Dear Tama Janowitz

Sent this morning to NYT letters to the editor with a request to forward to Ms. Janowitz.

I read your post The Real Thing on the New York Times blog Relative Choices. And as I posted yesterday on my own blog, I was appalled. But I'm writing today not to express my outrage again, but to share my thoughts about adoptive relationships, one adoptive mother to another. I recognize that you may view this letter as an imposition. But when I see another adoptive parent publicly harm the reputation of others, I am compelled to respond.

I believe that you intended your post to be humorous, and wrote it without malice. I can also tell from your writing that you love your daughter. I love my kids, too. My husband and I have two – The Boy is a freshman in college, and The Girl is a junior in high school. They’re both Korean, and came to our family as infants. It seems so long ago that they were babies, but in a funny way it seems just like they arrived just yesterday, too.

I think before my husband and I adopted and when our children first arrived, we believed that their lives would be far better with us than they would have been as the children of poor single mothers in an unforgiving and economically challenged country. We were as much at the mercy of the mainstream media and American attitudes about adoption as any others with no first-hand experience with it.

But several early experiences and long years of reading and talking with others about adoption, particularly Korean adoptees and Korean and American mothers, has brought me to a different conclusion. Yes, my kids have probably gained economically in my family. But they’ve lost so much more on so many other levels – their connections to their genetic histories, their country (one I have grown to love as much as my own), their language, the cultural experience of being Korean. Yes, they’ve lost a lot.

When The Boy left for college, I found myself becoming increasingly nostalgic, frightened, really, that my greatest joy – being an everyday parent to my kids – was drawing to a close. Of course, being a parent never ends, but a parent’s role changes when their children reach adulthood. It’s hard to let go of the day-to-day relationship you have when your kids are at home. But I’ve learned in the months that The Boy’s been gone that there’s a whole new relationship that can develop if you let it. God willing, that relationship is the one that’s going to go on the longest. And for it to succeed, I have to recognize that The Boy is an adult. I have to earn his respect as a peer, not a parent.

No matter the circumstances of my children’s births and adoptions, I don’t believe I could do that by telling them I had saved them from terrible lives in Korea. They are here because individuals, governments, and societies did nothing to prevent those circumstances – including me. They deserve my respect and love, not my pity.

As an adoptive mother, I do understand how frustrating it is to have your relationship with your children called into question all the time. In my experience it hasn’t been mothers who do that, though. It’s the mainstream, people whose lack of experience with adoption skews their view of it. I bristle at the jokes about adoption I see on TV, the perception that to be told you’re adopted means you’re loved less by your adoptive family, and not at all by your first. It is, in my opinion, something we shouldn’t be joking about.

That, I think, is why there has been such a reaction to your post. It disturbed many of your readers to see how casually you would tell your daughter that you had saved her, and joke about it to boot. You see, when I read those words, I didn’t picture you saying them to your daughter. I pictured you saying them to The Boy and The Girl.

Yes, the circumstances my children would have faced in Korea would have been incredibly challenging. But knowing them as the bright, strong, resilient people they are, I have no doubt they would have made good lives for themselves. Recognizing this makes me grateful beyond words that they are here with my husband and me instead. It is humbling.

The relationships I have with my children are real. The relationships they had with their mothers in Korea, if only in their wombs, are real, as are those with the fathers who also gave them life. When I see others debate which of these relationships is the “realest,” I simply step away. For at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that my kids grow up to know who they are, and that they are respected and loved for themselves.