vulnerability

I’ve been thinking about the new question Gretchen posted over at Regular Midwesterners. She asked:

For queer couples with kids, there is a necessary third figure in our children’s lives. How do you plan to explain or acknowledge this person?

Indeed (as Gretchen goes on to acknowledge), there’s at least one other figure. For those of us intent on adopting, there are two. And we typically need the support of lots of other people: sperm bank or adoption agency support staff, medical practitioners, lawyers, family, friends. It’s one way that our families just aren’t like lots of straight families (though this connects us to plenty of adoptive hets). It’s an important question.

Since J and I don’t yet have children here to parent (though we are in the third trimester today, thank you very much!), our plans for handling this with our kids are still entirely hypothetical. I don’t know what we’ll say about Rabbit’s donor (a man I feel deeply and intimately connected with). I know that we plan on creating a consistent and cohesive narrative about donor conception, but I don’t know exactly what that will look like. I guess I think it’ll depend on our son, on how he seems to hear and internalize these ideas. On what kinds of narratives make sense to him, given his unique worldview. But I’m not sure that what we plan to say is as important as how we really feel about this reality because my guess is that our kids will hear how we feel about this lots more than we will actually talk about it.

So in terms of how I really feel about it, I’d say this: it comes down to vulnerability, which means that it comes down to how I, as a parent, handle being vulnerable.

Vulnerability is something I’m super interested in. It is the foundational concept of my dissertation, where I use alternative feminisms (queer. postcolonial. black. Islamic.) to try to read power in vulnerability. In the west, we tend to perceive vulnerability as a weakness, as something we’re supposed to fight against. Conversely, we perceive strength in all things impenetrable. In sovereignty. In liberation. But in looking at national sovereignty and the harm that’s done in its name (for example: our retaliation to the threat of 9/11; our belief that the need to protect the self justifies any assault on the other), this definition of strength seems problematic. The question here is: what does our resistance to vulnerability cost us in the end? So I tend to think politically about vulnerability, about what it might stand to accomplish. Because the truth behind all of our attempts to convince ourselves otherwise is that we are always already vulnerable. We are ceaselessly exposed to violence, to accidents, and to the breakdown of the body’s natural processes. At any moment, our lives – or the lives of the people on whom we depend (bodily, emotionally) – can be extinguished. We can lose. That reality is so viscerally threatening that we work hard to deny it. To shore up our sense of empowerment, and control, and invincibility. We pretend.

Maybe it’s the fact that I spend so much time thinking about these issues, but to me, parental narratives of possession are inseparable from all of this. We’re conditioned to think of the things we love as ours: our lives, our loves, our children, our homes, our friends. And in claiming all of this, we feel tethered to it. In owning it, we convince ourselves that it cannot be taken away.

But in his answer to Gretchen’s question, Josh said something really beautiful:

[This] goes to the heart of the radical nature of adoption and maybe other forms of alternative family(?): we share our children with others and do not wholly possess them.

This is the core reality of adoption – of non-biological parenting in general – to which people seem most resistant. They’re not really our kids. Or they’re less our kids. Or they can only be two people’s kids, and those roles are already filled. So here’s where I think we are ironically privileged: we know better from the start. We aren’t at liberty to ignore the fact that none of us ever “wholly possess[es]” his or her children. They are shared, as, I would argue, all children are shared. They are not our sovereign territory. And we know it before we even lay eyes on them.

So how do I think this functions in the lived reality of alternative parenting? I’m not sure yet. If I had to guess, I’d say that queer and adoptive (and queer adoptive) parents are positioned to teach their children this early on, that the children of queer/adoptive parents spend less time under the illusion of sovereignty. The dangerous traditions of in-group privilege and out-group exclusion. That, if they see us grappling with these issues, they’ll grow up grappling with them too. And that this is good for them.

I was born to an adopted father who was neither married to nor in a committed relationship with my incredible mother. To a brave, unwed woman who had never planned on parenting. For a long time, I saw pieces of this as a liability. I wanted a “normal” family, to feel a part of a secure, unbreakable unit. But I like these facts now. I think they’ve helped me immeasurably on this path. When I came out, when I married a woman, when I decided not to try to carry again, I gave up other pieces of a narrative that has never really served me anyway. It was probably easier to let go because I was already on the outside.

So it’s important to me that my children are raised in a committed, two-parent household. It’s important to me that they know they are safe and loved beyond measure. That they know that their well-being is our top concern, always always. But the idea that they might feel connected to the other people who helped give them life? That isn’t threatening to me. Because they should feel connected to those people, right? I feel connected to them. And it seems, to me, better to show my children how interconnected we all are than to have them sense that interconnectivity, but think of it as a betrayal to me. Like the women of the novels I write about, I think there’s more to be gained from the acceptance of vulnerability than there is to be lost. I think there’s more to be gained from the acceptance that other people are a part of my children than in the denial of that fact. Because doesn’t that break down so much of what we, as queers, are positioned to see through anyway? I love Rabbit’s donor. Though they may never meet, I hope that Rabbit will love him too. That he will be a silent, absent, beautiful, undeniable part of our family. That allowing lots of space for that will only serve to connect me more tightly to my son.

Nota Bene 1: I probably sound like I’m completely comfortable with vulnerability, and you should know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. I get so scared about so many things. I worry that something serious is wrong with my health, that I won’t get to see my kids grow up. I spent much of this weekend OBSESSED with one off-hand comment that a doctor made about a symptom I’ve been having. I worry that, in my lack of legal recognition, this little boy will be taken from me. I don’t mind sharing him, but I mind very much the horrible possibility of losing time with him. Still, I don’t think this serves me, and I work constantly (in therapy, with friends, with my wife) to find ways of letting go of these driving fears. They keep me thinking about what I might lose and not what I actually have right now.

Nota Bene 2: In losing Emmett, I learned a lot about the cost of vulnerability, so I don’t say any of this lightly. Still, I know this is theoretical, and therefore inherently simplistic. I know that, when we begin the adoption process, we could face painful realities I can barely imagine now. This is how I want to walk into this process, but I hold no illusions that the process itself won’t shatter these notions and force me to construct new ones again and again.

 

the false binaries of parenthood

Nota Bene: This post is long, but I think it’s an important discussion to have. It’s something I’ve wanted to write for awhile now, and, whatever your subject position, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this, either in a comment or through private message.

I had a hard day yesterday (lots of sadness: I think it was a cathartic, end.of.summer, the.Rabbit.is.doing.well, J.is.feeling.better, I.can.fall.apart sort of thing), so when J got home last night, she took me downtown to eat carry-out on an outdoor table and hit a movie (a perfect RLG pick.me.up). We ran into our friend G and her incredibly sweet mama, who did something adorable. She asked what I weighed at birth, and then what J weighed at birth, and then she told us that her kids weighed the average of her husband’s birth weight and her own, so, she speculated, the Rabbit would probably weigh the average of ours. G’s mom is a badass, and I’m pretty sure she’s not senile, so one of two things happened: either she was just being sweet in including me, or she forgot (because she’s the kind of person who might just forget about biological necessities). This moment made me feel incredible.

I was being asked a question about myself by way of speculating something about my son!

Reflecting on this last night and this morning, I’ve asked myself why these kinds of comments make me feel so good, all the while I’m dreading the constant commentary that I anticipate we’ll hear about how much Rabbit looks like my wife. It isn’t that I don’t want him to look like her, so let me be clear:

• She’s gorgeous.
• She’s brilliant.
• She’s my favorite person in the world.
• I would LOVE for this boy to have her amazing eyes, her upturned upper-lip, her high cheek-bones, her long neck, her long limbs. I tell our son this all the time, speaking through her belly, loving them both and the connection they share.

And I never needed for my children to look like me. If I could choose which parts of me my babies would inherit, I would give them my loyalty, my self-discipline, my steady sense of gratitude, my joy. And I’m just as likely to give these qualities to a non-bio child as I am to one with whom I share genetic material. So for me, it’s not about any actual desire for a biological relationship with my children. What it is about is perception. It’s about the deep investment our culture has with biology, the not.so.subtle privileging of blood-relations.

This morning, I ran across a new post by Lyn – over at First Time Second Time – who wrote these words in response to the question, “are there any differences in how you feel about your gestational kids and your partner’s gestational children?” Lyn and her partner, Gail, each gave birth to one of their two children. Like all of the First Time Second Time posts (I’ve been a silent reader of this blog for some time now), this one was full of insight and honesty. Though – as a mom who will probably only share genetic material with a child who didn’t make it – some of what I read there was painful, I’m glad to be a part of a community that can discuss these questions openly and vulnerably. So in that spirit, here are my thoughts:

The problem isn’t that we draw distinctions between biological parent/child relationships and non-biological parent/child relationships. There’s nothing wrong with distinctions. The problem is that we do so in a society wherein this binary is always already weighted. From our first utterance on the issue, we’re fighting against the assumption not that there are differences, but that because of those differences, relationships can be valued and ranked. We live in a culture where biology is so privileged that any acknowledgment of difference amounts, essentially, to confirmation of a hierarchy. It’s the same reason we have to fight, as members of the LGBT community, to insist that our families are the same, even though in many ways they’re not. It’s why “separate but equal” never works. We can’t be trusted to allow differences between groups of people because we are so deeply conditioned to rank and compare. And once we make value judgments, we stick to them.

Men are better than women? Check.

White is better than black? Check.

Straight is better than gay? Check.

Moms are closer to their kids than dads? Check.

A biological connection with your children is always best, and anything else is a back-up plan? Check.

These are the terms. And, as is typical, these terms dictate what we can even think about, forcing us to ignore the complexity that actually drives these issues. If Emmett Ever had made it, I probably would have had a different relationship with her than I will with my other (from J’s body, from other women’s bodies) children. But why would we assume it would be better? Maybe it would have reflected that common mother/daughter tension. Maybe she would have been so much like me that we would have fought a lot. Maybe she would just have been closer with J. I’ve had our two black cats for thirteen years now, and our boy-cat (they’re siblings) is my soul-animal. He and I fell in love at first sight. His sister and I learned to love each other, but when J came into our lives, that girl-cat finally found her soul-mama. I love her, but we don’t have that same, magical thing. But loving her is, in some ways, sweeter for the work that it’s taken us. There’s a different kind of depth because it wasn’t instantaneous. Connections aren’t so easily predicted. They’re a product of too much complexity for that.

And the reality is that, because I’m a different person than everyone else, I’ll be a different mother too. J and I were both raised by our biological moms, but they’re very different parents, and my guess is that if you asked them to describe how they think about motherhood (which I’d love to hear them do!), they’d give you very different answers. The problem is, nobody compares their answers because, as biological mothers, they’re both assumed to have experienced ideal motherhood.

What hurts me is not that E is the only child I’ll share DNA with. What hurts me is that, just as I have to fight against the mainstream assumption that my family is lesser than because it happens to include two women, I’ll have to fight against the assumption that my relationship with my children is lesser than too. Personally, I think there’s something beautiful about the likelihood that I won’t be related to any of the children I get to raise. It creates an equality that I like. The Rabbit, and any other children we decide for J to carry, and any children we’re blessed to adopt: their relationship to me will be based completely on my love for them as people in the world. It won’t be based on shared features. I think of this as a privilege. It just hurts me that few others do too.

And I find this whole conversation a little absurd because – just as with this country’s divorce rate, it’s laughable to suggest that gay marriage will harm the “sanctity of the institution of marriage” – it’s laughable to think that all bio-moms are inherently more connected to their children than I will be to mine. Being a mama is the most important thing in my life. I’ve waited a long time to be sure that I’ll be good at this, that I’m ready to put myself down in the ways this will necessitate, that I have room in my life for these people to grow. I am humbled by the prospect of being invested with the safety of my children, with their happiness, with their ability to become the best possible versions of themselves. But I’m supposed to think that, even with all that intentionality, I’ll always be second to their “real” moms? Or that, because they don’t share my nose shape, I’ll do all of that a bit less enthusiastically?

I remember having lunch with a friend who had struggled for years with infertility. When I asked about adoption, she said that couples had to fully mourn the possibility of conceiving before they could move onto adoption. This was true for her, and she’s since become an incredible adoptive mama. But I bristled at the generality of her statement, largely because it never felt true to me. I wanted both: to adopt and to carry. And I wanted them equally. I’ve always sensed that my children would come to me in a variety of ways, and that’s never made me feel like some of them will be any less my children than others. But what she said is culturally true (ideologically-driven), precisely BECAUSE we tell women that adoption is a back-up-plan. It’s something you do if you can’t have the real thing. It’s something you settle for. But I refuse to think of my relationships with my children as “settling.” I’m not infertile, but trying again might be dangerous for me, and if I did try again, I’d be doing it because my culture tells me that’s the better experience, the true-mama experience. But why would I believe that? I don’t believe that I’d be happier if I’d just found the right man. J is my unequivocal right person. And my children will be my right children. E made me a mama, but she didn’t need the things from me that I wanted her to need. I pray that the Rabbit will. And assuming he does, that experience won’t be cheaper than it would have been had it been her. It won’t be lesser than. If anything, it will be even greater for the lessons I’ve learned in losing her. The depth with which I already love this little boy astonishes me.

I think that we should talk about difference, but we shouldn’t talk about it as though it’s entirely biologically driven, or as though the biological differences can be valued. We have different relationships with each of our children because they are different human beings. They need different things of us. They bring different things to the table. Unless they came into our lives at the same moment, we’re different people when we meet them. I’m a different mama than any of the mothers I’ve observed in my life. I’ve learned from each of them: picked up bits of wisdom, things I’d like to emulate, things that wouldn’t be right for me and my family, but in the end, I am and will be the kind of mama that only I can be. That would be true no matter how my children came to me, but if I were a heterosexual bio-mom, the uniqueness of that would be invisible. It’s only visible (up for discussion) because of the alternative nature of our family structure. And that’s kinda silly. I wish we could all be like G’s mom: could just forget that we’re supposed to notice these kinds of things. I think that if we stopped noticing them, they would stop being true.

A note for further reading:

Two blogs have helped me to undermine the privileging of biology. I share them with you now in case you’re walking through any of this yourself, or in case you want to better understand someone who is.

• The first is Love Invents Us. I ADORE this family, and I’ve learned a lot from this mama’s refusal to submit to the mandates of shared genetics. She is a total role-model for me.

• The second is Regular Midwesterners, especially Josh’s posts about his adopted son. There are lots of ways in which I feel connected to a gay male experience of fatherhood: because of my bodily limitations, because I’ve always wanted to adopt. I just found this blog a couple of months ago, but it’s already proven helpful.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, if you find yourself willing.