from not having healthy attachment patterns.

When Love is Not Enough was the book that triggered our worst case scenarios.  We read this when didn’t really have a full picture of what a typical foster-to-adopt kid was like. The best scenarios in this book may reflect a typical kid in this situation.  The worst situations depicted are so extreme that they are rare. Of course, when reading a book like this, I find myself focusing on the worst cases, they are the most dramatic and attention grabbing.  By the time I was done with it, I was expecting my kid to hate and reject me for the rest of my life.

Luckily during our agency training, we had a parent-child panel that was a huge relief. These kids loved their parents and were lovable, too!

The waiting…and control

The other great thing that I got out of The Kid was that there may be an illusion of control with parenting, but with any kind, there really is none.  With adoption, this is particularly true…a mother can change her mind…a family member can appear…there could be undisclosed information.  With any parenthood, you will never know everything. There may be more of an illusion that you do, but it is really an exercise in patience and self-control and dancing with others to fill the bumps in the road to the future of this child as smoothly as possible.

The Kid

My biggest regret about the book was that we don’t know more about The Kid after birth.  What is there is a reality check about how one can be marginalized by living as an adoptive parent.  Savage describes scenarios of people making assumptions about him and his kid.  These include getting looked at or questioned as if he and Terry were kidnappers or people asking The Kid if he was going home to “mommy”.

I have thought about this a lot since there is a good possibility that our kids will be a different race than us.  Transracial families are very common in our neighborhood, which I feel lucky about…but I realize that I must be prepared to be confronted in positive and negative ways with this issue.