A Foot In Both Worlds

Over on RQ, they are discussing the new requirements being put into effect by the CCAA, including those that will affect SN exclusively. There is much talk in the comment section about all the disruptions that seem to accompany SN adoptions, which appears to be in response to the RQ’s comment that she hears about more disruptions in connection with SN adoptions than with NSN adoptions. Many of the (NSN) aparents who read and comment on RQ advocate increased education for parents planning to adopt SN, and some suggest that SN kids should only go to parents who have documented experience caretaking for the type of SN that they are hoping to be approved for. They are honest about their own limitations, and their mantra is that they speak with the best interests of the children in mind.

Over on my SN boards, they are discussing the RQ post with a mixture of bemused resignation and irritation. These are women who have often adopted multiple times from the waiting child program, and some of them have taken the toughest of the tough cases to place: the missing-both-legs cases; the dwarfism; the blind-and-deaf; the severe cerebral palsy. Some members have joined the boards more recently, having switched from NSN to SN (that group includes me!). There are families there with one or two SN kids; there are many families of four, five, six, and–yes–even seven SN kids, adopted from China or elsewhere and China. These women clearly devote their lives to parenting kids who would otherwise be shunned and isolated, or–in the best-case scenarios–merely cared for inadequately, because of their conditions. I mention that because these boards are lit up with women who are not by any stretch of the imagination dabblers in SN parenting or dabblers in adoptive parenting–although some of them clearly think that the NSN aparents are.

Why do I bring all this up? I find myself in the interesting spot of straddling these two worlds–the NSN aparent world and the SN aparent world–and I am here to tell you that what looks like internecine squabbling might instead be something closer to a culture gap, because these two worlds are not the same. I mean, really not the same. As in, two-distinct-subcultures-of-the-international-adoption-community-not-the-same. They have their own languages; they have their own icons, their own heroes, and their own best blog buddies (for instance, the SN boards radically distrust the RQ); they have their own resources; they even have their own agencies (those agencies considered at the top of the NSN game are SHUNNED by the SN community, who prefer a couple of very small, very “insider” agencies that are known for extreme advocacy on the part of both children and clients. When I read about a NSN aparent praising a large China-only agency with the words, “I would never go anywhere else for an adoption,” I have to smile, knowing that this aparent’s conviction would be mightily challenged if they but set foot with that opinion on a SN board.)

A superficial read of the two online sites right now might suggest that there’s some sort of competition going on:

The SN boards regularly refer to NSN aparents as “newbies” (even if they’ve adopted NSN before) or patronize them as well-intentioned, but clueless. They characterize NSN adoptions as being more about the aparents (and their dreams of parenthood) than about the kids. They stand by their assessment that many more disruptions take place with NSN adoptions, particularly those that occur back here in the States. They also dismiss the RQ as a rumor-mill and a mere entertainment, even though RQ herself has defined her site several times as a repository for rumors, not a mill for them–the distinction being that she refuses either to manufacture rumors or to refine the ones that she doesn’t trust. And she often turns out to be right, or nearly right, long before a lot of agencies are. The SN people don’t trust her because she is just not “of their world,” and the intricacies of the NSN wait isn’t something they care about.

To most SN aparents that I read on the SN boards, choosing SN because the wait to bring your child home is shorter than NSN represents a perfectly justifiable, reasonable, and even laudable motivation. Their assumption in that regard is that these kids need to get home as fast as possible so their needs can start getting met, and, given that they believe that most NSN kids have textbook SN issues, the extent of which goes largely undiscussed in the NSN world, they aren’t as hung up on the differences. They’ve BTDT on the surgeries and the therapies and don’t see it as the deal-breaker that many NSN aparents do because, well, they’ve BTDT. Psychological hurdle already cleared. They perhaps forget that they, too, went through a process once upon a time to get where they are today.

The NSN aparents commenting on the RQ site did jump on the RQ’s suggestion that more disruptions are SN and lectured for awhile about all the safeguards that should be in place prior to allowing a potential aparent to go SN. To the folks on the SN boards, that “lecture” was laughable. The aparents of SN kids talk regularly about how unprepared most of the NSN aparents are for the “special needs” that they will undoubtedly encounter, including “institutional autism” (the term that’s used on the SN boards for “attachment disorders”–did I mention that there’s a whole new language over there?), developmental delays, and any other “hidden” needs that might not have been acknowledged or discovered yet on the NSN child’s medical report.

What this comes down to for me is that people have a hard time talking to or about people who have made different choices than they have. A lot of time is spent posturing defensively or justifying, rather than trying to learn from each other. I was also a bit disturbed by the “jump on the bandwagon” phenomena that occurred on the RQ comments when she mentioned that “I am hearing of more disruptions than I’ve ever heard of, mostly involving SN children.” As I said above, the SN boards dispute this, but that’s not really my point. What I thought was interesting is that many, many waiting NSN aparents jumped on that bandwagon and rode it for all it’s worth, without really having–in most cases–any firsthand knowledge of any disruptions. Several posters didn’t even know what a “disruption” was, and most of those who did, didn’t seem to realize that once a SN child’s adoption is disrupted, the child doesn’t get a second chance at finding “their true mommy and daddy,” but rather go back to their SWI without ever being listed again by the CCAA.

I appreciate people’s opinions, but I get scared by people who feel the need to lecture without knowing all they can about that which they speak of. It reminds me of that experiment that Opr@h is famous for having conducted on her show, many years ago now…the one where they told the audience that scientists had discovered that blue-eyed people were genetically more intelligent than brown-eyed people, and the blue-eyed audience members jumped on that bandwagon and suddenly became experts at their own intelligence…before being informed that they had just fallen for one of Hitler’s propaganda techniques.

I’m left saying again what I’ve said before: there are going to be bad, ill-informed SN aparents, who are motivated into SN for the wrong reasons, just as there are going to be bad, ill-informed NSN aparents, who are motivated into IA for the wrong reasons. Sweeping generalizations just get you to a weird defensive place, they don’t get you to the truth. And, in the case of international adoption, I think truth is elusive in any case. It’s hard-won, and it’s relative to both the adopting parent or parents and the adoptee, who will, no doubt, redefine what the truth of his or her adoption is on his or her own terms eventually anyway.