For those who have not given birth, any gathered retelling of birthing stories serves to remind them of their marginalized status in the mothering community. I imagine this is especially true for those women who have struggled or who are struggling with infertility, and whose longing to birth a child is heightened by the narratives of others who successfully delivered. This is not true for me, as my husband and I decided adoption was a legitimate path to a family, and we did not pursue biological parenting; I honestly never felt an acute need to be pregnant or to give birth. But my connections to the adoption community, where up to 80 percent of parents first tried biological conception, have reminded me of the enormous sadness infertile women feel when they cannot give birth. Groups of mothers bragging about their labor experiences only serve to remind these women of their presumed failures; or reinforce their sense that they are not fully mothers, or even fully female, because they could not carry children to term. Too often, others' birthing narratives condemn these women to silence, even though they have their own stories to tell -- about pain and loss and, many times, about an alternative journey to parenthood.
These alternative journeys to parenthood can be extraordinary, I know: the adoptions of my two sons were defining moments in my life, even though I was not a part of their births. But there are few forums in which mothers can tell their adoption stories and receive the same kind of affirmation as birthing stories receive; for example, several online mothering magazines feature readers' birth stories, but have no place for adoption narratives. Most of my mothering friends, too, have not asked to hear my entire adoption stories, even as I have heard my friends' labor tales several times over, and can tell with certainty who had an epidural and who did not.
In some ways, I do not fault them for failing to ask me -- most people lack the context to know what to ask, or to even know how remarkable an adoption experience can be. But if pain and suffering indicate maternal fitness, many adoptive parents might have their own harrowing stories to tell, given the opportunity. I know I do. For while my first son's adoption from Viet Nam, at seven months old, proceeded relatively smoothly, my second son's adoption, from India, did not. Problems with our agency and our son's orphanage resulted in a nearly two year adoption process, and the child we assumed would be younger than two when we brought him home was actually over three. Jokes about being an expectant mother for twenty months served to cover the emotional strain of waiting for a son we knew only by a picture and a scant medical report -- a report that hinted at cerebral palsy and malnutrition. When we finally met our son, at an orphanage in Mumbai, he screamed in terror for hours and refused to let my husband hold him, traumatized by the big white strangers who had arrived to take him away.
Parenting in a foreign hotel can often be difficult, and our week in India processing paperwork was made more complicated by an infection that swelled shut both my eyes and a son who insisted on being held. On the thirty hour plane ride home, my husband contracted a food-borne illness, and I spent the entire trip trying to entertain a frightened, impulsive, active toddler by myself. By the time we reached Portland, delivering our child to the safety of home, we were all exhausted, and while a nice hospital stay, and a nurse to look after me, sounded lovely, there was no resting: still with eyes swollen by infection, I began mothering two three-year-old sons, one who spoke no English, was on Indian time, and could not stand separation from me.
If given the opportunity, this is the story I would tell: about my son's miraculous entrance into my family, and about the psychic and physical pain that accompanied his arrival. Too, my first son's adoption -- while not as draining -- had its share of long plane rides, hotel room parenting, and emotional exhaustion, an exhaustion intensified because we were first time parents, trying to divine the needs of an infant long use to the ebb and flow of his orphanage life. Although I do no know the pain of giving birth, although I have never really sensed the mayhem of a hormone-addled body, my adoption narratives might still be considered good competition for a maternal fitness award: if only I had the chance to tell them, if only others might see my own lack of a birthing story not as a deficit, as an indication that I am not a real mom.
And still: even my sons' adoption stories are not really about them, for their birth narratives are different, unique, unknowable to me or to them. This is where some of my sadness about birth story rituals resides, that my sons do not know anyone who can bear witness to their beginning, even as they quite obviously came to being through the miracle of their first mothers' labor and delivery. And so, while I long to tell the narratives about my sons' adoptions, I assume there might be another mother somewhere, in India, in Viet Nam, longing to tell her own story about my sons' births. I wonder sometimes whether each mother has the space to share her story, given the circumstances of her labor, the cultural stigma of unwanted pregnancy, the grief she may feel about leaving her child. How does each woman feel when she is in a group, listening to others share their own birthing experiences? Does she feel silenced, as I do? Most significantly, in my attempt to argue for the merit of my adoption stories, I worry that I somehow compromise the value of each mother's own stories, and of the tremendous sacrifice each made to allow me my greatest gifts.
In a sense, this is what birth stories do: in many cases, they serve to undermine the value of other women's stories, of other women's experiences. I suppose that birth stories might have the power to bind women together, creating communities who have a shared experience of labor and delivering -- or not, as the case may be. Yet too often, the competitiveness of birth narrations challenge this possibility of community. Instead, the stories become self-focused, as their narration -- both those of birth and of adoption -- affirm for ourselves and others the rites of passage that attest to our maternity. By asserting that our own entry into motherhood was the hardest, bloodiest, most exhausting, we nearly condemn those who chose another path toward motherhood.
In the process, we attempt to confirm what it means to be a "real" mother, and our focus is obscured from the real center of motherhood: our children. After all, the delivery of children into our lives takes hours, maybe days; when we are blessed, our children remain ours for a lifetime. And over the course of a lifetime, we make many choices as mothers that are just as good, as fulfilling, as painful, as harrowing, as those first choices about pregnancy, about delivery -- even about infertility and adoption.
Giving birth to a child makes someone a real mother, no matter how that birth happens. Adopting a child makes someone a real mother, no matter what others say about the virtue of blood. But what matters most -- the fact we all know, even as birth narratives suggest otherwise -- is being present to our children each day after their birth. So although we need to develop the grace to listen to all stories of labor and delivery and transformation, from biological and adoptive mothers alike, we also need to recognize the really significant narratives about the lifetime of mothering we do. Those stories about mothering -- the good, the bad, the challenging, the exhilarating -- are the ones we should be telling each other, for these are the stories celebrating what makes us real.
mmo : march 2007 |
