Q: Do you still agree with everything that you wrote in the book?

JW: Because it started as a diary, I wrote with brutal honesty—without the constraints of thinking that I had to be politically correct or act like an authority on adoption. I’m not sure whether it was naïveté or courage that allowed me to be so revealing … but it seemed to validate the feelings of many other adoptive parents.

I do not agree with everything I wrote in the book (see next question), but I still think it accurately captures the anxiety and ambivalence that are commonly felt early on in the adoption process.

Q: Was there any part of the book, such as your version of the birth mother letter, which you thought of leaving out?

JW: That unsent version of the birth mother’s letter, which I wince at now, came from feeling utterly powerless and also indignant that we couldn’t have a family in the “normal” way. That letter—with its gross generalizations about birth mothers—is a much more scathing reflection on me than on birth mothers.

I hope that the insensitivity I let readers see at the beginning of the book with the imagined letter is moderated by the dawning enlightenment I show once I’ve had the chance to get to know and like a real live birth mother (namely, my son’s).

I’ve been slammed for that letter, but it underscored the strong ambivalence I felt at the time. Leaving it out would make me look better, but then I wouldn’t be sharing secret thoughts, I’d be sharing sugar-coated ones.

Bottom line, I would not have allowed the book to be published without the blessing of my son’s birth mother, who felt it was a hard but important and honest story to tell.

Q: How did you get over your thoughts of “this wasn’t the real thing” as it relates to birth and adoption?

JW: The short answer is time.

As I came to learn what Ari’s repertoire of cries and faces and grunts meant, I became the one who knew him better than anyone else. Part of owning the role of his Mommy was feeling able to handle his needs.

Another aspect was psychological. Part of me felt like I didn’t deserve to be the real mother because Martie had done all the hard work—I was there and saw for myself. I was conflating the debt I owed Martie with the ability to fully embrace the real mother mantle, as if my claiming Ari was negating Marcie. I found it comforting to remind myself that Martie picked me because she thought I would be a good mother to her baby.

I had to get over another hurdle, too. The fact that I didn’t resemble Ari in the slightest was a constant reminder that I was not his biological mother. Sometimes I felt like a real mother inside our house but not outside. The question of feeling like the “real thing” faded over time. It’s a big issue that becomes a non-issue.

Q: There are some adoptive parents who speak about how they knew it “was meant to be” as soon as they held their son/daughter. Do you think more adoptive parents have your fears and are just uncomfortable admitting it? When did you begin to see your son as yours?

JW: When we first met Martie, three months before Ari was born, my husband and I felt that this was “meant to be.” But having come to know her, and being present at the delivery, actually made it harder to see our son as ours exclusively, and a bit of a stretch to think that the baby that I had just seen Martie deliver was “meant to be” ours all along.

Ari became “mine” when I gave myself permission to claim him … not at a particular point when he did something, like call me “Mama” for the first time. I think there’s a pressure on adoptive parents to feel instantly like a family, but it’s really a process that most of us grow into.

Even if you don’t start out feeling like it was “meant to be,” you end up feeling like it was.

Q:You wrote that it took time to fall in love with Ari; was there a specific moment when you realized that you loved him?

JW: I hurt for my baby when he had blood taken from his toe the day he was born … was that love? That was on the way to love. I was always very tender with my son … but my feelings of love for him had to catch up to my actions. It’s related to the process of “claiming” your child as yours. There wasn’t a specific moment when I realized that I loved my son … it happened with time and shared experiences.

Against the prevailing image of parents who fall instantly in love with their child, it’s easy to feel inadequate and unmotherly if you don’t. I can tell you that a slow start is not a predictor for how well you’ll do as a parent or how deeply you will ultimately fall in love with your child.

Most of us, long before adoption is on our radar, assume we’ll be able to make babies. Parents think about their children as a biological mashup of their genes.

When it becomes clear that we can’t conceive, adoption enters the scene … starting as a foreign, maybe even distasteful, concept: How could anyone else’s genes be as good as ours? The very genes we once took for granted now seem like prized possessions. Some would-be parents put such a high premium on their own genes, they choose not to adopt.

For those of us who have gone through with adoption and fallen head over heels for a child we feel destined to be with, we become much more humble about the supposed superiority of our own genes. Our amazing sons and daughters teach us to appreciate the genetic inheritance of their birthparents.

As time goes on, and differences show up, adoptive parents are inclined to revisit and reassess the genetic dispositions their children bring with them. And whether we’re delighted to uncover a child’s innate talent for art or math, or disturbed to uncover his learning disability or mood disorder, we’re humbled, once again, by the limits of our influence.

The adoption connection appears early on in a scene that shows Steven’s (Jim Carrey) birth mother rejecting him, suggesting that all of his problems emanate from there and give the man without an identity full license to be whomever he desires.

Where once I might have felt offended by the insinuation that adoption is to blame for bad behavior, this time I saw it as nothing more than a convenient device for the screenwriters. Over-the-top stereotypes of gays, cops, bankers, prisoners, Southerners, etc., make the film an equal opportunity offender (and really funny, too).

But I think the real reason that the adoption reference didn’t sting like it used to is that, when you’ve been an adoptive family for nearly 20 years, you don’t take things as personally or as seriously as you did when your cement as an adoptive family was still hardening. Caricatures, misinformation, and inappropriate comments about adoption are still rampant; where once they felt threatening, they come from people who don’t know better and from those who may actually feel threatened themselves by some aspect of adoption.

Members of adoptive and birth families mellow over the years; we pick our battles when the offense is worth the fight.

What rings true to me is that we can’t live through our kids.  It’s OK to spend years as parents enriching our children, but it’s not OK to have particular expectations for them. I’m working on getting OK with that.

What the author does not mention–because his editor did not think it relevant–is that he is an adoptive dad. Perhaps the editor felt that the article would resonate with a wider audience if the author didn’t point out that his son was adopted. But, as an adoptive mom, knowing that this story has an adoption angle makes it more poignant. Is it possible that, in adoptive families, there’s a greater disparity between our aspirations for our children and theirs for themselves?

Q: Where are you from?

Magazine A: “Are you asking where I was born or where I live?”

Real Kid A: “Here.”

Q: “Is that your real mom?

Magazine A: “Do you mean my birthmother? I don’t live with my birthmother.”

Real Kid A: “Yeah.”

Q: “Why didn’t your real mother want you?”

Magazine A: “Are you asking why I was placed for adoption?” or “My birthmother couldn’t take care of any new child.”

Real Kid A: “I dunno. Let’s chase Sara.”

Q: “Is that your real sister? You look different.”

Magazine A: “We have different birthparents, but are part of the same family.”

Real Kid A: “Yup.”

It’s not that the recommended answers are wrong. The spirit of them—I’m proud of who I am; let me educate you because you obviously don’t get it; I’ll tell you some things but not everything—is right on. My son got the same advice 15 years ago. He could even parrot some of the answers, some of the time.

But he never wanted to spend any more seconds on the subject than he had to, and the answers the authorities coach kids to use only provoke more questions and prolong the interaction … and ultimately make your child more “other” than he already is.

It’s worth preparing your child for the fact that he/she will get questions about adoption, and it’s worth offering some possible (albeit unrealistic) answers. But when are we going to teach adoptive kids in ways that align with how things go down in the real world?

In the end, maybe it’s our kids who will teach us how to be real.

The racists behind this online community reprinted in full an article I wrote a decade ago called “Raising a Child of Another Race,” but not before adding a scathing introduction that refers to it as  “a guide for adopting a neegra.”

It scares me and angers me in equal parts to be targeted in this way. It evokes a reflexive prejudice that parents who adopt transracially are not supposed to have. I’ve always taught my son to speak up to injustice and call out racism, but I wonder if there are times when the chasm is too big for any bridge.

Insidious as it is, “friendly” racism — an inappropriate assumption, joke, or fascination — can and should be dealt with directly. I’ve grown bolder over the years about naming this kind of bias when I see it, even when letting it slide would be more comfortable, especially among family and friends.

But how do I deal with Aryan supremacists whose cause is to hate, hurt, or worse?

Sadly, nothing I say or write will change their worldview. So, the best I can think of is to ignore their vitriol and deny them further attention by naming their website. Any other ideas?

I started owning the role of Mommy little by little: my son taught me what his cries meant; I became the one who knew him better than anyone else; and I gladly morphed into becoming his love slave.

I stopped feeling like I had to tell our whole story to anyone who asked. I reminded myself that my son’s birthmother chose us to be his parents; even if I wasn’t always confident, she had been. I dropped the mantle of ADOPTIVE mom to feel just like MOM … though with a transracial adoption, reminders of adoption are never far away.

Adopting a child of another race fundamentally changed the way I saw the world. It awakened me to racism, forced me to figure out where I stood, required me to reach for help, and empowered me to speak out. In the process, I became bolder and more humble at the same time.

The humble part came when I began to realize that, no matter how much I knew about adoption, no matter how well I parented my son, there is so much that is out of my reach. I honestly can’t sort out how much of a role adoption has played in my son’s personality and choices (or mine, for that matter). So while adoption still lurks as an explanation for everything or nothing, the influence of genetics becomes clearer as time goes on. Parents of younger kids don’t like hearing this. They like to think that their wonderful parenting and intense love will trump everything else.

The story is upsetting, too, because—like adoption itself—it’s inherently dramatic, and you know it’s going to end up in a movie before long. In the meantime, the story gets played out in the media. Experts (and non experts) are asked to weigh in, and a certain number of adoptive parents who are also at their wits’ end with troubled children will come out from hiding and begin to tell their me-too stories.

And that’s the good news. Every single adoption saga that makes it onto the evening news or Dateline-like TV show is being lived in a parallel universe by other families we’ll never hear about. A positive upshot of one boy’s adoption disruption is that people are talking about the impact on kids of having lived in an institutional setting. And it has ignited a larger conversation, as well, about the risks of adoption in general.

The fact that the adoption industry has been more inclined to talk about adoption’s rewards than its risks doesn’t make adoption less risky. To the contrary, the more we know, the better agencies and professionals will become (hopefully) at providing training and ongoing support for adoptive families.

If adopting parents can’t tolerate a reasonable degree of risk, they probably shouldn’t adopt. The truth is that all adopting parents are scared to death about the little strangers who might become their beloved children; they do what they can to mitigate the unknowns, and then, with eyes wide open, either take the leap or get off the pot.

In not knowing quite what to do, we did a lot:  sought out friends of color; talked openly about race and racism; went with our son to culture camp; got books and artwork depicting different ethnicities; wrote letters to accomplished men of color for advice; read about racial identity and history; celebrated Kwanzaa; visited a Baptist church; even traded homes one summer with a family from a Black and Hispanic neighborhood in Oakland, CA.

There’s plenty we didn’t do, too:  We didn’t move to a community that was racially mixed in the way our son is; our closest family friends were still white; our gung-ho efforts to pursue ethnic friends and experiences petered off as our son got older; and we chose to send him to a better school than the one that had more kids of color.

Our second-hand attempts to boost our son’s racial pride over the years have been outweighed and outnumbered by his first-hand experiences with prejudice. Big-impact opportunities he’s had — like meeting a group of Tuskegee Airmen and spending a day with Quincy Jones — are no armor for the small, daily daggers he’s encountered — like being stopped in ninth grade by a security guard at his own high school or being watched like a hawk at 7-Eleven.

Since kids who have been adopted transracially don’t have the luxury of internalizing their racial identity through family osmosis, it’s our job as parents to make sure we find other teachers. That’s a job that takes a village. And when you don’t live in the village, you do your imperfect best to find the kind of role models who — despite not loving your kids as much as you do — may be better qualified to help them learn to love themselves.

Whether or not you know your child’s birthmother, the second Sunday in May is a personal reminder that it’s thanks to another woman that you get to be your son’s or your daughter’s mom. It’s one of those bittersweet realizations that you think about less and less as the years go by, though it is never far from your awareness.

So I find myself thinking about Martie, who was 18 years old when she gave birth to a boy and, remarkably, allowed me and my husband to be with her in the delivery room. Even more amazing was her decision, three months earlier, to let us be her baby’s parents. That she picked us and trusted us is a fact I’ve returned to over the years, as I’ve fumbled to figure out what was best for Ari with any given parenting decision. I don’t know that I’ve been a better mother to Ari than Martie would have been, but I think Ari has had a better life — and she was the first to recognize that possibility.

How Martie, as a high school senior, could have thought through the repercussions of adoption for her and her baby is more stunning now that I’ve seen what 18-year-olds look like up close.
Ari wasn’t nearly as mature as his birth mother was at the same age (and neither, for damn sure, was I).

I may be the one who gets taken to brunch, but the first mother I’m toasting on Sunday is my son’s.