It’s a question I’ve struggled with since the beginning. What will we tell our daughter about her bio mother when the times comes?It’s hard in this situation since we will know nothing about her.
Research-China posted this piece about The Myth of the Birthmother recently. The man who keeps this blog is someone I alternately agree with and then don’t agree with. He is an adoptive parent who does research on China and his opinions are his own. I consider them opinions and nothing more, sometimes they’re interesting, sometimes they’re troubling. We will likely use his services to locate our child’s finding ad once the time comes (it’s the ad required by law to be placed in the newspaper when a child is found).
Anyway, he talks about the tendency of adoptive parents to romanticize the bio mother, to project our own emotions onto her and assume she grieves the loss of her daughter and only gave her up under the most desperate and dire of situations. He argues that this isn’t ncessarily the case, that rural Chinese culture is different than ours and that they don’t have the luxury of having children for reasons of love. They do it for monetary reasons, to have a strong workers for the land, to ensure a retirement plan for themselves, ect.
He cites the story of a woman who parented an abandoned baby (likely a frequent occurrence. There is evidence to suggest many abandoned baby girls are absorbed into local villages and never turned over to the authorities). The woman kept the child until she was four years old and then met a man she wanted to marry. In order to provide a shot at having a child with the man, they dropped the four-year-old off at a SWI. Pretty cold, huh? Apparently they went back to the SWI, having second thoughts, but the SWI wouldn’t give the child back to them, told them they had to pay 5,000 yuan for her (that’s about $640.00).
His point is that having children in rural China is less a luxury and more practicality. He argues that the birthmother may not have had much emotion over the abandonment of her child at all, probably doesn’t cry over the loss of the child every day.
Here’s what I think….no matter the culture, no matter the place, no matter the time in history, certain BIOLOGICAL responses remain true. Women have built-in responses to having a baby. They are deeper for some than others, but it is largely universal. It’s a response that is physical, hormonal and has been with us since our caveman days. It’s a survival mechanism for our species.
So, basically, I think this piece presents a sweeping generalization.
There are undoubtedly some bio mothers in China who never shed a tear when they go out into the middle of the night to leave their newborn infant alone on the side of the street. Some probably are more concerned with basic survival than their newborn daughter. Or, maybe, like in the story above, they simply want a shot at another child or a child of a different sex and their decision was a coldly practical one. However, I believe that biological urge–the unique mother and child bond–wins out most of time.
Do these women mourn the loss of their children? Do they think of them every year on their birthday? That we’ll never know, but (and this leads me to my most important point), I think it’s critical we (as in James and I) lean to the compassionate side of that question mark. I think it will be incredibly important and healthy for our daughter to believe that her bio mother gave her up out of necessity and that she was valued as a human being by the woman who carried her for nine months and gave birth to her. (Frankly, as a woman, I have trouble believing anything else anyway. Maybe I’m projecting, but whatever. *shrug*). But the bottom line is that, for FD’s own emotional well-being and sense-of-self, this is what matters.
I will think and wonder about her bio mother forever, never knowing the circumstances of our daughter’s abandonment. The truth is an important thing to me. I hate self-delusion. But since we’ll never know about FD’s birthmother, isn’t it better we simply think about what’s best for FD? And I think what’s best for her will be fostering a strong sense-of-self and a healthy level of confidence that she is, was, and always will be loved and cared about.
That anonymous woman who gave her up will need to be a part of that equation. She’s going to be the ghostly third parent, never seen but always present.
So, this leads me to my most recent purchase (one of many purchases of books about China and Chinese culture)….
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, by Xinran Xue
“In 1989, Xinran, a Beijing journalist, began broadcasting a nightly program on state radio that was devoted entirely to personal affairs—a radical concept in Communist China. In response, she received thousands of letters from women, many with questions about sexuality; one woman wondered “why her heart beat faster when she accidentally bumped into a man on the bus.” Eventually, Xinran persuaded her superiors to let her share some of these letters on the air, and in this groundbreaking book, written after she moved to London, in 1997, she has also included stories that didn’t make it past government censors. A teen-ager commits suicide after learning that a neighbor has seen her boyfriend kiss her forehead; a university student speaks casually of becoming a “personal secretary,” or mistress, to a rich man; a Kuomintang general’s daughter goes mad after witnessing the torture of the family that sheltered her. This intimate record reads like an act of defiance, and the unvarnished prose allows each story to stand as testimony.”
It’s an older book and maybe outdated. However, while economic development is radically changing the face of China, I am yet to be convinced it is affecting the poor, rural areas significantly at this time. And that’s where most the abandoned baby girls in China come from.
