Vanessa Adel
IN THE FALL of 2008, my partner and I were faced with a momentous decision: whether to welcome a fourth baby into our lives or not. We had three children, ages seven, six, and three at the time, whom we had adopted through social services. The youngest two shared the same birth mother, and she—a woman who had suffered a long history of drug abuse, violence, racism, and social and familial neglect—had just given birth to a baby girl, three months premature. Our social worker called us a little more than two weeks after the girl was born, asking if we would be interested in fostering and adopting our children’s birth sister.
What to do? The first thing on our minds was the impact this new life would have on our routine: another mouth to feed, loads more dishes and laundry, additional doctor visits, less sleep, and the intensity of parenting a baby all over again. These concerns were compounded by the fact that she was a premature baby whose physical and developmental needs were unclear. How could we possibly manage this additional family member with our work, our careers, and our home? My partner has a taxing, more than full-time job as a sixth-grade social studies teacher in a nearby city. As a graduate student in sociology and a part-time lecturer with a full but flexible schedule, I shouldered the bulk of organizing and running the household. The mountainous bags of clothes that tumble down when I opened the closets in a frenzy to find sizable hand-me-downs every time one of my kids had a growth spurt became my visual symbol of being overwhelmed as I considered what welcoming a new baby would mean to me in our family system. The prospect of ever finishing my doctorate, let alone being able to successfully navigate through junior facultyhood, seemed absurd and laughable in the face of parenting one more child. This chapter bears witness to the process of deliberating whether to grow our family while I was in graduate school. As I tell the story of this decision-making process, I reflect on multiple layers and dynamics of ideology, structure, privilege, and penalty that drive its elements.
As a sociologist, I am acutely aware of how this deliberation represented an inherently social process in terms of the cultural narratives and meanings of family, identity, self, and career that my partner and I navigate and in terms of the social structures that shape our lives. Our relative positions of penalty and privilege as queer middle-class white women adopting transracially in a nuclear family system interlocked to shape both the decision-making possibilities available to us and the future ramifications of our decisions in different contexts (Crenshaw 1994; Collins 2002). The intersections of our social identity positions provide myriad data for reflection and analysis because they exist within and are constituted in and through dynamic contexts of ongoing and emerging institutional and social contexts and relations (Choo and Ferree 2010).
How we engage these positions in our interactions with others arises out of processes of power and garners outcomes that grease the wheels of power in the form of resistance or assimilation. My partner and I like to imagine ourselves as agents of resistance—a liberatory, radical couple pushing at the edges of ideologies of family, sexuality, gender, race, and blood ties. In reality, the processes of our lives involve both assimilatory as well as resistant dynamics of thought and action. That is, coming to be mothers of multiple children was born of intersecting power dynamics that we are embedded in and acting from (Hequembourg 2007). Although our gender, sexuality, and multilayered motherhood constitute perhaps the most vulnerable processes in my personal story, our race, education, and class are our most obviously privileged positions. In making the choices through which my partner and I came into motherhood with multiple children, “we create[d] the opportunity or space for movement within the process of subjectification” (Hequembourg 2007, 157), such that we opened up new understandings of ourselves as agents and parents and of myself as an academic and a mother.
Gender revealed its prominent role in the decision-making process as it made an evocative appearance in and through the contentious relations of my family of origin. When my mother learned of our deliberation, she emphatically asserted that I could not parent a fourth child; I needed to think about my own career and finish my Ph.D. Her response surprised me. In our relationship so far, my mother had never underscored, let alone emphatically expressed, the importance of career development for me or for any woman. As her daughter, I had always felt that she was intimidated by any professional endeavors I engaged in. I regarded this issue as deeply gendered because in my experience my mother seemed to regard the driven and successful women in her life with a mixture of insecurity and distrust. She came from a classically misogynistic family who, from my vantage point, successfully undermined her own desires for educational attainment and career development. Despite great talent, my mother did not professionalize her own passionate interests in interior design, education, and human rights. Instead, she structured her life as the wife of a UNICEF manager, staying at home to raise her children and to support her husband’s and son’s careers. Although my mother was a daily witness to professionals working for women and children’s welfare, and although she spent many dinners discussing global women’s rights, she herself gave feminism and women’s movements for equity not much more than sideways glances, almost studiously avoiding their liberating potential for herself. In my own life trajectory as a queer woman, I learned to navigate the misogyny of my family of origin in contentious isolation from my mother. So when she expressed such emphatic concern for my career welfare, I was taken aback. At least for a moment, we shared a gendered concern that my motherhood responsibilities might prevent me from being able to fulfill my academic aspirations.
In the same conversation, my father interjected, “Well, maybe that’s what [Vanessa] wants to do.” For me, his words and tone, in the context of decades of tense communication between my parents, simultaneously cut down my mother’s love-inspired wisdom and served to uphold the security of his own cultural and emotional attachment to an ideology of women staying at home. The swiftness of his response seemed like aggressive relief that his masculine-looking lesbian daughter might choose motherhood over a doctorate and a career as an academic. The effect of this comment and its delivery left little room for acknowledging and reflecting on the conflict for me, and by extension for many women, between parenting and work or, more specifically in this case, between parenting and graduate school. This tension is evident in the rise of attrition rates for graduate student mothers that recent research attributes to the conflict between the roles of mother and student, on the one hand, and the social structural environments of family and academia, on the other (Lynch 2008).
In a formulaic way, my parents’ emotional responses correspond to the conceptual and experiential binaries of life choices for women, including those in privileged positions. It also highlights the remaining dichotomies between work and home at the level of both ideology and structure (Folbre 2001). For middle-class women, especially white middle-class women, with both professional goals and necessitated participation in the labor force, there is a tension between intensive motherhood and intensive professional life (Hays 1996; Gerson and Jacobs 2007). The gender ideologies that deem women as and push them to become primary caregivers create a binary that is often impossible to resolve in the current landscape of state and market policy. Many scholars show how women are bearing the brunt of this family–work conflict because of a marketplace that has not adjusted to working mothers’ needs or family lives that remain largely gendered in their division of labor (Folbre 2001; A. Crittenden 2007; Gerson and Jacobs 2007; Stone 2007b). In the face of this conflict, many women turn to less-than-balanced resolutions. Recent research finds women doing the following in order to cope: leaving lucrative and top professional positions if they can afford it (Stone 2007a); spending more time and emotional energy at work than at home (Hochschild 2007); enduring long-term separation from their children as a result of transnational economic migration that sometimes lasts entire childhoods (Parreñas 2005). Even in workplaces with more generous family policies, the pressure to outperform at work leaves employees vulnerable to comparison with the performance of childfree counterparts and often resistant to taking full advantage of existing family-friendly policies (Glass and Estes 1997). In the context of higher education, graduate student mothers experience high rates of attrition because of the conflict between embracing intensive motherhood and navigating universities and colleges that implicitly regard family as a private, largely female endeavor. For graduate student mothers, there is the added stress of making significant time commitments to work that incurs child-care costs without also providing much in the way of income (Lynch 2008). Very little research explores the impact of parenting multiple children on motherhood and career balance, though it is not difficult to surmise that the tensions between home and work only intensify with larger families. Although my parents’ conversation highlighted old dynamics of gender relations between us that my feminist analysis hoped to transcend, their reproduction and contestation of the dominant motherhood framework shape the processes and outcomes of my parenting experiences.
The decision my partner and I faced about whether to parent a fourth child was tougher than any we had made about our kids before then. It propelled us into a sphere in which we found ourselves confronting the limitations of our participation in the labor force in ways that were new to us, partially because we were used to the privilege of making deliberate choices that we felt we were in charge of. For our first child, we deliberated in the way of quasi-rational prospective parents of middle-class backgrounds in the contemporary United States. We wanted a kid, we had been together about ten years, we felt ready enough, and we had bought a house in preparation for growing a family. We deliberated the different options: birth children through insemination—known or unknown donor; adoption—domestic or international.
Much of our deliberation was in our minds; we analyzed what path would be best and which would be more suitable. We thought about timing from different angles, considering when having a child might be “too soon” or “too late.” We were drawn to adoption because we felt that insemination was going to be complicated and expensive, whereas there were already children in the world who needed a home. We considered the politics of homophobia in our families and felt that adopting held the greatest possibility for creating more equity among all of us in our family unit than giving birth would, which might invite divisive attachments to genetic heritage as a marker of legitimate family bonds. For lesbian couples in which one partner is the birth mother, the nonbiological mother is often marginalized from full status as a mother, whereas the birth mother is seen as having a more legitimate claim to motherhood (Brown and Perlesz 2008). Research has also shown that lesbian couples are strongly committed to egalitarianism in their relationships, which certainly drives the way that we make choices about our lives together (Perlesz et al. 2010). Plus, we live in Massachusetts—a state where adoption by gay/lesbian couples assures that both parents are legal guardians of the adopted child, which is not the case in many states in the United States.
We deliberated about the politics of transracial adoption. As two white prospective moms, we thought deeply about whether it would be fair to adopt a child of color given the whiteness of our families and the country’s racism and racial segregation. We weighed the meaning of being open or closed to transracial adoption and how we might wittingly or unwittingly participate in reproducing racism as a result of any of our actions. We had frank conversations with friends, who encouraged us to be open to adopting a child of color, to keep race on the table, to keep it in sight as a constant line of navigation. One friend, an African American transracial adoptee who is active in the transracial adoptee community, advised that if we were to adopt a child of color, we should adopt more than one so the children would not be alone in their identity and experience as people of color in our family. Another friend, a white mother of three adopted kids, also asserted the same wisdom: if you do adopt transracially, don’t let any child be alone in her racial experience in your family. Numerous studies have revealed experiences of painful racial isolation and disconnect, especially when adoptees live in predominantly white communities (Benson, Sharma, and Roehlkepartain 1994; DeBerry, Scarr, and Weinberg 1996; Hollingsworth 1997, 2000; Brooks and Barth 1999; Huh and Reid 2000; S. Patton 2000).
In the end, we decided to go the way of foster-to-adoption via social services in our home state, which has legalized same-sex marriage, joint adoption, and foster care. We were open to any child age four and younger, of any gender or race, a single child or a sibling pair. In the fall of 2001, social services called us with the news that a healthy baby had been found in a church, parents and heritage unknown, and asked, Would we be willing to take her home tomorrow? This was the fortuitous beginning of our parenting adventure in the swift, surprise placement manner of social services. There are many stories to tell here, but nine months after welcoming our daughter as a several-days-old foster baby, we were able to adopt her, a precocious baby who was already walking just shy of ten months of age. We knew we wanted more children, siblings for our daughter. In agreement with the advice our friends had given us and what the literature reflected, we wanted to foster and adopt one more African American child with whom our daughter could share in the diasporic identity, solidarity, and strength of African American heritage and experience (S. Patton 2000; Lee 2003). After some unsuccessful attempts working with a private adoption agency and fostering two babies in quick succession who were successfully reunited with their birth mothers, my partner and I welcomed our son and second daughter into our home when they were ages three years and one month old, respectively.
The decision to have three children came relatively easily. We had previously been open to welcoming a sibling pair, and when our son and daughter’s situation presented itself, it was not a leap from where we had already intended to go. We hadn’t exactly planned on three, but it didn’t seem too much of a stretch. With our fourth, however, the choice to parent catapulted us into a different sphere of decision making and orientation—out of the comfort zone of traditional nuclear family structure supported by our class and community culture that normalizes two-parent families with 2.4 kids. We deliberated for a long week, talking with close family and mentors, assessing every detail of how we might possibly be able to parent four kids the way that we like to parent and still do all the things we wanted to do, including for example, finishing my Ph.D.
Although we thought of ourselves as expanding notions of kinship in our lives as a queer, transracially adopted family, being confronted with the choice to parent our children’s birth sibling revealed a certain attachment to blood ties. After all, social services had called us previously about children they had hoped to place with us. Our standard answer had been: “Please don’t call us anymore; we’re all set.” Analyzed through the lens of intersectional power, this response can be read in different ways. On the one hand, our previous denials reflected reasonable boundary setting. On the other, they reflected the desire to maintain a privileged class status and a particular exclusivity over our family identity. Family is home, but it is also a bounded space from which some are inherently excluded (Espiritu 2003). In adoption, inclusion crosses traditional confines of “primary kinship” (Hicks 2006), but it is also a site where blood ties are implicitly excluded—in the case of birth parents, for example, and even in the case of birth siblings. My partner and I were compelled to consider inclusion of a birth sibling based in part on cultural notions of blood ties and in part on notions of the benefits of children’s being able to share birth origins, especially in their navigation of potentially difficult identity work in coming to understand their birth histories (Benson, Sharma, and Roehlkepartain 1994; S. Patton 2000; Lee 2003). Blood ties are one way in which our own family choices are embedded in a field of power that has both liberating and oppressive directions. They were not the only factor compelling us, however.
We went to visit the baby in the hospital. She was doing incredibly well in the local Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) despite having been born at one pound, fourteen ounces. We held the baby and fed her one-half ounce at a time of special premature baby formula from a tiny disposable sterile bottle. She was two pounds, seven ounces, when we met her, impossibly small to behold. One nurse in particular was quite overt in her opinion that we should foster and adopt this baby: “I could tell you some stories” (and she did). Her main point trailed a couple of horrific birth stories: “Sometimes I wonder how these babies are going to survive. I do hope you take her. How could you say no?” The intensity of sitting in the NICU with my children’s birth sister made for a space in which the regular social rules of private self-presentation did not really operate. Add to that my transgender appearance, and my life became a performance to be commented upon. Holding the baby in my arms in an uncomfortable rocking chair, hot from the eighty-degree temperature maintained in the room, and the smock and mask they made me wear, I replied, “Well, it’s complicated; we already have three kids at home.” On cue, the baby erupted in a series of what the medical experts call gas-induced smiles, those presocialized upturns of the mouth, gummy and unformed by social expectations. The nurse noticed and added, “She’s working on you. Did you see that?”
Cherríe Moraga writes about how her status as a birth mother changed her usual position as outsider butch dyke to insider mother in the NICU where her son spent his first four months. In contrast, her femme partner had to constantly prove her status as a mother, despite the way her gender expression conformed more closely to social expectations of motherhood (as cited in Tatonetti 2004). The nurse in the NICU where I held the baby knew nothing about me or my capacity to parent—financial, emotional, or otherwise. Indeed, I was sitting there internally wondering about my capacity to parent a fourth, but she read in my race and class markers sufficient cause for welcome and inclusion, to the point of insisting that I take on motherhood status. Queerness, whiteness, foster care, and adoption interacted together to position my decision making as partially public in nature, as a process to be commented on forcefully while echoing themes of compulsory and legitimized motherhood.
In fact, my partner and I initially declined the option to adopt baby number four after deliberating every rational angle. After meeting and feeding the baby in the hospital on more than one occasion, we called our social worker and said, “We can’t do this, sorry.” Then we felt sad. It didn’t feel right. We deliberated all over again, this time much less linearly. We cried, we laughed; we wriggled with wrenching feelings of impossibility and possibilities. We called our social worker a week later and said, “We changed our minds, and we’ll welcome the baby.” And then we told our kids they had a new baby sister.
Taking a meandering intersectional look at our decision-making process, I find it hard to know exactly the nature of the reality I am viewing. Indeed, saying this only reflects the multilayered, multivalenced nature of trying to be agentic within fields of power in and through which I am constituted. Gender, intersected with race, trumps our queerness to designate us as “good mothers,” yet gender confines me to a largely private, altruistic role (Folbre 2001) that is barely supported in the academic workplaces where I study and teach. In the poker games of parenthood and academia, I have some ace cards and some low-numbered cards and even some cards that shift status depending on the context. I receive props for white motherhood, but that same motherhood limits my opportunities as an emerging scholar. My class position grants me an entitlement that enables a larger range of agency and choice, yet my choice to have four children pushes at the boundaries of middle-class norms and viability. As a queer adoptive family, we push at the edges of acceptability, helping to transform ideologies of family in living our daily lives, even while our middle-class nuclear structure supports oppressive hierarchies. The way that power and discourse prop us up or bring us down, sometimes simultaneously, and the way that we access privilege or suffer penalties form a shifting enterprise with some discernable and predictable patterns as well as occasional surprises.
Amy Hequembourg (2007) suggests that although lesbian motherhood (like any identity or position) is born out of relations of power, the choices that are made in the making of that identity create opportunities for movement and possibilities for change. The opening in my case is this: navigating through the unexpected parenting of multiple children has brought me to consider the way in which our decision queered our own positions by expanding our notions of love and our experience and reception of love. We smiled as we held Alia in the NICU because we felt love. We cried when we initially said no to adopting her, and we reversed our originally well-thought-out position because we loved her. As Moraga writes, “There is no accounting for … what finally makes a family, except love. [It is love that has] the power to queer cultural boundaries,” freeing one to construct family identity in the queer spaces in between constraining cultural tropes and subject positions (quoted in Tatonetti 2004, 243).
When I first began parenting, one of my advisers reflected back to me that “children need a lot of love.” It was one of those comments that have replayed in my mind as a kind of teaching, like a simple koan to reflect on in deeper and deeper ways.
Growing up in a family in which I experienced tremendous symbolic violence in my position as a queer woman, it wasn’t so clear to me before I began parenting how much love there can be in everyday family life: how much love my kids give and how much love they love to receive; love in moments of play and engagement; love in its expression as attention, listening, snuggles, dancing, and the sharing of joy. My four-year-old snuggles with me, asserting, “I want you to stay with me forever.” My eight-year-old writes me a card with a drawing and a caption that exclaims, “Everything you do means a lot to me.” These days, our youngest is two years old, and when I’m flitting about trying to multitask, she turns to me and says, “Sit, Mommy, come sit,” inviting me to be with her in quality presence and interaction. It’s not always easy to stay here in this place of sweetness, but something is there that pushes and pulls at the rigidity of instrumental and dichotomous choices and decision making.
When we operate in congruence with mainstream ideologies of family and identity, our notions of parenting and relationships across age and nurturance suffer from constricting ideas about what is possible for us as people in terms of embracing relationships. In addition to encountering what we have not planned for ourselves, we might find ourselves participating in care work that we did not initially foresee given the narrowness of our conceptions of creating family structures, familial bonds, and caretaking arrangements. Making the “irrational” leap to parent a fourth child has nurtured and deepened decision-making approaches for me that consider putting the heart and meaning first, rather than instrumentality.
That said, parenting four children has made it more difficult to pursue my academic life, a life I identify with, am fulfilled by, and imagine myself good at. Despite my lofty talk about the significance of the heart and the importance of making decisions that defy mainstream capitalist rationality, I have incurred real costs for the commitment to intensive parenting. My dissertation has been in stasis for a number of years, and my income relies on insecure lecturer positions. It is hard to do much more than parent, run a household, and teach. Indeed, these tasks are already a hefty load. My life in academia is not progressing at a competitive rate in terms of publications, dissertation completion, let alone job security or adequate remuneration. My choice to parent multiple children is high-risk behavior, some might even call it professional suicide, in the context of an academic job market where graduates compete for dwindling jobs in a system in which one-third of full-time faculty are non–tenure track (Deresiewicz 2011). In addition, more and more institutions are relying on part-time adjunct labor, and public and private universities are facing monumental cuts that include axing entire academic departments (Deresiewicz 2011). Although the pay gap between men’s income and women’s income is narrowing within entry-level cohorts, the pay gap between mothers and nonmothers is growing, conferring an estimated wage penalty of 7 percent per child (Budig and England 2001). At times, I feel more as if I am dabbling in academia rather than really pursuing it, a victim of a gendered system with limited resources for mothers, many of whom are hanging onto professional status by a thread.
Without a doubt, I am caught in the binary between intensive motherhood and intensive academia (Lynch 2008). Although I suffer in terms of my level of competitiveness and structural position in the marketplace of academia, there are rewarding aspects to my life as an academic with multiple children. For example, there is a deepening of understanding and self-reflection that comes from long-term engagement as a graduate student, lecturer, and parent. My life as a parent feeds my sociological inquiry. Sociological literature helps me make sense of my life and challenges me to think through the social constraints of the choices available to me and the choices I am making. My students help me remain inspired to pursue the same questions from different angles semester by semester. My academic and parental experiences are woven in and through each other, even as the structures and processes of parenthood and academia do not mutually reinforce each other.
Deciding to parent our fourth was a multivalenced choice marked and made by gender scripts, racial scripts, family conceptualizations, work–family balance, motherhood practices, and social positionalities. The love that we sprang for is the queerest thing—irrational, unboxable—a gift that, if we can maintain the presence of mind to say, “OK, honey, I’ll sit next to you,” is the deepest and most capriciously enigmatic meaning worth engaging.
