Adoption: The Friedman Family

Please tell us about yourself — your location, job, etc!

I’m a writer and full-time graduate student in Central Ohio studying to be a clinical counselor. I write essays and articles related to parenting (often adoption) and I am also the managing editor for Support for Special Needs, a social networking for families of kids with special needs and the professionals who serve them.

When/why did you decide to adopt? 

We adopted our daughter in spring 2004. She was three days old when she came home to us and we are very fortunate to have a fully open adoption with her birth mom, Pennie. We were always interested in adoption but we moved forward after resolving our secondary infertility. I kind of hate to bring up the infertility because it makes Madison’s adoption sound like a second best choice but I’ll tell you right now, Madison brought the AMAZING to our family and now I’m pretty dang grateful that I wasn’t able to get pregnant again because otherwise we would have seriously missed out.

Do you have any biological children? 

Yes, we have a son, Noah, who is seven years older than Madison. Despite the large age range between them, they are very close.

Whom did you adopt, and from where? 

Madison came to us through a transracial, domestic infant adoption. What this means is that her arrival turned us from a white family to a multiracial family because she is black and her birth mom lives about twenty minutes away across town. 

What was her name, and did you rename her? Why or why not?

We did not rename Madison. Originally we thought that we would choose a name with the birth parents but then we met Pennie and discovered she already had names (first and middle) picked out. (Pennie was about seven months pregnant when we met.) The agency told her that the adoptive couple would likely want to change it but after we all talked about it and thought about it we decided this would be silly. I mean, it might have made sense for us if Pennie was naming her something that sounded a lot like my husband’s last name. (The kids have my husband’s last name and it happens to be a fairly common first name, too, so that could have been awkward!) But it felt like if we had changed her name we would have been telling her that we wanted her to be someone different when she moved from one family to another. We wanted her to know that we wanted HER. Because we know that identity is a big issue for adoptees we felt like keeping her birth names was a profound and symbolic way of letting her know that she was not divided into a pre- and post-adoptive self, she is HER self.

What has been the most surprising aspect of adoption?  

How much we would fall in love with Pennie, too, and how deeply openness would change the structure of our family. I also thought adoption would be much more segregated in our lives but because of the transracial aspect and the openness aspect, I feel like we are living out our adoption everyday. That is not to say that we look at Madison and say, “You are my Adopted daughter.” It is to say that her adoption feels as integrated as my son’s birth story does and we think of it as part of her in the same way that our son’s arrival seems like a part of him. We never forget that she’s adopted -- we love her adoption story, we love her first family -- but we do forget that other people are not accustomed to living adoption the way we have. For example, we have pictures of Pennie up in our house and we look at them and are happy in the same way that we are happy to see our kids with grandparents so we are sometimes surprised when people are taken aback by how open we are about her adoption.

What has been the most disappointing? 

I have been disappointed by how little support there has been for Pennie and how much she still has to live under the judgement of others who assume they must know her because they know she is a birth mother. Also as I have learned more about ethics in adoption, I have had to confront my own prejudices and misunderstandings about how adoption works in this country and who domestic infant adoption is meant to serve. Because we have so benefitted from an institution that is systematically unfair to birth parents and adoptees, I feel a tremendous responsibility to speak truth to that. Many people don’t realize that adoptees in most states have no right to their original birth certificates and instead are making their way through life with amended birth certificates that list their adoptive parents as the people who gave birth to them. Adult adoptees should have the same rights any of us have -- they have a right to know their origins. But the shame and secrecy of adoption continues to sully so many of our adoption practices, which is why I am an advocate for openness in adoption. 

What has been the most gratifying?  

Raising Madison. This kid, she lights up our whole lives.

Did any organization or agency really help you get through the process, financially, emotionally, or otherwise?  

 We used an agency to mediate the adoption. This means they did our homestudy and then we worked with them to help us find a placement. Pennie worked with them to find adoptive parents and then once Madison was with us, the agency supervised our home until we could legally finalize the adoption (in Ohio that’s about six months from the time of placement). We loved our social worker (she was wonderful!) and we remain in touch although we have become less enamored with the agency of late.

What advice would you give people who are considering adopting a child?  

I would encourage them to read read read, even the difficult stuff. Most importantly I would ask them to read the stories of adult adoptees, especially those who were adopted by means similar to the ones the hopeful parents are considering. I would also ask them to read the stories of birth parents. Too often birth parents are erased from the picture but their experiences are vital to understanding how adoption works and how it doesn’t. I am a much better mother to Madison because I was fortunate enough to find the blogs of birth parents and adult adoptees who are willing to speak to the hard truths that many of us want to avoid. There are a lot of ethical issues in adoption that are obscured by our want to find happy endings. But what might seem like a happy ending to us (child finally in our arms) is a lot more complicated when we take into account the family left behind and the child needing to integrate that loss into her identity. It’s a different road for every individual and it’s harder for some than for others but as parents, the best thing we can do is love our children unconditionally and allow them to be the authors of their own stories.

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