re-framing the adoption narrative

She came to us on a Saturday night, after lying alone in a room for nearly 48 hours. We hadn’t planned for her. In fact, earlier that morning, I stood together with Jeremy in the storage shed while we debated getting rid of all the clothes our youngest had outgrown. 

We’re done, right? 

Uhhh… I think so???

…

Let’s just hang on to them a little longer, ok?

Ok. 

And an hour later, Bana K was at our door explaining what happened. 

Mom had been on the way to the clinic when baby M came. Somewhere between home and safety, she birthed, bled and died. A neighbor pulled them both into a hut and the funeral began. Baby M was wrapped in a blanket and placed in a back room. With no one to nurse her, the family prepared for not one, but two burials. 

Something in her cries that night must have pushed the family to think differently. Several of the funeral attendees knew us, and a messenger was dispatched. I arrived to find Dad, his seven other children, and the 200 or so mourners typically found at a village funeral. I was ushered into a two room house. The four-year-old on the other side of the brick wall was wailing for his mom who wasn’t coming back. The family sat with me on the dirt floor while other curious bodies crammed in, blocking what little light would have come through the door and triangle windows built into the exterior walls. Dad leaned on the wall across from me, no longer coping with the two-year-old fussing on his lap. The fifteen-year-old next to him was little help. They both looked like they'd been run over by a truck. 

The family asked me to speak, and I asked first to just listen. In turn, old women said the same thing, one after another. “We need help. We can’t manage. Please help us. Please help.” I said, “I want to help. She needs to eat. It has been too long. I can have milk here in a few hours.” 

They had already decided though what kind of help they were looking for. 

“Take her.”

“Uhhh…”

“We just can’t right now. We’re not managing with the other seven. We need you to take her.” 

There we sat, between a rock and a hard place. A shell-shocked family desperately asking for help. Me, rolling over attachment theory in my head. Above the clamor expressing this challenge and that, I blurted out, “She needs her family!” And they upped the volume a notch and yelled back, “We need YOU.” And ten minutes later, someone was shoving into my vehicle a bundle of blankets, at the center of which was a darling little girl. 

Every year when Adoption Awareness Month (November, fyi) rolls around, I get this sinking feeling in my gut as I see the internet filled with stories and pictures of happy adoptive families who would center the narrative around the beauty of adoption. And truly, adoption is beautiful. To choose to love is beauty incarnate. But, truly-truly, it is beauty from ashes. We owe it to the adoptees in our midst to acknowledge that ashes are a bi-product of something being burnt to the ground. 

There is no other way to arrive at adoption other than extreme trauma and loss. A mother dies. A family breaks. Addiction. Disfunction. Abandonment. We can’t manage - take her.

Sometimes I feel like we are so busy celebrating the redemption that we hold precious little space for the tragic. It is both lovely and awful at the same time. Like my favorite Ann says, “Joy and pain are arteries of the same heart,” and intentional orphan care means we handle both well. 

It might seem unreasonably pessimistic to even suggest re-directing the conversation towards trauma. Who doesn’t love a happy ending? What’s wrong with you, Emo Adoption Lady? 

What’s wrong with me is that I grew up in the first world and have lived my entire adult life in the third, and now as a foster and adoptive mother, I see the trajectory of orphan care from two different continental views, and I’m still unsettled. 

In America, we have focused on keeping children safe, and with family when possible, which means we major on two actions: removal and reunification. “The system” is swamped and foster parents, bless them, are doing their best. In Zambia - to our shame - we have largely focused on crisis management which has meant institutionalization. As I’ve written about before (here and here,) the funding flow out of the West fuels the glorification of orphanages and the result is thousands of children in “care” (a misnomer) while their DNA is out there. 

What has my gut twisted in knots and wrapped around my heart is that, on either continent, in any context, when I hear talk about adoption awareness, the thing that I’m NOT hearing people talk about is prevention. 

Every single adoption is the result of a brokenness which we, the community of privilege, have failed to prevent. I think about this for our own son, and for all of our adoptee friends. I cry about how scared my son’s birth mom must have been, and how someone clearly wasn’t there to support her. I think about the parents who sign papers and hand kids over because no stepped in to say, “keep your child, I’ll pay for everything.” I think about the homeless mom and the addicted one and the one with an abusive boyfriend and I feel the burden of responsibility. How many steps along the way were we not there for you? 

Baby M stayed with us for three weeks at which point, I won’t lie, we kind of wanted to keep her. There’s something about waking up every two hours at night to feed a baby and wearing her close to my heart throughout the day – I think any mother would have to be a little off to not feel the bonds of love forming. And truthfully? It would have been easy to make her ours. 

Her family already had asked for a long-term placement. We could have shown off our house and resources and promised her the world and her family would very likely have made a “smart” and terrible decision to leave her with us forever. And we would have been praised by the internet as a beautiful, adoptive family. But thankfully we have super good and reliable friends who snapped their fingers in our ears and just repeated, “She needs her family. She needs her family.” And they were absolutely right. So we set our feelings on the shelf and got serious about getting her home.

Convincing the family to receive her back was easier said than done, but we kept at it because we know it was right. We can never bring her mother back, but we can work to PREVENT the trauma of adoption. 

And work it is.

The first week baby M was home, Grandma called me several times after midnight just to say, “M is crying and won’t stop.” I never slept after those calls. On my first visit to the home to deliver more formula, I was given a list of things they needed. She wreaked of pee and I noticed that the rats had chewed through every one of her bottle nipples. We talked about burping and why babies cry and why laundry soap is too caustic for newborn skin. I taught them what a selfie was because the day deserved some levity. I drove away feeling like the band-aid had been ripped off too fast. 

Driving home, the thought rushed into my mind and I pushed it out the other side – This is a huge commitment. We are paying for everything anyway - it would be easier to just keep her with us. Thankfully the grace of conviction swelled again – prevention is worth the work. 

Unfortunately, our adoption culture celebrates the exact opposite. How many times have I seen a viral facebook post of a cute couple offering (begging) to adopt some other woman’s baby. We christen them as saints and speak nothing of birth mom’s story out on the margins. And after 6 million likes and 50,000 shares, the words “We’ll take her!” have become more admirable than, “We’ll move heaven and earth to make sure she stays with you!” And just like that, we facilitate loss instead of preventing it. 

Is it possible that the narrative of redemption in adoption has desensitized us to the flaming mess we didn’t address on the front end?  Is it possible that we aren't serious about family preservation because we don't yet believe in the primal wound we are inflicting? Do our meager efforts through pregnancy centers and WIC programs really amount to all that we can do? Are we skilled at putting out fires before they create the ashes out of which adoptees must then rise? 

I don’t think so. Not yet. We’re not nailing access to health care, marriage counseling, education, mentorship, therapy, childcare, job support. Not even close. Smart people have made these lists for us: they have curated research around what destabilizes parents and what kinds of structural and relational safeguards must be in place to support and preserve families. The stats are there: we're not doing it.

It feels like, in November, of all months, when we are supposed to be most “aware” of adoption, that prevention is the message we should be pouring over. Prevention is what we should be discussing and rallying behind and setting goals for. Because we love our adoptees more than life – this is a fact – but we need to get honest and admit that our adoptees wouldn’t have needed the "traumatic blessing" that is adoption if someone – WE – had done the hard work of prevention in the first place. 

Obviously not every person of privilege is in a position to help every mom and family in crisis – for reasons of geography if nothing else. None of us is omniscient and unknown crises are impossible prevent. Which is why I think the overarching narrative around adoption is so important – because while you may not be the neighbor to the newly pregnant woman who needs long-term support to keep her child safe and in her own home, that facebook friend of yours who thinks adoption is all rainbows and sunshine certainly is. It is our responsibility to cultivate a climate that is wise enough to know what needs to be done, and courageous enough to do it. 

For my part, I write words. I hug my son and mourn his loss with him, and celebrate the beauty of our forever family too. Together, we deliver tins of formula and become full-time cheerleaders of families preserved. We pour out, and advocate and hope. We do our best, which is all we can do. And we pray that you will too. 

on death and ice cream

It was a Tuesday morning when the familiar sound came drifting through the crack between the top of our walls and the base of the roof. The inconsolable; the freshly mourning. Boaz has died, the neighbor told me. I knew that he had been injured in a soccer match. I knew that he had been referred to the hospital. I knew that he had been sent home. Died? Yep. We started piecing the puzzle together and concluded that he must have had some form of internal bleeding that was not attended to.

Since Boaz’s house was right across from the preschool, we canceled class for three days so as to not disturb the wailers with our painfully cheerful ABC’s, or maybe  so as to not frighten the wee ones with the fits of sheer grief, whichever happened to be louder.

It quickly occurred to me that Bronwyn might not be so ok with funerals any more. She had attended her fair share in her early years, but now, older, more emotionally aware and empathetic, I wasn’t sure how she would perceive the descending sadness. This is, after all, the child who could not cope when Frosty melted and when Cinderella lost her shoe. A little boy is gone and his mommy can’t even stand up under the weight of sorrow – I wasn’t sure how that would not shake my sensitive girl.

We sent her to play elsewhere as I sat with the wailers in the funeral house - as Jeremy prepared the Land Rover to serve as hearse - as songs and cries of grief waxed and waned. We slept closely that night, hugging our little girls with a fresh awareness that life is fleeting and precious.

The following day, the boy was to be buried. Jeremy was sent to the hospital to retrieve the coffin and the body and bring it to the church. We sat, along with a few hundred others, under the trees, waiting for that familiar sound of the diesel engine to draw near. As the vehicle pulled closer, the noise level amongst the people grew and Bronwyn looked at me with concern. Why is everyone crying? Because a little boy has died, and his mother misses him so very much. When is he coming back? He’s not, baby, he’s going to be with Jesus now. Oh... Can we have ice cream?

the overflow seating

It was the third of her questions that helped me relax again as I was clued in to the fact that this was indeed still beyond her, and we were not likely to have another Frosty or Cinderella-esque melt down. Of course I was still sad for Boaz and his family. This boy has been a part of our crew for years and the unnecessary nature of his death made me ill. But as with so many things, my preoccupation with my own children somehow had the ability to defer and deflect other reactions. And for that funeral, Bronwyn was ok, and therefore so was I.

I posted a picture on instagram of my girls on my lap and the coffin wedged up next to us as we carted it off to the cemetery. She never asked and I never told her what was in that crushed-velvet-covered box. I was surprised a bit by the outpouring of sympathetic reactions to that picture. Clearly the story was heartbreaking, and I did appreciate the solidarity, but the startled response gave me pause to remember, oh, our friends don’t know how normal this is.

It’s not always a boy bleeding out after taking a soccer ball in the stomach. But it seems to always be some one and some thing. The same night we buried Boaz, a Musonda grandchild passed away and the mourners kept mourning and only just shifted to another location. A few days after that, Bana Louisa’s mother died and no one came to my meeting at the clinic. A few days later, Bana Ngandwe’s brother died and Bible study got canceled. We have only attended one of the four funerals in the past two weeks largely because we lack material and emotional resources to cater to every single family, and therefore we pick and choose. But the reality remains that we could probably go to 50 + funerals a year in our community like everyone else does. 

funeral procession to the burial ground

Quite honestly, mourning is strangely normal. The domination of death in the village is seen in meeting minutes when three fourths of the absentees are reported to have gone to funerals. Organizations, including our own have not only “sick day” policies but “funeral day” policies a well. We receive more requests for monetary assistance for funerals than we do for business/micro finance. There has never been a team or a visiting volunteer whose work has not somehow been disturbed by an unexpected funeral.

towards the cemetery

That evening after we came home from the burial ground, I capitalized on the events of the day, taking the opportunity to explain to Bronwyn about Jesus’s death and what that implied for our own. Jeremy, worrying that I was breaking the cardinal rule of parenting by answering questions that my child was not asking, gave me the “stop talking” face and I had to remind him that he had not been there for Easter when we had to completely avoid the death preceding the resurrection because our three year old couldn’t understand and I was determined to use this opportunity to help her figure out the rest of the gospel.

Jesus died so that we don’t have to, I told her, among other things. And she sorta nodded and said, ok while slurping her completely-melted-nothing-stays-cold-in-October ice cream. Jeremy pointed out that she still wasn't getting it, but I’m ok with that because at least she has the full vocabulary of redemption now. She’s seen the picture, heard the sounds and she now has the words to grasp that life here is not forever. She has the context for our work’s great precept: life is hard, God is merciful, heaven is for sure.

This will only get more real for her. With every funeral, every coffin and every burial, it gets all the more concrete that life implies a final hour. This interaction with death is a part of the third-culture-kid package of life lessons that are not at all desirable but somehow a blessing all the same.

I’m thankful that my children have never ending opportunities to come face to face with ultimate reality. It is the hardship of the now, juxtaposed with the mercy of God and the assurance of heaven for those who believe that keeps us here. And I want them to get that. I want them to live the same, where they consider all their years as a mere breath and endeavor to do something significant with them. I want them to know that death is NOT the worst thing that could happen to a person – death without knowing Christ is.

And so in plain view and along side our sticky-faced kids, we champion LIFE. We push and sweat and labor till we just can't anymore - all to the end that people would know LIFE and know it to the full. We mourn with those who mourn. Truly, deeply. There is nothing neat or sterile about it. We also teach/sing/show again and again that to live is CHRIST and to die is GAIN. Because so help me goodness our blondy MK’s might be totally weird and awkward for many of their experiences here, but if nothing else they will have a rock solid theology of life and death…

…and that is a gift greater than all the ice cream in the world.

Bashi Winnie Changes Diapers, and my claim to fame

Mansa is our little shopping town, and as long as I've been frequenting there for bread and cheese and canned beans, I’ve never really had my own identity. When I was serving with the Peace Corps, I was just another volunteer, easily confused with other generic white girls and called Christina, Jessica, Bonnie, Kristin, Becky, and Elizabeth. Because all white people look the same so clearly I’m her.

After I got married, I became the one married to the guy with the Land Rover, which apparently made me very cool and all the gas station attendants wanted to be my friend. Everyone knows Jeremy – and the Land Rover – and so this became my own claim to fame. I rode far on that title, answering politely as people would start a conversation not with "how are you?" but with "how is Jeremy?" (He's stellar, by the way.)

And then, one day, it happened. I had been sent into the market to buy some dried fish or something and a bunch of ladies were all like, “oh hey, we know you, you’re the one married to the guy who changes diapers!” Beaming with pride and cackling as much as the fish ladies were, I accepted my new moniker. Hand on hip with head tipped to the side, I said, “yup, that’s my man.” 

After asking Jeremy where this one came from, I finally heard the story. One day he had been with Bronwyn in the market’s car parking "area" (calling it a parking lot would imply some kind of order - so, we'll call it an "area") and the babe needed a diaper change. So Jeremy, being  a confident and secure man, not to mention a caring and kind father, simply changed the poopy diaper. In the three minutes that it took to remove the dirty diaper, wipe her up and slap a new diaper on her, a sizable crowd of men had gathered to stare and point and wonder really loudly who is this man that changes diapers??? 

Winnie baby, you are also awesome, and I hope you do not feel too exposed.

I've asked all my Fimpulu friends and they all say the same things: rural Zambian men CANNOT change diapers. It’s not possible. The child can sit in his poo until his mother returns. Or grandma can do it, or the big sister, but not the man because that is way too beneath him. If ever there were something on which to slap the label “women’s work,” it would be diaper changing. I only found one or two fathers who have ever changed a single diaper, and for them, it was a very humbling experience and under severely extenuating circumstances. So the fact that Jeremy, the Land Rover driving, barbed wire hauling, greased hands, man's-man – the fact that THIS GUY publically and unabashedly was found changing a diaper in the middle of a macho-guy infested public place… well shoot, that sealed it right there. Bashi Winnie is the new diaper changing celebrity. And I, proudly, am the diaper changing celebrity’s wife. 

I think of the American women of my generation who are fighting tooth and nail to establish their identity and leave their individual mark on the world and staring down the constant threat of being known merely as wife and mother. I understand the fight, but  I can honestly say that I’m content that hardly anyone knows my real name or my personal awesomeness. I’m rather quite honored to be connected to such a man of enviable fame who is talked of near and far because of his guns of steel and baby powder softness. 

Because after all, it takes a rather special woman to snag such a hunk of a diaper changing man. 

Eat your heart out girls, he’s mine. And Happy Valentines Day babe.

wee ones and wee wee

Well would you look at this: lil' miss on a little potty. With a book. Because for some reason, peeing is assisted by reading. (I though that was cultural, but apparently its biological?)

We’ve always sort of wondered ourselves what potty training would look like in a place without traditional potties. I would joke with Jeremy that I was not going to send Bronwyn into the pit latrine to do her business for fear that she might fall in. But I had no ideas in mind as to how she was supposed to learn the skill of personal waste elimination.

I didn’t receive much help from the ladies around me either. Kids here just sort of pee. Anytime. Anywhere. Whatev. I’ve watched pee leak out of the chitenge while a baby stays strapped to moms back. Mom acknowledges the wet but keeps on clicking. Little kids who are self-mobile usually just pee all over themselves until they realize that they can pull their pants down and squat and they start doing that. For little ones, peeing (and most pooping) happens right on the ground at the location where the urge is first felt. (Our neighbor boy Michael had a big thing about peeing in our living room. Maybe it’s the soothing color scheme…) Slightly older kids will go off to the side so that they aren’t peeing in the same place they are playing. Older kids will go behind the house or into the bush a bit to find some privacy. And eventually, fear of public exposure does ultimately drive every person into the pit latrine. But all of this is child-driven, without any intentional “potty training” from mom and dad.

I remember before we had Bronwyn, Michael's mom stopped by on an afternoon when Michael had peed himself, and our floor, for about the third time that week. I thought I was being helpful by giving her a few pointers. “When you see Michael get that look on his face like he might need to go, why don’t you encourage him to recognize the urge and hold it till he can go outside and you can take his pants off? And then praise him for doing a good job!” She just sort of got this quizzical look on her face as if to say, “I cannot process why you are so high strung, Bethany.”

So clearly we’ve been winging it since day one in terms of potty training. Some time back, she started saying this word that sounded something like potty and we got excited. We went out and bought her a cute little potty chair and it just sat in our bedroom getting absolutely no action. But every once in a while, she’d insist we take her diaper off and she’d go and sit on that seat. More often than not, she’d just sit and do nothing, but then one time she actually tinkled and was so pleased with herself! For the rest of the day, she wouldn’t put a diaper on, and just went all over peeing in different places. We were so proud of our little puppy dog. And up till now, we just follow her cues. When she says “potty” we take her diaper off and let her do what she thinks she needs to do. As her awareness of her bodily functions grows, we hear “potty” more and more. But we don’t stress it, because, Michael eventually stopped peeing in our living room, and we don’t know a single teenager who doesn’t know how to use the pit latrine, and that gives us hope that Bronwyn too will grow to be a normal functioning person.

As I’ve tried to read up a little on this developmental milestone, I’m still taken aback by the American potty training intensity. I think it is much less about a child’s natural development and much more about PROTECTING OUR BELOVED FLOORS. It’s for the love of the carpet and the hardwood that we don’t strip that diaper and say “just be free, nature baby,” letting kids figure out that wetting their pants is less than ideal.

But no worries. Bribery with M&M’s has its merits, and ya’ll can laugh when I tell you Bronwyn is terrified of falling into the foreign porcelain toilet bowl. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!

What’s the funniest/most inappropriate place your child has ever peed?