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There’s a really wonderful, sad, and insightful article on Salon.com today: “A Mother’s Love,” by Sallie Tisdale, about the her son, his wife, and their children. Tisdale’s son was adopted at age 9 from Guatemala, he’s profoundly deaf (when he came to his adoptive family he could communicate only through signs he’d made up himself), and now, as a young adult, he works only sporadically and lives mostly off the disability checks he and his partner (also hearing impaired) draws from the government. The two of them have several children together, all unplanned (it appears) and they lead a rather shiftless, pointless, unproductive existence. Their fate, as well as the fate of their children, worries the author.
The article is worth a read, but the letters afterwards – they’re what are really worth a read. Although many of them are wonderful and insightful and supportive in their own right, the people who bothered to write in also show what society thinks in general when a child doesn’t turn out “perfect” no matter what his/her background: it’s the mother’s fault.
Here’s a letter who blames the writer’s son’s problems on the fact that he was adopted from poverty into middle class:
I do not want to accuse, but are there ways in which you made him feel that he owed you something when he was a small boy? Did you want him to be grateful for your middle-class kindness? Did you make him feel he was this lower-class boy who had to earn your love and respect? I think we can make excuses for being unkind and unthoughtful, for not knowing how to love another human being who is different from us, even though we want to. I understand that race and class are huge issues for Salon readers. It is a way in which people define themselves morally. The truth is that we, as humans, are so much more alike than different. It seems to me that your son is searching for love and understanding by gravitating toward people who do not see him as Rafael, the adopted poverty boy from Guatemala. It sounds like he’s chosen a community of wounded young people (who may or may not be meth users) who are accepting because they speak a common language of abandonment by parents, adopted parents, society. The consequences for his children are tragic. If nothing else, you, as a grandparent, can do your very best to get them out of there, if need be.
Here’s another gem:
It’s strange, but in most cases the apples don’t fall that far from the tree. So how did her son turn out to be white trash? Lack of direction? Lack of discipline as a child? I could’ve gone that route when I was younger, but my parents were tough enough to steer me away from that kind of lifestyle. What went wrong here?
Nice.
This one says the boy is having problems because of the racist society (perpetuated by his white parents, I gather):
“A mother’s love” seems to have racist undertones. Never do you suggest that we are living in a racist and oppressive environment and that that may be the cause of Rafael’s struggle. Obviously you have read/support the “culture of entitlement vs. culture of constraint” thesis which argues that poor people/ people of color recreate their poverty all by themselves. And you are blameful of the poor. You think they should be sterilized? You should be angery at the system that is inadequate–a system that expoits the poor, the disabled, immigrants. This article is not about a mother’s love. A mother’s love is unconditional.
Oh boy.
Everything about these select letters makes me sad and annoyed and dismayed and really mad because they seem clear on the idea that it’s his mother’s fault that the kids is failing at life because if only she had loved him enough he would be doing ok.
Did they not read that the child was 9 when adopted and had had basically no way to communicate with other people? So not only was the child attachment challenged due to no home and no parents, but he couldn’t even communicate with the people he did have around him. He was helpless as a child and he’s helpless as an adult – and this is somehow his mother’s fault? She was supposed to undo the hard-wiring that the first 9 years of his life created?
I realize this is kind of a sad story for a blog entitled ‘Hoping to Adopt,’ but since prospective parents come in all shapes and sizes and are adopting children from all kinds of backgrounds, I think this should serve as a warning to people thinking of adopting – NOT that you should shy away from special needs children or older children (although you certainly should educate yourself before you consider this) – BUT that if your child is not perfect YOU will be blamed for it by people who don’t know you, or perhaps those that will. You need to develop a thick skin. You need to try to find pride in the ways you have parented your child well (which I think Tisdale has, based on her other writings about her family).
Love is sometimes not enough, no matter what we hope. But imagine the alternative for this child and for Tisdale if she had never adopted him. He would be living on the streets, perhaps? She would be without him, and those grandchildren. Nowhere in the article does she regret adopting him and nowhere does she take responsibility for how he’s made his choices as an adult. I actually think that makes her a very good mother.
