AUTHOR: M. DATE: 11:04:00 PM ----- BODY:

We had dinner the other night with a family we were introduced to by some mutual friends to talk with them about their domestic transracial adoption. We loved them, and found them, like so many others we've talked to about adoption, open and honest and excited to tell us about what they had learned during the process of adopting their daughter, who is now 2 1/2. Their daughter is hysterical and charming enough that we considered asking her parents if we could adopt her instead, but decided that we might ask them the NEXT time we all have dinner, when we know them a little better. As they were making dinner, one of them handed the little girl a bowl of chips and a bowl of guacamole and asked her to offer it to us. Because she's 2 1/2, she sat right down on her kid-sized bench and dug in. Isadora oinked at her and called her a "chip pig," which the girl thought was one of the funniest things she'd ever heard. She spent the evening calling herself a chip pig, me a chocolate pig, her dad a green bean pig, and so on. Halfway through dinner we asked how they were talking to her about the adoption, and her parents decided that they would let their daughter tell us instead. "Do you know where you came from?" they asked her. She responded "I came from another woman's tummy. Her name is ________________." Apparently they've been telling her this for a long time, but it was the first time she had said it herself. Both her parents got teary, and reached out to touch her hair. In the middle of this tender moment, my wife, panicked that we were witnessing this intimate moment that should have been theirs alone, blurts out, "Are you sure it wasn't a chip pig's belly?" The little girl cracks up, spits her food all over the place, and the moment is over with a resounding bang. I laughed to the point of tears all the way home. Anyway. When they adopted their daughter, they had already turned down several situations that weren't right for them. When the lawyer called about this baby, one parent was home, beginning an incredibly hectic phase of his job, and the other was most of the way across the country visiting a very sick parent. They got on a conference call and learned she had been born already and that baby and birth mom were to be discharged from the hospital in 24 hours. Without having the chance to speak to each other alone, they decided that this was their baby. In hindsight, they both say that, though the situation would have been near-perfect for what they wanted anyway, it was the fact that she was already born - that she was this real live human being who would be in short-term foster care in 24 hours unless she had an adoptive placement - that clinched it for them. They called her their "surprise baby" and said if they were going to do another domestic adoption they would have requested a surprise baby again. I've been obsessing over this idea that we could have 24 hours notice, and here was a totally new take on it. It does put a new spin on things. The other thing we talked about is sharing information about the birth mom. They have been pretty open about it, but have come to regret it. It has started to feel for them like they're sharing a story that should be their daughter's to tell - or not. Their part of the story is the adoption story. I liked the idea, but felt hesitant about it because one of the things that I love about open adoption is the total lack of secrets. (For more background, see "Great Belly Button Ring Incident of 1995"). But they were suggesting answering people's questions with something like "We'd be glad to tell you about the adoption, but we're waiting until our daughter is old enough to decide for herself what she wants to share about her birth mother." We were both really moved by what they had to say about this. It seems hard to think about not sharing some of that information with some of the people we're close to, but it makes a lot of sense in a kind of elemental way. It made me realize again what a wierd and amazing and process this is. Maybe no wierder than sex as a way of getting babies, but oh-so-complicated and interesting all the same.

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