Professional Adoption Worker and Adoptive Father
INTERVIEWED BY TELEPHONE, JANUARY 14, 2013
Chester, it is wonderful to talk with you. I want to jump in and ask you how you chose adoption as a means to build your family.
On some level I think that adoption chose me. To give you some background, I was born here in New York City. When I was about five days old, I went home with a woman who was not my birth mother. I didn’t discover that little piece of information until I was about thirty-two years old. That would play a big part in the whole adoption journey for me.
As an adoptee I am curious how you worked that out in your own heart and mind.
It was an incredible revelation to me and quite a relief. I knew that in my family there was something wrong or something that was not quite a fit for me. In my family we did not discuss adoption information. But I knew that there was something different about me as early as I had memory. As I got older and started asking questions that kids ask, like, “How come I don’t look like this person or that person?” I found out information. For instance I had an older brother and he would tell me stories. One of his favorite stories that he liked to tell is that Mom found me in the trash. So when I approached her about it, I never got an answer that said what I was saying was ridiculous or not true. Instead I always got this skirted answer that was never quite satisfying.
Let me fast-forward. I am going through my life doing what I am doing. One of the things that I discovered early on is that my role in life was to make my mother’s life happy. My brother on the other hand was very good at being bad, and I was very good at being good. So that was my role. I didn’t do anything in my mind that I thought would bring shame or embarrassment to her. So I went through this whole childhood of mine as a “good kid,” but in reality I was simply a robot. I did what I was told to do. I didn’t think. I didn’t make any choices or decisions. Anything that had the possibility of being wrong I simply didn’t do. If it was the wrong choice or the wrong thing to say or the wrong direction to go, I didn’t do [it]. I waited for my mother to tell me what I needed to know or do.
So I am going through life kind of stilted and feeling a little weird because I am living in my own bubble. As life would happen, I got hurt in junior high school. That took me off the scene for a while. I broke my hip and I was hospitalized through a series of unfortunate events for a number of years. That was important because it isolated me from my peer group and from all of the things that would be a part of a normal kind of adolescence.
I get into high school finally, and I’m going through high school, and I decided to go to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York because I wanted to be a lawyer. I don’t remember ever wanting to become a lawyer; I was just told that is what I wanted to do. So that is what I “wanted” to do. At John Jay I had my adolescence. I had my period of rebellion. I like to tell people that I basically lost my mind. And I did. But I met some people there that were key people in my life and continue to be my friends today. One of my friends during that time was Pat O’Brien, who is the executive director now of You Gotta Believe, the agency I work for. After graduation we went about our lives and kept in touch periodically. Somewhere around 1990, Pat called me and said, “Chester, I have this job that I think would be great for you.” He told me that he worked at this adoption agency, and if I came on board, I would get to interact with a wide range of people and get to mentor kids. I didn’t know anything about adoption agencies and didn’t have any interest in that. But, again, I was just kind of floating along on a breeze so I thought that this was as good a thing as any. So I went for the interview. After my interview I knew that I did not get the job. I went back and told Pat that there was no way that I was going to be hired. He told me not to worry about it. It turned out that Pat convinced the person who interviewed me that I was the right person for the job. So I got the job.
If you can picture it, I am now working at this adoption agency that places older kids. Back in those days “older” kids were eight years of age. This was all new to me in terms of kids, social work, et cetera. My function then was to go out and meet the kids and do interviews and videos with them. Then I would go back to the agency, and I would introduce the information that we had to the prospective adoptive families. Basically I was the broker, essentially the go-between between the kids and the families. I had some success with that partly because I’m an amenable kind of guy. I did that for six years. As I got more and more involved in the agency and as the kids got older, something miraculous happened. . . .
Somewhere between 1991 and 1992 my wife and I were going on a trip to Canada. In those days you didn’t need a passport. You just needed your birth certificate, driver’s license, or your voter’s registration card to get in and out of Canada. I knew that I had my birth certificate, which I planned to use. Two days before the trip, when I decided to pull out my birth certificate, I couldn’t find it. Finally, I told my wife that I would go to the Bureau of Vital Statistics and get a copy, and then we would get on a plane the next day and life would be good.
So I go down to the Bureau of Vital Statistics. I will never forget. I get to the window after waiting a long time in line. I told the lady at the window that I needed a copy of my birth certificate and that my name was Chester Jackson. She did her thing on the computer and then asked me where I was born. I told her. Suddenly she got this strange look on her face. And then she informed me that I was not in the system. I asked her, “What do you mean I’m not in the system?” She pulled me closer to the glass and said, “Go over to the phone booth. Call your mother and ask her what name is on your birth certificate.” Where a lot of people would have had a tantrum right there, me being a robot said, “Oh, okay.” So I went over to the phone and called my mother up. And I said to her, “I’m down here by the statistics and they can’t find me. So they told me to ask you what name is on my birth certificate.” I am waiting for her to say the usual—“What are you talking about? That is ridiculous.” And what I got instead was a long pause. I’m thinking that this should not be a complicated question. This will give you a sense of my mother, who I loved dearly of course. She then said to me, “Tell her to look under ‘D. Mitchell.’” Now it was my turn to pause, and I asked her who D. Mitchell was. And she said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter because she is dead now.” So I go back to the window. I gave the lady the name D. Mitchell. She punched in the name in her computer and there it was. I didn’t have any identification, so she couldn’t give me a copy of the birth certificate. But she did give me this new revelation.
To give you a sense of where my mind was at that time, even with this new revelation and me working at an adoption agency, I did not connect the dots that I was adopted. I went back home and told my wife about what happened. I told her that it was ridiculous, and something didn’t seem right but that they told me that I could use my voter registration card instead, so I was going to use that. We go off to Canada. My wife is giddy with excitement and tells me, “I bet you were adopted!”
I couldn’t fathom that I was adopted. Why wouldn’t my mother tell me long before I was thirty-plus years of age?
After my wife and I came back, I sat down with my mother. I can still see her lounging on the bed, smoking a cigarette. She asked me about our trip. We talked. Then she took a long drag on her cigarette and handed me an envelope. I open it up and it was my original birth certificate. The first thing I noticed as I looked at it was that my mom’s name was not anywhere on it. It was a shock for me. Now in that moment it was everything I could do not to sing with joy. Because in that moment I realized that this is it! This is what has been wrong with this picture my entire life. All of this time I was thinking it was me, and it was them.
Even in my elation, and it was like a load was lifted off my back, I looked at my mom and in her eyes there was such pain, such anguish, and such fear that I immediately went into my thought pattern that this is my mom and nothing hurts her. I then explained to her that my birth certificate was only a piece of paper. It didn’t matter et cetera. I began to push my own feelings down. I did however feel an incredible amount of relief.
Over the following months my mom and I did touch on the issue here and there because she never really liked to have conversations of this sort. But somewhere down the line we had a direct discussion about my adoption. I asked my mom if it would have been easier to deal with if we got this out in the open earlier. She said to me basically that she was afraid to tell me that I was adopted. She didn’t think that I would love her and that she feared somebody would come and take me away. I remember clearly [that] she then said to me in her most serious mommy tone, “I wished that I would have gone to my grave before you found this out.” That was probably the most devastating piece in the whole situation.
How did those words impact your person, psychologically speaking?
When my mom said that to me, it was not so much devastating to the man standing before her as it was to the little boy, the little toddler in me, who was asking the greatest person in the world for help, and they are saying that they wish that they could die without giving you any help. That is what I felt. And in that moment I realized that, even though there are all these platitudes that folks say—and I am sure there is some truth to them—the bottom line for me as that kid was that this was not about me. This was about a grown person making a decision about my life without regard to what effect that would have on me. That turned my emotions into anger. I never gave a hint or shared with my mother, who is now deceased, that part of my emotions. “Pissed off” doesn’t even describe it. I can’t even explain to you how angry that made me.
It is interesting in the adoption world the word relinquishment is often used to describe when a child has been taken from his or her biological parent and placed in another home. To me the severing of one’s connection with their biological mother and father does not feel like relinquishment. It feels like abandonment. I don’t know how you dress up that feeling to make it seem more palatable. The feeling of abandonment continues to affect me in my adult life. Anytime I go through transitions, the little girl in me cries out, “Am I going to be okay?” It comes from the feeling of knowing what you touched on, that adults made decisions on my behalf as a child without necessarily considering the effect those decisions would have on me or even asking me what I thought, how I felt, and how those actions would change my trajectory lifelong. In reference to your experience in trying to get your birth certificate, still today I do not have access to my original birth certificate. It’s crazy.
Yes. I understand. There was a time for me that big changes, anything that sounded like criticism, I most definitely could not handle. I remember my mother and some of my relatives would tell me that I was “too sensitive,” because I would feel things and be hurt by things that weren’t necessarily meant to be hurtful in their opinion.
For the first probably four years I was at Downey Side for Youth, the adoption agency I worked at before where I am now, things went pretty well in the beginning. Then, as I got more involved with the kids and got to know them as people and what their journeys were like, it got harder for me to be detached. It got harder for me not to personalize how prospective families responded to these kids. At that point I was not doing parent training, but I was in the room when parent training was conducted, and I met with prospective parents participating in the training. I remember particularly being very intolerant of the folks that came forward for children that we didn’t have. These folks were asking for babies. This was an older child agency. I just didn’t have any tolerance for that question. I stated to them with much irritation, “Please, go someplace that does that!” My thinking was that is about you. That is not about what the need is. The need is, there are all of these children of this age, and here they are, and you are telling me about some child that may or may not exist. I was almost a mess when it came to dealing with that kind of issue. That was where I was in that period. Unfortunately my attitude and how I expressed it . . . got me in trouble at different times along my career. The good news is that I have come a long way since then. Thank God for that.
At another place in my career I was a recruiter. My job was to convince people to adopt, to make it possible. Not at all did I feel that. I didn’t want to convince people. I wanted to tell people that if I could talk you out of it, then you need to go away. So there I was, this angry middle-aged man. I had a real hard time separating my professional life from my personal feelings. It made it difficult for me to relate to families and to have an intelligent conversation around the subject of adoption without getting visibly emotional. This was the person that I was at that point.
During that same time my wife and I were talking about adoption because neither one of us came from large families or families that had a lot of kids. But we didn’t have the need to have a little baby. In fact, if we could avoid that, that was certainly our plan. We decided that while I was working at the agency I would pay serious attention to the adoption piece, which I did. Like a lot of people, though, I thought that an “older kid” was six years old or seven or eight.
So I’m doing my job at the agency, meeting and interviewing kids. This is in the early 1990s. And I met this young man named Robert who was sixteen years old. Everybody at the agency loved him, including me. The minute I met him, he reminded me of me and all of the things that drive me crazy about me. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, but reflecting back on it, he was like me in foster care, even though I had never been in foster care. I could see so much of myself in him that I was immediately drawn to him. At the time none of that thought process was happening on a conscious level. This kid was a great kid and wanted to be adopted. He was sixteen years old, six feet tall, and three hundred pounds. He was this huge teddy bear. I was determined to find this kid a home. Sadly we had a really hard time connecting him with potential parents because they were intimidated by him.
One day after many frustrations I went home and said, “Honey, look who I found.” I told my wife what a wonderful kid he was and shared his story with her. The long and short of it was that we decided to move forward with Robert. We set up a visit where he lived in a group home. It turned out that the week that we were going out to visit Robert, my wife found out that she was pregnant. Yet we went to the group home and sat with Robert outside and chatted. One of the last things I told him was that my wife was pregnant. We asked him how he felt about that and assured him that if he was okay with it, we would be okay with it as well. After talking with Robert we decided—which again was a wonderful lesson for me in later years—that we were going to visit with him and have him come to our house every weekend and every break until the baby was born. It was a long, long time. I tell families now not to do it the way we did. It does not help anything. It is not real life. You are not going to learn anything about your child until they move in.
As it turned out, as my wife got more and more pregnant, she wanted us out of the house. So Robert and I had a great time spending time together. I would pick him up; we would go to the movies. We would go to the car show. We would go to the park. Time passed and time passed, and then our biological son, Brandon, was born. At that same time Robert moved in. It so happened that Robert has a sister named Ebony, who was fourteen years old. She was living in a foster care home in the Bronx. Since she was Robert’s sister, it was natural that my wife and I would visit with her and have her over to our house. However, for Ebony adoption was not on her radar. She actually said in later years that she fully expected the whole adoption situation with Robert to dissolve because that was what his pattern was for a long time: people would love him from the beginning, and then his behaviors got out of hand and it all ended badly. So she wasn’t going to sign on for that. But as it turns out Ebony eventually did move in with us. So we went from zero kids to two teenagers and a baby in a span of a year.
What did you tell them about what adoption meant to you and for them?
Because I worked at an agency where everybody built their families through adoption, adoption made sense to me. My wife and I did not look at adoption as a bad thing or a secretive, shameful act. Adoption was simply how these two children came into our home and into our lives. That is really what my underlying message to all of the prospective families and people out there is: that adoption is just the way that children come into our lives. It’s like their hair color and eye color and how tall they were when they came into the home—that is just how they are. There is no power in that. It always drove me mad when people would want to whisper the word adoption and say it like it should be something shameful like, “I don’t think they can handle it.” That is the adults’ issue, not the kids’. The kids are going to handle it the way we handle it. If we dissolve into tears every time they mention their birth family or anything that reminds them that they were not born of them, then of course these kids are going to have some reaction to that. Adoption is just how it is. It is a circumstance. That is how children came into our lives. And we are glad we could do it.
So were you able to listen to your children talk about their life with their biological family members?
Yes, absolutely. One of the advantages of adopting older kids—now I am sounding like I am trying to sell you on older kids—is that we don’t have to fill in those blanks for them. In our case our children have aunts and uncles and cousins living in the Bronx that were a part of their lives. I remember when Ebony first moved in especially—Robert was the kid that I wanted. Ebony was the child that I needed. Robert, like I said, was the clone of me. I wouldn’t have learned anything from parenting him. He did what I told him to do, and when I was upset he calmed right down. There was no challenge there. So he was the kid that I definitely wanted. I loved him “from jump.” But Ebony was the child that I needed. She was the one that was going to turn me into a parent and make me do the stuff that parents need to do in order to be parents.
Seeing that I am not a parent, please help me. What is it that “parents need to do”?
I think that parents need to understand that our responsibility, once we decide that this is the child that we are claiming, that we are responsible for, is to do everything in our power to make their life better. Not just their life and their circumstance but their internal life, i.e., their spiritual and emotional life, as they walk in this world. Because we are saying, “I ‘gotch’ you. I am going to take care of you.” And taking care of “me” is more than keeping me fed and clothed and having a roof over my head. Taking care of me is when I say, “I hurt here, and I don’t know why.” Taking care of me means you being strong enough to say, “Let me help you try to find out why.” As opposed to being so afraid that we have to pretend that the biggest thing in both of our lives never happened.
One of the beautiful things about adopting older kids is that you don’t have to have that pretense I just talked about. That is what drives me so crazy about folks that are adamant about needing to adopt babies. Of course babies need homes. I understand that. However, so often it is the parents’ way of pretending that this, adoption, didn’t happen. That we are starting from scratch. That is detrimental not only to the child but to you as the parent. Because whatever you feel about the fact that you didn’t give birth to this child, you are going to transmit that to the child through every pore in your body. You know, from the things that you cry about to the way that you touch him to the things that you say. Now the only thing that you are not going to transmit to this child is that it is your issue, not theirs. Kids are going to absorb it. And that’s 100 percent about the messages that we as parents give to our kids. I think that we as parents have to provide an environment where our kids can be safe 100 percent—and that’s physically safe, emotionally safe, safe to explore questions that they may have about their circumstances. If these kids cannot explore these things in their own homes, then where are they going to get that?
In later years I have come to appreciate the power and the depth of infertility. When I first started in this business, my thoughts were, to those who were struggling with infertility and wanting to adopt a child, “Get over it and move on.” I see this issue differently now. Largely because my birth children have brought to me a different kind of joy, I have a good deal of more empathy for folks who are dealing with fertility issues. My advice now to parents, years later, is “Please deal with this, the pain of it. This is not going to go away. You need to sort it out, or when this actual child comes, he or she is going to be the total antithesis of this imaginary child you have in your mind.”
How does a parent sort these feelings out?
They are, in my opinion, going to need to separate their stuff from their kids’ stuff because these kids are going to need their parents 100 percent. It’s a tough nut to sell. We get folks at our agency sometimes who are deep into the miseries of infertility. And until they get to a place where they can accept that they are going to become a parent through adoption, and parenting is ultimately their goal, it will be extremely difficult for them as they parent. Their misplaced emotions will have an impact on their child. Once you get folks to the place I’m talking about, then how they become a parent becomes less and less relevant. Then it becomes more about the young person, the child actually in front of you. And that is when the parent is in a place where they can do some good for the young person and themselves. The bottom line is if you, as the parent, aren’t taking care of yourself, if you are emotionally a wreck, that does not help your kid to become healthy, wealthy, and wise.
How should parents go about advocating for their kids, particularly their adolescents? I ask that because when I was a teenager, I was molested by an adult that was respected in the community. My parents were shocked emotionally and struggled to know how to help me. For me I felt shame. But I also felt that my family did not advocate for me. How do parents learn how to give that hurt child what she needs?
The first piece of it, I think, is that we as child and family professionals need to be realistic about what we can train people to do. The reality is, even if you spend every day for six hours over a two-year period with a family, you are only going to see what they show you. And as adults we can have so many layers of control, so many things piled on top of it so we don’t feel, we don’t think about, we don’t experience, we don’t touch on the places where it hurts. That’s why I think that, in terms of parent preparation, the very best thing that professionals can do is to help parents touch those places within themselves. I am not necessarily talking about it in a therapeutic kind of way but in a way where we convey to the parent that this is what you are going to have to deal with, because that child, whether the child is a teenager or an infant, is going to put you, the parent, in touch with all of your darkest fears and pains. In our agency when it involves a teenager, we tell parents, “Look, if you are looking for a honeymoon when you bring your child home, forget it. Forget a honeymoon—you don’t want a honeymoon anyway. You want to know exactly the areas where this young person needs your help.” And every single behavior is going to be a flag saying, “Can you help me here?” If they lie, if they steal, if they are promiscuous—every single behavior is going to be an indicator that this is an area where they need your help. Can you handle it as a parent?
One of the things we ask folk as they come through our processes is, “Why are you here?” And you know what people say? “I am here because I love children. I am here because I have a calling. I am here because my childhood was so great that I want to share. Or I am here because my childhood was so bad, and I don’t want any other child to have to go through that.” There are all of these platitudes, all of these politically correct things people say. And it is not . . . that there isn’t some kernel of truth in what they are saying. But the reality is that is not what brings people out. Because if that was the case, our agency would have these beautiful shows like the Dave Thomas production, Home for the Holidays. We would have classrooms full of thirty thousand people, because most people have those sentiments. That is not what motivates people to take time out of their lives, to open up their lives to strangers and all of the things they know are going to come down. What motivates folks to do that is deeply individual. As an example, my daughter Ebony is one of the most incredible advocates that I have ever seen, especially for her own children. A part of that is because as a teenager the world was an unsafe place for her.
Ebony was constantly ready to defend—not so much physically because she is not a fighter in that way. But I mean on things where I would feel hurt; she would feel anger and respond to that. If you can imagine, Ebony was fourteen years old when she moved in with these people who did not know anything about parenting, had kids, and were stressed! My craziness was [that] I thought my job as a child was to be perfect. So anytime my kids did anything that resembled imperfection, that was like flipping me the bird. It just inspired such rage in me. It wasn’t about the behavior at all. It was about “this is what you think of me?” The bottom line in all of this is that it made for a very difficult decade for me. Ebony was who she was. For a decade we went back and forth. However, those things that drove me crazy as her father, I later understood that these were the things that would make Ebony an independent and successful woman. It just doesn’t work when you are fourteen years old and have a parent that doesn’t understand [that] standing up for yourself is good. You want her to be an advocate. You want her to be able to stand up to adults. We, as her parents, just needed to shave the edges off and get her to a place where she didn’t have to tell her boss to drop dead. That is essentially what we did for her, shave off the edges. She is still who she is. The blessing in this is that there were definitely values and lessons that Ebony learned from my wife. We were amazed that Ebony took in any of it. There was no indication in the years that she lived with us that she was getting any of what we were teaching her.
I am speaking from the perspective of being an African American woman who was raised in a white home. I am also speaking for other transracial adoptees raised in white homes and living in predominately white communities. How do African American transracial adoptees deal with hair and skin issues, abandonment issues, shame, trying to be perfect, not fitting in, et cetera? How do they learn to balance all of these complex issues intelligently and effectively?
It is very difficult. I think more universal than that, we as adoptive parents have to first deal with the fact that this child was not born to me. It is not good or bad. It is just different. The reality is that we have to embrace that. What that means is that they were not born to me; they had a life before me. And anything that was a part of their lives is a part of my life. Just like when you get married, you marry your husband or your wife. You have a mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, this, that, and the other. It is all a part of you. That is why this idea that “this never happened” is so detrimental. We can’t deal with anything if we can’t deal with the biggest thing in our life. The biggest thing in our life is that this child was not born to me. Sometimes we hear the question “Should we be placing black children into white homes?” My personal opinion is that, if the choice is between a family and no family, then they need a family because no system is going to do anything that resembles good for any kid. I’d rather see a kid struggle like you are struggling, Rhonda, than to spend ten years in somebody’s foster care system. That is truly hell. That is truly hell.
Some of the stories that you hear from these ten-year-olds, fifteen-year-olds, and twenty-year-olds are unbelievable things that happened to them after they got into foster care. We, the professionals, take them out of their birth families to protect them and put them in danger, day after day after day. What happens when you are in foster care for any length of time is that you lose your citizenship; you lose a piece of your humanity. You become like furniture. You become like property. People move you around as if you are not human. Yes, we definitely need to be helping folks to understand that, if you are going to adopt transracially or internationally, you need to embrace where these children come from. There are things that the adoptive parent is not going to be equipped to deal with. That is the bottom line. I remember at the Downy Side Agency, again this was some time ago, in one of the classes that we required folks who wanted to adopt transracially to take, we asked the question “Would you marry a person from another race?” And you sit around a room of folks, and it is amazing, in a controlled environment like that, you can see how difficult [it is] just thinking about it and imagining what would that be like, to be married to someone of another race. It is fascinating to see how people struggle with that question. And then you say to them that I am going to bring a child to you and you’re going to be this child’s parent. If you are going to adopt transracially, or you already have, you have to get comfortable with the fact that your child comes from wherever they come from. And if that doesn’t have anything to do with you, then you need to find a way to make that bridge for them because they are going to need that information. Sometimes potential and adoptive parents will say that they are willing to talk about race and adoption and that they have no issues with where their child comes from. But the fact that there is no representation of their child’s background in these parents’ lives speaks volumes to these kids. It is a huge thing. Even the best people with the greatest hearts are going to have trouble in this area of transracial adoption. This is the world that we live in. Especially as you are raising kids, kids are looking to you for everything as their parent. And then of course they reach that point where you don’t know anything. One thing that they know for sure is that “I am not you!” Everything gets intensified. I think that it is so important, especially if we adopt children as infants, that we have to get comfortable with everything that makes up this child. And whether it is their hair or where they are from, we have to acknowledge the fact that these things need to be addressed. There is no pretending that it didn’t happen because everybody around you is not on the same page as you are as the adopted child.
It is like informal adoption, particularly as it relates to me. My adoptive mother (the woman that raised me) was my biological mother’s best friend. It sounds like a country western song. The rest of the story is that my adoptive mother’s husband might actually be my biological father. This was an open secret that of course everybody in the family knew except for me. My brother—who is five years older than me and another informally adopted kid, totally unrelated to me and totally unrelated to them—one day comes home, and my mother says to him, “This is your brother.” The story that my mother found me in the trash made a lot of sense to him. For a five-year-old, that is as good an explanation as any. I also had an aunt who was a domestic worker at that time and would bring home random stuff, like a chair, a coat, a rug, et cetera. You can see how my mother’s story made sense to my brother.
What I wished would have happened, instead of my adoptive mother saying to family members that she found me in the trash, was that she would have taken the opportunity to instead broach my adoption story truthfully. I wanted to say to her, “Mom, if you take the shame out of adoption by being able to say the word without bursting out into tears or turning it into something big and dramatic, then it would have been normalized for me.” But I couldn’t say that to her because I didn’t think that she could handle it, even years later.
How would you have wanted your mom to explain adoption you?
She could have explained it in an age-appropriate way that would have made sense for me. If I asked her at seven, she could have responded to that question one way; and if I asked her at age nine, she could have said it another way; and if I asked her at twelve, she could have said it another way. I wasn’t looking for the cold hard facts. I would have been able to put the pieces together. And as we both got older and matured, I am sure that we would have learned how to then have an intelligent conversation about adoption. Like I said earlier, generally speaking, one can only talk about this issue when the adoptive parent is comfortable with the fact that while they didn’t give birth to a given child, or conceive him, that does not make the adoptive parent any less of a mother or a father. The child belongs to the adoptive parent(s). And the way that the child came to the parent(s) was through adoption, formal or informal. So in my case, since my biological mother couldn’t take care of me, my adoptive mother chose to adopt me, which is a wonderful loving act.
I am just going to put this next question out there. Do black people adopt formally?
My wife and I adopted two of our kids formally, although my wife is not African American; she is [of] Swiss [heritage]. Also, from an agency perspective, the answer is yes. Many of the folks that come through our agency are, first of all, people of color. Second of all they are people that have a connection to the youngster that they are interested in adopting. So at our agency we do have a fair share of social workers, therapists, teachers, and bosses—people who knew a kid was in a tough situation and opened their home to them. The reason we push adoption per se as a legal procedure is because it is clean. It is clean in the sense that “I adopted you so you are my child.” It is easy for all of us as grownups to relate to that. There are some situations where we advocate that, for this particular kid, formal adoption is not the way to go. An example is my son Bobby; he is the one that my wife and I have legal guardianship of. To give you some background, sometime after moving to Pennsylvania, we moved here to Pittsburgh—our son Brandon was in second grade, and our daughter Geneva was little. We lived in the suburbs in a predominately white community. Back when we first moved here, there was a family that we connected with who had a son named Bobby. Bobby was in the same grade as our son Brandon. We knew that the mother of this family had adopted Bobby, who also happened to be biracial. So Bobby was on my radar. As the years went on, Bobby’s mother became ill. We learned about it. In small communities everybody learns about everything. So my wife said to me that we needed to let Bobby’s mother know that if she did not have a plan for Bobby, then we would plan for him. At that point I had understood that the first adoption my wife and I did was about me. It was something that I needed to do, and she went along with it 100 percent. I wasn’t going to put her in a position again to ask her to make this kind of commitment, even though I was thinking all along that we needed to do this. So, thank God, she understood that and was on the same page as I was. We went to Bobby’s mom and shared with her that we were adoptive parents as well and that we understood her situation and that if she did not have a plan for Bobby, that we would certainly be willing to take care of him.
As it turned out Bobby’s mother did have a plan for him, which was a very good plan at the time. Bobby’s babysitter, who had been his babysitter since he was eighteen months old, was going to take care of him. She essentially ran a day care business. Bobby’s mother, who was a nurse, would drop him off at six in the morning and would come back at seven in the evening to pick him up. So Bobby would spend hours and hours with these folks, and they said, “Hey, we will take care of him.” So I said to them that was a great plan. They had known him all of his life—literally. We had done everything that we needed to. We were off the hook. As Bobby’s mother became sicker and sicker, she came to us one day and said to us that the family said that they could not take care of Bobby. So my wife and I said, “Well, of course, we will raise Bobby.”
In the beginning of our discussion I said that adoption chose me. This has not only been the biggest thing in my life, this has been the meaning of my life. I have so many lessons that came to me through this experience. The loss that I feel is because I know it is a loss, but it is not like I would have chosen anything different. One of the stories that I love to tell is, at this point we went back to Brandon and Geneva, who were little, and told them about Bobby’s situation and said to them that “Mommy and I are thinking about bringing Bobby into our home, and what do you think about it?” Brandon, who was Bobby’s friend, wanted him to come in to our home. Geneva had a little look on her face. I said to her, “Honey, I just want it to be the right thing to take Bobby in.” She said to me, “Daddy, how could it not be the right thing?”
That is beautiful.
It still makes me tear up. There is no greater lesson in life than sometimes you have to do things because it is the right thing to do. Who knows if it is the smart thing? It is just the right thing. And this is something that my wife and I can do because we have lived that situation. We can do this. So we went back to Bobby’s mother and said certainly. She passed away that summer. And Bobby moved in with us. He was thirteen at the time, and now he is twenty-two years old. He just left, Rhonda, while we were talking, to go off to church. The point of all of this is to say that Bobby’s mother didn’t want an adoption. Now, she had adopted him, but part of her adopting him was that she wanted her name to continue. She didn’t want him adopted again. Now she didn’t tell us that in those words, but it was clear that us formally adopting Bobby was not her intention nor was it his intention. And we have had many conversations with Bobby over the years about this, and he doesn’t want to be officially adopted but knows that we are his family. I say this to say that when we as adults claim children, the only thing that matters is our decision and theirs. When you are dealing with older kids, they have a decision on whether or not to move into your home. No kid is going to move into your home kicking and screaming. When they don’t want to be in your home, then they are out of your home. We in our agency have to help parents understand that.
If you are having any doubts about whether you are a legitimate or authentic parent, then that is your stuff; that is not the kids’ message to you. The kid might say to you, “You are not my real parent or you’re not my real mommy.” And, really, all that means is, “You didn’t give birth to me!” And your answer to that needs to be, “I know. But I am still the one that is telling you that you need to be home by 10 P.M. et cetera.” The point of it all is that we have to understand that kids are going to do what kids do. A part of that is using any weapon they can to test us as parents, to see where we are weak and where we are strong. And if you are, in this case, a foster kid who has been traumatized, it becomes life and death for the child to understand what does this adult do when they are at their weakest point? How do I get them there? How do I keep them there so that I can find out how safe I am in this environment? And that sometimes goes on for years.
That is intense. I think that mind-set from the perspective of someone like a foster care child who has been traumatized can go on into adulthood.
Absolutely!
I can speak for me. I think that piece that you talk about is something that I had to discover within me. I think that in my life it was “Let’s achieve. Let’s achieve. Let’s achieve. Suck it up. Don’t feel it.” I empathized with others, but I didn’t stop long enough to realize that the child in me had fear in her. I had felt abandoned over the years, even though I understood my life to be blessed. But at the same time [with] any major transition in my life, I tend to question my worth. Am I lovable? Am I a good child, a good person? Am I going to be okay?
Yes. One of the things that I like to help people get a handle on is, as children, as we try and figure out our place in the world and what works for us, some kids decide that achievement works. And so they do incredible things. They strive and they achieve. And we as parents love them and give them kudos. And then some kids go the very opposite way. It is the same energy. It is the same energy in their hearts that is driving them. The only thing that is different is the path that is in front of them. Some people pick and are chosen to achieve, and some people pick to buy into the other way.
What are the values that you and your wife teach your children?
Here is the thing about my wife. Now we have been married since 1988, and we knew each other a long time before that. One of the things that drew me to her is that she was—and still is—perhaps one of the most decent human beings I have ever met anywhere. I mean fundamentally. She loves people. She loves life. She is one of those people where she asks you how you are doing and she wants to hear it. She is just one of those incredible people where the world is a very wonderful place for her. When we first met each other, I was at a stage in my life that I call my “People Suck Days.” I was in this funk. Individual people were okay, but as a collective group, people just sucked. I felt that there was no goodness in this universe. So when I met this person who actually honest to God believed to the core that life was good, I just could not stay away from her. I think that to some degree her mind-set is what has sustained us over all of these years. When it came to adoption, my wife knew that was what I needed to do, and she knew because it is her nature to care for me. She understands what I need. And I think on some level she knew that I needed to adopt even before I knew that I needed to do it. When she said yes and signed her name on the dotted line, she was all in. “All in” in adoption means that mothers bear the brunt of all of the angst, all of the anger of the child. Guys are almost always the good guys. Moms get it with both barrels. And my wife did not shy away from that. And we had some rocky patches because we are all human beings, and we have limits and things that we don’t think we can take. But the most loving thing that my wife has done for me (even though she would not say it this way) is going along with me on this journey. I say to folks that if you have a partner that is willing to go on an adoption journey with you and be your partner in this, that is an amazing thing. That is a huge asset, and something that needs to be encouraged and protected. If you are someone who wants to adopt but does not have a partner, then certainly you need to find people in your life that are going to be there and are supportive of the best you.
I say this because adoption takes a lot of work. Parenting takes a lot of work. I don’t think people come forward to abandon kids or to hurt kids. Rather I believe that people come forward and then their pain gets in the way. The pain seems so big that the only way to get rid of the pain is to get rid of what “caused” the pain, and that becomes the child. And unfortunately some of the people who love us are going to say things that are not openly supportive but what they think is the answer, like “If you were happy and cheerful before the child came, then obviously this kid is the problem.” In a very loving way they say, “Look, you have done everything you could. Look at what you have gone through. Look at what you have invested. Look, nothing is helping. What is going to happen in ten years?” These are not bad people. These are people who love you, the parent. But they are giving you advice that is not supportive of you because that is not who you want to be. The pain is telling you yes, get this kid the heck out of here. But the reality is that this is not who you signed on to be. And if you are encouraged to let this happen, you are not going to be the same. Is it going to be the end of you? No, but a little piece of you is going to die. And that is not what you came forward to do. It is not surprising that some people may discourage you, because in their own way they love you. However, they didn’t go to the adoption classes like you did. They don’t know the kid like you do. All they know is your pain. They see you in pain. They want to see you get out of pain. That’s why you need to find people who can say, “Yes, I know what you mean, but this too will pass.”
What resources did you use as a family, or [do] you recommend as a professional, for adoptive families who are going through particularly patchy times?
Thank God for our family. I worked at a place where every day was like being with a support group. So many of us were, one, adoptive parents. Second, we have so many people on staff who are former kids of foster care. My daughter even worked for us for a period of time. We have people who are adopted. So when you came into our agency, you had all of this support, and it kind of unburdened you.
What is the piece that is missing in the adoption practice, in your opinion?
The piece that is missing in adoption is the understanding that adoption is forever. It has to be forever or it cannot work. Parenting is the fact that you have no choice. Your kid is your kid is your kid. And no matter what they are doing, they are never going to stop being your kid. The problem with adoption is that we, being the professionals, the system, let parents off the hook. It lets people think that you can do this halfway, that you can be a pseudoparent, that you can be a mentor, et cetera. What we call that is “commitment lite.” If you are not committed, then you don’t have to think of solutions. You don’t have to do a thousand things. You can do five things and say, “I have done everything that I could do!” The reality is . . . you are saying . . . that “I have done everything that I am going to do, and it is over.” Nobody would give you the grief they are going to give you if you were talking about your birth child.
So why are we still struggling in society to understand that adoption is legitimate and viable? Why do we make such a differentiation between forming a family biologically versus through adoption?
I don’t know if it is the chicken or the egg. I don’t know if we treat adoption as a second-class way of forming a family because it is not genetic, it is not biological. I don’t know what came first. The one thing that I know for sure is that we are working at cross-purposes [in] trying to encourage everyone to adopt, because everyone doesn’t want to adopt. Everyone doesn’t need to adopt. Everyone doesn’t want to be a parent. I think that we as a system need to focus more energy into finding those folks for whom this is a legitimate way of going. And of course there is the ugly side, where there are billions and billions of dollars tied into maintaining kids, keeping kids, and thinking of new and fancier ways [of] keeping kids in [foster] care longer. We can’t deny that that is a piece of it as well. I definitely think that the very best thing [about] the foster care system, or at least those of us professionals dealing with helping people decide whether or not adoption is for them, is helping people get honest with themselves. It doesn’t matter who the kid is or what you do, if in your heart of hearts, as a potential adoptive parent, this is not for you.
How do adults, particularly those of color, get through the adoption process, which as you know can be quite intimidating and invasive?
I am sure that a lot of folks don’t want to recognize it, but whenever you talk to most adoption agencies about people of color, or even the people who have the tendency to do the best with the kids that are in the system, right now what they will tell you is we cannot find families of color willing to adopt. And the reason that they cannot find these families is because we set up a system that is designed to exclude people. It is designed to weed out people before we even get them in the door. What I tell people who are thinking about getting into this process is that there are a couple of realities that you have to deal with: One, you are not going to single-handedly change the system; two, you have to accept that this is the way it works. And one of the things that you have to figure out up front is, What agency are you going work with? If you call as a person off the street wanting information and they, the agency, treat you like trash, know it is not going to get any better when you have one of their kids. Simply put, you make a phone call. You like the way you are treated, then you take it to the next step. If the agency doesn’t get back to you, or they treat you like a bother, or there is nobody who is available to talk with you about the adoption process because it is not their job, there is a message in all of that. That is what it is. If you look at the folks who have historically been the social workers who are doing the assessing, there is no wonder why you don’t see many families of color adopting formally. The secret to any adoptions, especially teen adoptions, is you find somebody within an agency that has a connection to the kid who thinks that they are more than just a statistic. That is when your teachers come in, your social workers, your bosses, and your family members. The problem with the system is, “We have taken Johnny from that family so there is nobody in there that could be good enough to do this.” It is not that the families are not there; it is that the system doesn’t want them.
In New York City we are what is called a recruitment agency. We don’t have children in our care that are not in families. So we don’t have foster homes or residential treatment centers or group homes. When you make your money based on having kids in your care but not in a family, it is counterproductive to be thinking about putting them in families. The other piece is we come to the foster care system as consultants, and we say, “Hey, look, we can find a family for this kid.” And what we want to do is look at the kid’s record and determine who they know and who their family members are. The pushback that we get from the system is, “So right now you are telling us that we have had this kid in our care for ten years, and you are going to be able to do something that we haven’t been able to do?” Rhonda, the truth of the matter is that the foster care system hasn’t been looking for this kid to enter into a permanent home. Once you come into foster care, the clock stops for the child. The only clock the system is looking at is when you turn eighteen or twenty-one so that they can get rid of you. Nobody is looking to get you into a permanent home. . . . I know that institutions like to get us on the kick that if there are all these families out there, why don’t they come forward? The reality is that we as a system don’t want families to come forward.
That is a sad commentary on the state of the foster care system in America.
Here is a classic example of what I am talking about. I am working at an agency, and I am taking a kid from another agency that has worked with me for three years at that point. This is Ebony. Ebony gets pregnant as a teenager. Back in those days there wasn’t quite the rush to finalization, so technically, even though she was living with us, she was still in foster care. There were cases where older kids moved into foster care, and it wasn’t until two or three years down the road before there was any kind of finalization. So Ebony was not legally finalized, but she was pregnant and living with us. So I called up a social worker, someone who I had known for years and had placed other kids with. I say to this social worker that Ebony was pregnant. What do you think was the first thing that came out of her mouth? Now this is not an evil conniving person. This was a caring person who I had known for years at that point. And she had known Ebony and Robert even longer. The very first thing out of her mouth was, “Oh, my God, where is she going to live?” The assumption was that I was going to put her out. Now understand: these were not happy times. So the thought of putting her out was not the furthest thing from my mind. But what this social worker’s statement did for me was that it infuriated me. I understood that if that were my biological child, nobody would say something like that. The lesson in that is that this was a woman who understood at the time what my talk was. This wasn’t her thinking, “Chester is going to put her out.” This is the reflex of the job. The girl gets pregnant, then she is out. Her behavior is “too extreme.” I wouldn’t even have had to say, “Come get her.” All I would have had to do is agree with this social worker. That is the danger of foster care.
Wow! I was in foster care for two years. You would think that I was there even longer with the mind-set that I developed because of that experience. I had this internal mind-set that told me that, growing up, I had to make sure my legs were “sewn tight” so that I would not get pregnant and thrown out of my adoptive home. I knew that I needed to make sure that I completed elementary school, high school, and college because I had, again in my mind, “What would people think of me without these credentials? I am already black, and a foster care alumna, which to me, growing up, equated to a throwaway child. I am still working through the dark side of the foster care reality as an adult. And it was only two years in one placement for me.
But look at those two years. Those are the years when you are absorbing everything. Talk about magical thinking. These people are giants in your life and in your world. So, yeah, I am not surprised at all what you have and are dealing with because of your foster care placement.
And then you go into another home through adoption, whether it is inracial or transracial. The food is different, and the sounds and rhythm are different. All of these clear changes and transitions are difficult. It’s interesting: even today, when I hear an adult yelling, it physically does something to me emotionally. If I am going to a mall and I hear, “Boy, get over here!” I literally can get ill. Where does that come from?
That comes from being traumatized. That is where that comes from. You don’t get untraumatized. You just learn to live around it. If you can imagine, children can be so challenging, just the everyday precociousness, doing what they do. Imagine you have a young child living with you that doesn’t mean anything to you. Forget about loving them; you don’t even like them. This idea, “When I get rid of you, I will get another one.” What kind of message is that? And this can come from well-meaning people who are tired, frustrated, and not always supported. Forget about the abuse and the crazy people. I am just talking about everyday folks.
As we close our discussion, tell me: What does the name of the agency you work for, You Gotta Believe, mean?
The reason we named the agency You Gotta Believe is because the one thing that we all decided when we were founding the group was the only thing that mattered was your belief system. You have to believe that these kids are adoptable. You have to believe that you can parent them and that they can have a bright future. Unfortunately there are oodles and oodles of people in this profession who don’t believe.
What is the legacy that you want to leave for your children?
Ultimately I want my kids to understand that I always tried to be a decent person and that I valued civility. I really believe that there is no reason why we can’t go through this life helping each other. There is no reason why there has to be hatred and animosity between one another. I want my kids to know that I cared about people, and I want them to care about people too. I want them to be good people by contributing more to this society than they take away. In other words I want them to leave the world a better place instead of hell on Earth. And one can do that in many ways and in big ways. In that is the blessing.