The Children Money Can Buy: Stories from the frontlines of foster care and adoption by Anne Moody.
Ms. Moody is a social worker who got her first job working as a case worker for foster children in Michigan. The job eventually become to mentally and emotionally taxing and when her family moved to Seattle, she began working for an adoption agency. She writes about her experiences with foster care and adoption, mostly focusing on adoption. Ms. Moody writes with a clearly positive slant toward adoption while at the same acknowledging its problems and advocating for best practices with realism that comes from experience.
Her view on foster care is bleak. She acknowledges her experience dates from decades ago, but I suspect things haven’t gotten much better. Ms. Moody believes there is too much emphasis on reuniting the family, particularly when it seems clear that the parents are not making good faith efforts to correct their deficiencies and their children bear the burdens of the dysfunctional foster care system.
On the other hand, she has a very positive view of adoption, and certainly comes at it more from the perspective of the parents. It was interesting to read this book in conjunction with “You Should Be Grateful” by Angela Tucker. They both discuss the fact that a percentage of adoptions “fail.” Ms. Moody emphasizes this is a small number, while Ms. Tucker feels the number is too large to be acceptable.
Both are advocates for open adoptions. Ms. Moody believes this benefits everyone, birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. She also feels very strongly that birth mothers must receive counseling on all the available options for them, including parenting. She acknowledges and strongly condemns coercive tactics by adoption agencies and consultants that pressure and guilt people into relinquishing their babies, and also discusses the ethical dilemma of couples essentially paying a woman for her baby. (Apparently in some states, like Washington, laws make the blatant exchange of money for baby less likely.)
While Ms. Moody has worked with birth mothers (and fathers) at her adoption agency, her insight into their perspectives is limited. Her book also lacks the adoptee perspective. She and her husband adopted a daughter named Jocelyn from Korea, and while she talks about her and even includes one of her other daughter’s perspectives, we don’t hear directly from Jocelyn, or other adoptees. While acknowledging unique challenges that adoptees may face, Ms. Moody feels that overall problems are exaggerated, and it’s hard for me to know what to think about that.
Overall, I felt this was a helpful book to read. I read it after “You Should Be Grateful“and initially it came off as perhaps a bit too optimistic about adoption, but as I continued through it it felt more balanced.
Of note, Ms. Moody has a positive view toward adoptions by gay couples, although I can’t say much about it as I skipped that chapter.
“You Should Be Grateful”: Stories of race, identify, and transracial adoption, by Angela Tucker.
I came across Angela Tucker while googling adoption. I listened to one of her podcasts. She comes across as a gracious, well-spoken, intelligent and empathetic woman.
You Should Be Grateful tells part of her adoptee story and her perspective from working at an adoption agency and mentoring adoptees, as well as incorporating research and philosophies related to adoption and transracial adoption in particular. (Transracial adoption referring to people adopting a child of a different race/ethnicity/skin color.) Ms. Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted as a young child by parents who also adopted multiple other children of various ethnicities and raised her in a loving, supportive environment. Despite having a closed adoption, Ms. Tucker was eventually able to track down and reconnect with her birth parents, relatives and half-siblings.
Although I think it’s becoming more common now, historically there are more narratives from adoptive parents than adopted children, and while no doubt every adopted child’s story is different, reading about an adoptee’s experience is valuable. Ms. Tucker writes generously and honestly, both about the excellent upbringing her adopted parents provided her and her irrepressible longing to know her birth mother, as well as the complicated emotions that were part and parcel of finding and connecting with her birth family.
In the book, Ms. Tucker introduces three words/concepts that were new to me:
Hiraeth (here-eyeth): A deep yearning for a home that never was. Angela makes the case that all adoptees have some degree of hiraeth.
Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. (A neologism coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.)
Sondersphere: A realm where every person in an adoptee’s life has a place–where birth parents and adoptive parents and biological aunties and foster parents and adoptive cousins all exist together. (Coined by Ms. Tucker, based on a word coined by John Koenig.)
Another concept she discussed was that of a “ghost kingdom,” essentially what someone imagines their life would have been like if an event (such as adoption) had not happened.
Ms. Tucker is not anti-adoption, and she is not anti-transracial adoption although she raises a lot of concerns. However, as the word “sondersphere” suggests, she is strongly in favor of adoptions being widely open. While she understands that adoptive parents have a responsibility to care for their child’s wellbeing and that birth parents may very well not have the capacity to be a healthy presence at times, she argues that honest information sharing is the best policy. In her own experience, she found that connecting with her birth family actually strengthened the (already strong) bonds she had with her adopted family. I could see adoptive families having concerns that if their bond with their adopted child is not very strong, bringing in the birth family could weaken them further. At the same time, those concerns are centered on the adoptive parents, rather than on the child.
Ms. Tucker also touches on the microaggressions that transracial adoptees may face, and helpful or unhelpful ways their adoptive parents interact with their race. She believes it is imperative for transracial adoptees to interact with children and adults who share their birth culture so adoptees can connect with that aspect of themselves, rather than ignoring it’s existence. Interestingly, she includes a discussion of how assigning food-labels to a racial characteristic (“chocolate” skin, “almond-shaped” eyes, “oreo”) carries the connotation of being able to eat, and therefore dominate, the person with this trait. I’m still on the fence on what I think about this one. This afternoon I called my cat, “honey.” My dad and mom called each other this all the time. Were they subconsciously trying to dominate each other? I think not.
Of course, reading a book like this, I can’t help but relate it to my own experience, not as an adoptee but as a member of a household that included two transracial adoptees, my African American youngest brother and Chinese youngest sister. Their adoptions were closed. We grew up in a small town in southwest Nebraska, where there were two other (also adopted) Black kids, one other (also adopted) Asian kid, and one (also adopted) Indian kid. There were a decent amount of Hispanics who mostly stayed together and everyone else was White. We had an (also adopted) Korean aunt, a Black uncle, and an (also adopted)Korean cousin, but they lived far away. I’m not aware that my siblings had meaningful, sustained relationships with any Black or Asian adults during their childhoods. We did not participate in an adoption-related activities or camps, that I am aware of. As a kid, I truly did not believe racism was still a problem.
I know now that I was wrong.
My brother experienced things growing up that I didn’t know about until much later in life. I don’t know about my sister, but she’s shared events from the past few years that demonstrate she deals with microaggressions on a regular basis. (Recent example: her boss said she was a standout member of the ESL program at work.)
My siblings have never seemed interested in talking with me about being adopted, or about the emotional struggles they may or may not be going through. I wonder if they have experienced “exulansis.” I’m sure I haven’t presented as a great listener. While I don’t think I’ve ever felt that they “should be grateful,” growing up I never considered they would feel different at all. I wish I’d known better.
Cautions regarding this book: it is certainly not from a Christian perspective. It trends toward “wokeness” but I don’t believe to the point of being unhelpful. When describing group discussions with adoptees, Ms. Tucker is always careful to describe that she introduces her pronouns when starting the discussion, which is something that goes along with LGBTQ+ affirming practices.
