“God Directed Me”

If you’ve read this and this here, you may be assuming what I will write about. But when I clicked on the story announced by the words “God Directed Me” there was a surprise waiting: an African-American appears-to-be-single woman who adopted her foster child at age 5 (one of many she had looked after over the years) and an adoption caseworker who is an adoptee and found her original family because she needed to.

Too bad how we’ve gotten into this habit of rushing to judgment. See a phrase like “God directed me” and it’s probably some nutter who thinks God ordained this adopted child just for her *before time* or that by adopting, the kid instantly inherited her blood or DNA. Or the latest: God took the birthmother’s DNA and mixed it with the DNA of the two adoptive parents all because the a-mom’s mother swears the baby is the spittin’ image of her as a baby.

(Refuse to link to any of these stories but if you don’t believe me I can dig them up for you.)

You know, sometimes people are just led.

There is no doubt that Frances Lewis of Brewton, Alabama, is a believer and that she believes in what she is doing. So do most people, most of the time. It’s actually hard to recognize something as really bad and muster all your resources to do it anyway. I believe in my heart that most people who adopt or surrender for adoption have good intentions. A smaller number do not. Some, like Ms. Lewis, are to be admired for avoiding most of adoption’s ethical dilemmas. The government agency she deals with actually believes it is beneficial for children to know and be involved with their original parents. Her adopted child was not a highly coveted white infant but a full-grown child who needed a parent. She fostered so many children without ever so much lifting a grasping forefinger and saying, “God directed me.” She never paid the devil. She never committed “cultural genocide”–a phrase that used to mean the destruction of a people but is now used to describe transracial adoption. Her child’s OBC will be unsealed when and if she decides to access it.

Actually, you know, I can’t find too much wrong with Ms. Lewis. And so I wonder, when adoption is routinely put down because it is routinely uplifted for all the wrong reasons, if the people who only ever put it down ever imagine her.

Ms. Lewis.

When they, you know. Criticize. Gloat. Carp. Complain. Hurl their mighty thunderbolts.

Bet not.

Well, my vent’s over. Now onto fixing adoption.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , "God Directed Me", adoption, Alabama, blood, DNA, ethiical, foster care, Frances Lewis

Ohio letting moms raise children behind bars

Apparently, the number of women in prison just keeps going up and up in the United States. So Ohio has started a program that will let pregnant inmates give birth to, raise, and keep their babies in prison with them. Why?

Drum roll, please:

Some experts say that approach is best for both mothers and their children because the women are less likely to commit crimes when they get out, and children get to be with their moms during critical periods of their development.

The naysayers claim that prison is all about punishment and that kids don’t belong behind bars. But the research looks convincing at this point:

Programs for convicts and their babies are relatively new, and little research about their effectiveness has been done, according to [Chandra] Villanueva of the Woman’s Institute.

In her study, she found Ohio prison officials looked at the program at its five-year mark and found 118 mothers had participated, with just 3 percent of the women committing another crime within three years of being released. Of the general female prison population 30 percent commit another crime.

Only 3 percent of kids born in prison go into foster care, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Parents in Prison and their Minor Children. The overwhelming majority live with the other parent or another family member. However, those figures most mostly describe the situation of men. Pregnant inmates have fewer options.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , bonding, crime, foster care, inmates, moms in prison, Ohio, punishment, Woman's Institute

What does adoption reform mean to you?

Go here, everyone. It’s hot.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , adoption, adoption reform

Rescued from Buddhism: A brief history of the Christian adoption movement

A few years ago when the 2008 US presidential election campaign was getting underway I became interested in the left wing of the evangelical movement. Remember the book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It? That book, written by Jim Wallis, examined how the Religious Right had “hijacked” religion, making it synonomous with Republican Party principles and reducing it to a few hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Wallis, himself a noted evangelical, charged that the Christian Right’s narrow focus on these two issues was often mean-spirited (read: intolerant and homophobic) and ignored the social gospel entirely. Where was the concern over “issues such as poverty and pandemic diseases, environmental care and climate change, trafficking and human rights, genocide, war and peace”? Recall that in 2005, the year of the book’s publication, objections to the Bush admin and America’s presence in Iraq were peaking and leftie evangelicals were a big part of that movement.

Filed under: adoption, critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , Abba Fund, adoption, Christian adoption, Christian Alliance for Orphans, Cry of the Orphan, GOP, Great Commission, international adoption, Jim Wallis, Orphan Care Initiative, Orphan Sunday, Rick Warren, Russell Moore, Southern Baptist Convention, Together for Adoption

Single moms need reform school?

At NewMajority, where they have boldly dedicated themselves “to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement,” the following photo was selected for a story about kids of single moms doing badly at school. (“No School Reform Until Single Moms Reform“)

Isn’t that ripe?

How sweet and innocent the child. How awful that mother, bold as brass in her bikini . . . dragging on her cancer stick and throwing her son a baleful look. Why not just stick a thought bubble on top of her head that reads, “Look kid—you’re interrupting my tanning time and I gotta hot date tonight. Now beat it.”

No wonder all our kids are doing badly, right?

Filed under: Single parents have stupid kids, critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , achievement, NewMajority, school, single moms, single mothers

Another “Young, Uncertain” mom-to-be seeks advice from the New York Times

It started with Emmie, in grad school and unexpectedly pregnant. She wrote to NYT’s Motherlode column and asked what she should do—terminate, place the baby for adoption, or raise the child? Something like a thousand readers wrote in.

Now Liz has written, in much the same position. She’s already gone to counselling and has opted not to abort, something a few of the readers are stuck on but it’s quite clear that Liz has major ethical problems with abortion and won’t do it. (This despite the fact that she probably got mission-based counselling from a Christian agency. Doesn’t matter. You can tell she’s just not going there.)

However, Liz has also decided she will raise her child, even though she’s a self-described “covers their ears and sighs loudly in public places with screaming kids” type gal. Still, she feels she has much to give a child—she with a graduate degree under her belt soon too. Yes, indeedy.

She has a boyfriend too, the father of the child. Does not want to marry him. And this is where some of the readers are quite divided. There are those who are actually telling this 23-year-old that

If you want to do right by the child, and cannot go through with adoption, you need to marry the father so that the baby grows up with both parents. Otherwise, you are cheating your baby out of a stable home environment, which will be incredibly hard for you to establish alone, as well as making it hard to achieve what you want at the same time if you make the choice to be a single mom.

Please consider what you would want for yourself if you were the baby. There are way too many single moms out there, who ended up that way because they were too selfish to consider what the baby needs, what the father thinks, and not just what they themselves need.

Unbelievable. So Liz should just hand her kid over because there’s no way she can do this on her own. Actually, Liz has a good chance of making it with her education level, provided she can just get herself connected to the many resources out there available for single, pregnant women. Thankfully, this is where most of the advice is going, including some good advice from formerly pregnant grad students who’ve been there and defended the thesis at 7 months.

I often wonder what is going on in someone’s head when they argue that single motherhood is a selfish choice. What exactly would be achieved by Liz marrying the boyfriend she has known for only a few months? Why does the writer think that the only stable home environment is the married one? Ironically, one of the most stable family types is composed of the single mother who is not interested in getting married and keeps her dating life (if she has one) separate from her main focus—raising her child.

In fact, nothing can put a homelife into a tailspin like stupid boyfriend trouble or trouble between partners, married or otherwise. That is why a new study has confirmed that kids who grow up in stable single-parent homes generally do as well as kids being raised in married households in terms of emotional-behavioural issues and academic performance.

Anyway, go to the Times and leave your message for Liz. Let her know she can do it and there is help out there. I’ll be posting later in the day.

Filed under: Single parents have stupid kids, adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life , abortion, adoption, Emmie, father, grad school, Liz, married households, Motherlode, New York Times, pregnant, single motherhood

Hampton University plugs marriage to students: Single parents chopped liver

Boo.  Hiss.  Strange that an institution claiming to promote “strong critical, analytical, and communication skills” would hop on the marriage bandwagon.

You know, it wasn’t long ago that if you were a woman, going to college to get your “Mrs” was considered something to poke fun at, not exalt.

Filed under: critical thinking, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , African-American, Focus on the Family, Hampton University, kids, marriage, national crisis, Richmond, single motherhood, single parenthood, society, Virginia, woman

Accidentally lost child adopted in China?

Single mom adopts mom Chinese boy in 2001. Since he is 8 at the time of the adoption, they talk frequently about his memories. He has many–all pretty good.

Curiouser and curioser.

One day a-mom tells him he might want to search for his original parents. A former America’s Most Wanted investigator, she goes to work too. Probably couldn’t resist.

Working through Baby Come Home, the China agency that helps locate trafficked or kidnapped children in China, a-mom puts out some feelers and provokes an amazing letter back.

Her son’s parents are not only out there–they say he was lost on that fateful day in 1998, not abandoned, ”the result of a tragic mistake.”

Read the whole article here.

Side note: Anyone want to venture an opinon on how it might be easier for single a-parents to reunite with original family? I was thinking of this the other day when it dawned on me: Simone has only one dad, meaning the competition issues just won’t be there. Perhaps single parents might seem less threatening than perfect couples too. When I came across the asinine word “birthfather” in this otherwise good story, it reminded me of it again. Similarly, this boy has only one father. No need to call him anything but dad.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, solo life , adoption, birthfather, China, couples, dad, father, kidnapped, lost child, searching, trafficked

“Who needs two parents?” asks the Guardian

Sentimental footnote: My daughter is turning 12 on Monday. Here’s a photo of her at age 8 dressed up as a mining town gal. Transracial adoptees: take note of the utterly discordant costume.

This week a couple of single-mothers-are-bad stories drifted into my Google Alerts. I used to run with them but I’m much less inclined to do that now, a year into blogging. If you wish, you may visit the Rev. Raymond Dix, who recently calculated that 91% of single mothers are on the dole or Kristia Cavere, who steals a page from the Ann Coulter playbook with her assertion that

There are 1.5 million babies born to single mothers every year in America, and their probability of poverty, crime, promiscuity, drug use, suicide, and failing out of school are exponentially higher than their two-parent peers.

But let us not dwell too long on how many lies can be recycled about a topic before thoughtful discussion shuts down for good.

Enter today’s Guardian article by Sabrina Broadbent. What I like about this article isn’t that it goes over territory covered at O Solo Mama ad infinitum, because it really doesn’t go there. Instead, it tries to make the hidden reality of single parenthood visible. While two-parent families usually have more income, we have this opportunity for closeness, tightness, with our kids. It’s this amazing bond. For me and my daughter, it’s just us. There is no other thing here–save writing–to distract me from the job of parenting this child. At least ten times a day my daughter begins a sentence with, “My mom. . .” and then rattles off some good, silly, strange, or wise thing the old lady has said or done in the last 48 hours. I hear her on the phone, or when kids come over and it never ceases to amaze and delight me. This child and I are not broken. This family is whole.

Then there’s the happiness factor.

It’s almost impossible to explain to someone how great it is if it’s right for you. Because of the conservative propaganda machine and the research that fails to measure precisely the impact of “singleness” versus the impact of other critical factors, most people think that to succeed at single parenthood you’ve got to be heroic–you’ve got to be doing a million things *very right* in order to be beating the odds. They can’t think of it as something you were just cut out for. That might actually be good for civilization.

I remember once at the very start of my publishing career, I met a single mom who became my friend for life. She had three kids, the youngest of whom was seven, she had just divorced and this was her first job in publishing. One beautiful spring day we bought lunch at the deli and drove out to a park in her neighbourhood. When we were driving back to the office, I noticed that the happiness radiating from her face was giving me goosebumps. She was unreservedly, shamefully happy to be exactly where she was in that moment, raising those kids herself. It didn’t hurt that she had a great lawyer who got her a good settlement–money definitely helps. But that wasn’t the sum of it.

My memory of that incident was prodded by these lines in Broadbent’s article:

Far from considering themselves damaged and deprived by life with a single parent, these young people suggested a kind of family life, and in particular, a kind of relationship with their parent, about which most commentators and politicians seem unaware. They told of the renewal that divorce can bring, of positive parenting behaviours where there is closeness, listening, availability and support. What if, with the dissolution of the nuclear family structure, greater equality, intimacy and companionship develops between parent and children? Could it be that once freed of the spousal system, fathers and mothers become better parents?

“Could it be that once freed of the spousal system, fathers and mothers become better parents?” Broadbent is one of the few willing to go that far in the debate. But she’s onto something. A great many people have a parenting instinct that kicks in whether they’re married or not. The problem is that such an idea flies in the face of the *truth* that what kids deserve is two parents because that’s how kids are made. It’s a very tough sell.

Filed under: adoption, fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , crime, drugs, Guardian, parents, poverty, Sabrina Broadbent, single moms, single parents

Men saved from extended adolescence by marriage?

Check it out.

New York Times debate on single motherhood.

I’ve posted three times.

What jumps out at me: look at the comments, and you’ll see a fair bit of support for different family types and less insistence on the intrinsic importance of marriage or the advantages it confers. Most people are interested in whether or not people have children responsibly and care for them. Amen to that.

Also check out one expert’s contention that with the loss of marriage

. . . men lose out on the one institution — other than the military — that can pull them out of their extended adolescence.

I responded in Comment #10.

This idea of the guy as half savage-half teen until honeybun drags him to the altar seems as brutal a stereotype about men as Victorian notions of women being unable to vote.  Remember that it was just a hundred years ago that people actually thought this way.

Personally, I do think men are rethinking their roles in society. That’s a natural consequence of the women’s movement. But we are only limited by our imaginations here.

Filed under: fatherlessness, kids, life, solo life , children, family types, marriage, men, New York Times Room for Debate, single motherhood