Better off

I’ve been struggling to figure something out for a couple of weeks. It’s one of those language things, where someone says something, and you feel like it’s not quite right, but it’s not immediately evident to you how to explain why. I find this happens a lot with me around adoption language. And language is important. It has the power to shape things.

When my mother talks about Izzy’s adoption into our family, she has a tendency to say that Izzy will be “better off” than she would have been if Leda had chosen to parent. She says things like “she’ll have a much better chance”—though a chance at what, she usually doesn’t specify. So I assume she means “life” in all its grand possibilities. (This is a in a similar class of speech to something Heather at PNR talked about after adopting her daughter—talking about adoptive parents as if they “deserve” their child.)

There are a lot of levels on which this statement of “being better off” operates. I am all too capable of getting cultural-studies about the whole thing. But this feels more visceral to me. My gut response is to tell my mother, “I’m better off.” Which is true, but also still leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Like I said, this has been causing me trouble.

I think the core issue is that I reject the equation of the statement. I do not think that our relationships are like mathematics, and to say that Izzy is “better off” with us than she would have been if Leda had chosen to parent is like making a formula of us:

Leda + Izzy < Pottergrrl + Pidi + Izzy

Interesting—when I do that, I see something more clearly (math is good for something!). If you take that equation and subtract the same “amount”—Izzy—from both sides, you get:

Leda < Pottergrrl + Pidi

This is not accurate. This can never be accurate, no matter who is on each side of the < sign.

Leda < Mother Theresa

Not true either.

You can maybe make those equations work with a ≠ symbol. We are all different. And I can agree with the statement that Izzy is going to have a different life with us than she would have if Leda had chosen to parent.

I’d like to add that I do believe there are certain women who have babies and should not parent. Sometimes it’s that they don’t have the resources because of the particular place and time in their life, sometimes they are not mentally healthy, sometimes they cannot or do not control their substance use. Some women—gasp—are fundamentally not maternal. But, you know, these are the exceptions, especially in adoptions that don’t involve the state. In the grand lottery of life, many of the women who choose to place their children would have their struggles, but if for whatever reason they chose to parent, they could and would.

And every person who adopts is not going to be the best parent in the history of the world. Sometimes they will be bad parents. Life will also happen to adoptive families. People divorce, tragedies befall people. I know a woman who was adopted as an infant in a private adoption. Her adoptive mother became addicted to prescription meds, left the family while she was quite young, showed back up briefly when she was around ten, and then died. Her adoptive father remarried, and her step-mother had biological children who became the focus of the family, eclipsing her and her adopted brother. Not a magical childhood.

But again, though it’s almost reflexive to go there, I don’t think this is about greater than or less than. It’s not about being better off. I don’t ever ever want my mother or anyone else to say to Izzy, “You’re much better off with your parents than with Leda.” Izzy is not a charity case, she is not a project, or an outcome. She is a person. We are blessed that, after making her own decision about her capacity to parent at this time, Leda made another choice to entrust Izzy into our family.

And, though this is another “not equal to,” Izzy is not “with” us and “without” Leda. Leda will always be in her life. As her birthmother. As a star in the constellation of her universe.

Explore posts in the same categories: constellation, Izzy, language, My mother