Adoptive Parents: Fables, Facts, Fears

by L. Anne Babb, Ph.D.

Did you know that we have more myths and fables about adultery and wicked step mothers than we have myths about orphans?

For every one myth about being orphaned and adopted, there are five or ten about adultery, jealousy, and wicked step mothers. I think this is because in real life, more people have been affected by adultery, jealousy, and wicked step mothers than have been affected by adoption. Adoption is unusual and people don't understand it. People who adopt are often regarded as somehow different than those who don't. People who adopt are different.

Statistically, the vast majority of all adoptive parents are infertile. A 1991 national study of the motivations for adoption reported in the Journal of Marriage and the Family found that 94 percent of Caucasian women considering adoption only considered it because they could not have children themselves. A recent Child Welfare article reported that adoption is often seen as a second-best alternative to biological parenthood and as a last resort for adoptive parents themselves. Only 5 percent of all Caucasian adoptive parents surveyed by the Child Welfare League of America said that they could easily adopt a same-race infant with a noncorrectable handicap; and 74 percent said they would find it impossible to adopt a healthy, African American infant.

At an Adoptive Families of America conference, adoptive mothers Mary Martin Mason and Amy Silberman estimated that only 60,000 of the six million prospective adoptive parents who try to adopt annually in America actually do so. The competition for healthy, Caucasian infants and toddlers is fierce. Adoptive parents who manage to get a child from some source are all the more grateful, possessive, and protective of that child. They are all the more aghast that anyone would just give up a child, when getting one by adoption is so difficult. For all their posturing and mythologizing of the "poor birth mother" who gave up her child, what some adoptive parents are really thinking in their heart of hearts is altogether different.

I haven't met an adoptive parent yet who doesn't feel that the adopted child is someone else's legacy or treasure, with which they have somehow been blessed. At a gut level, some adoptive parents who know what treasures their children are, also stand in judgment of the parents who either gave these children up voluntarily, or who had them taken away. Any parent, they reason, who would voluntarily give up a child, much less have it taken from them, really must not be a fit parent. What person in his or her right mind would just walk away from a human treasure, one so coveted by those who can't produce living children themselves?

Lots in adoption is about needing and wanting to have a child, even if that child is someone else's child. Much in adoption is about covetousness, jealousy, and judgment: evils that are concealed with words and reasonings that sound good and palatable. Society is willing to believe the reasonings of adoptive parents because society already knows what we don't want to admit or talk about openly, namely that very few people want to raise someone else's child, and therefore people who do raise other people's children are odd. They must be desperate (to be pitied) or saintly (to be rewarded), or sometimes pitied and rewarded at the same time.

Jupiter

One example of how adoptive parents are rewarded can be found in the story of Jupiter (Zeus), the supreme deity of classical antiquity, the father of gods and men. Jupiter represents abundance and prosperity. In a positive sense, the influence of Jupiter is benevolent, broadminded, generous, and optimistic; in the negative sense, he is excessive, pompous, and misjudging.

Jupiter was the son of Saturn and Rhea, given by Rhea to the daughters of King Melisseus of Crete. Through adoption, Jupiter escaped the fate of his brothers and sisters who were swallowed by their father; a classical case of the at-risk child relinquished for safety's sake.

The daughters of Melisseus fed the infant Jupiter with the milk of a goat whose horn Jupiter broke off and gave as a gift to his foster mothers. The horn was endowed with the power of being filled with whatever its possessor wished, the cornucopia, a reward to those who cared for another's child.

When Jupiter grew up, he developed a long and colorful history as an adulterer. Though he married Juno, the queen of heaven and protectress of women and marriage, he never was a faithful husband. Jupiter the adoptee seemed always to be looking for the perfect wife or perfect lover, or maybe the perfect mother, having 16 children with ten different lovers. His youngest child was Minerva (wisdom), who sprang from his head without a mother: doubtless the best way of solving all of life's mother, wife, and women problems and a great example of how some adoptees handle their own turmoil surrounding mothers.

Jupiter the womanizer gave his wife many reasons to be jealous, his girl-friend Semelee among them. When Juno discovered that her husband Jupiter was having an affair with Semelee, she goaded Semelee into asking Jupiter to reveal his glory to her. Poor, silly Semelee, pregnant with Bacchus at the time, pleaded with Jupiter to show her all his glory. He did; she died.

Bacchus was born prematurely, but Jupiter saved the infant by sewing him up in his thigh. After Bacchus was born, Jupiter took him to the Nysaean nymphs, who cared for him throughout his child-hood. For this, they were rewarded by being placed among the stars.

Bacchus also had a foster father, Silenus. One day Silenus came up missing after a drinking bout and was found by some peasants, who carried him to their king, King Midas. King Midas recognized Silenus as the foster father of Bacchus, and took care of him, after which he returned him to Bacchus. Bacchus rewarded Midas by giving him one wish, which was, of course, for the ability to turn whatever he touched into gold.

So we see that people who take care of orphans are special folks who are rewarded. They are people we look up to, like the stars of the heavens; they are people who turn what they touch into gold, and they are people who have power to get what they want, which is how they've managed to keep adoption records sealed in this country in spite of strong opposition for the past 30 years.

We know that adoptive parents with infertility are the norm. We know that society rewards adoptive parents and punishes birth parents. We know that one of the rewards of adoptive parenthood is power, and that some adoptive parents use their power to oppose justice for adopted people. But what motivates these adoptive parents?

I believe that adoptive parents who oppose equality for adult adoptees are motivated by three destructive mindsets, three types of wrong-headedness or wrong-heartedness.

(This article first appeared in the Spring/Summer 1998 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

Topics: adoptive parents