Jack Brennan Perspectives

Obviously, readers are interested in knowing what has happened with the eleven year old – call him Ted – whom I’ve written about this week. The latest report I have is that he is very very angry and he is demanding to speak to his “mother” to ask her “why?”

That’s good. My great fear has been that he would experience himself as a victim, “an unfortunate person who suffers from some adverse circumstance” [WordNet/Princeton]. Instead, he is apparently experiencing himself – appropriately – as a target, “a person who is the aim of an attack by some hostile person” [id]. And the proper reaction to being targeted – especially by one’s so called “parents” – is to be angry, and the proper response is to express the anger and to demand answers.

Whew….

Everyone working in the system knows that our kids carry emotional baggage with them as they move from loss to loss to loss. It is so universal, and so the same experience from kid to kid, that it’s almost as though the baggage comes in only one material (though in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and colors) from some actual real company named “You Are To Blame, Inc.”

I’d go so far as to say that if there were only one experience that we could magically eliminate from our kids’ lives, I would choose to eliminate this conviction of self-blame. I would choose it above the rejection, above the neglect, above the abuse, and even above the abandonment. All those can be transcended, but blaming oneself for what was done to us? It eats away at our very ability to respond. And isn’t it our response-ability that frees us to be us?

Ted is processing, not burying. He is apparently recognizing that his pain is not self generated and he is looking directly to the source. He not only seems to NOT be blaming himself; he appears to be responding appropriately to this “attack by some hostile person.”

His behavior actually has me feeling optimistic for his future.

I’m proud of him.

Jack

Tomorrow afternoon, I have to be part of a team of people that tells an eleven year old that his parents are surrendering their rights to him (legally severing their parental connection).  This is not something that I have ever done before. At my adoption agency (commercial: familyfocusadoption.org), we either place children who are newborns or children who have been in foster care for years and have had their legal bond to their parents broken for a very long time – long before we ever meet them.

The object of the game will be somehow to show this boy that his parents’ decision is neither his fault nor his responsibility.  Yet, when the consequences for him are so severe, and the relationship with the people doing it to him, so personal – his parents, after all – what chance do we have of doing that?

It has made me do a lot of thinking this week. After all, all adoptive parents are never a child’s first parents. And the fact that there’s been an adoption always means that the first parents are no longer parenting their child.   In the case of some kids that is a good thing: e.g., abusive and neglectful parents lose their legal parental rights. And in some cases, very good people give up their children because they recognize that they cannot effectively parent them.  A fifteen year old pregnant high school girl who makes a wonderful adoptive plan for her child is a perfect example.

Yet, I have already described, in last Friday’s post, an example of parents who apparently decided that they could not effectively parent their gay son.  But my gut insists that that circumstance is the polar opposite of the fifteen year old girl above.  What is the difference?  Because knowing that difference may help us tomorrow with this boy.

I was long ago taught, by my brilliant and wonderful mentor, the late Msgr. Christopher Huntington, that “all motivation is mixed.”  There is no such thing as a person with pure motivation.  We all do what we do, and don’t do what we don’t do, for various mixed reasons, some good, some bad.  But our mission, he taught me, is to constantly strive to purify our motivation. Work to get rid of the bad, and reinforce the good.  And the measure of – and means for – our success is how much we are focused on the good of the other vs. the feelings within ourselves.

And there, I realized this morning, is the direction we have to go in with this boy tomorrow.  Are his folks working with the foster care team, to develop a future plan that is best for him? Or are they primarily reacting to their own feelings of pain, anger, and frustration, that they have experienced in their relationship with him?  When I look at that, when I try to measure which is the primary experience that the team has had with them, it becomes frighteningly clear what is going on.

In the infamous biblical story of King Solomon, the woman whom Solomon figured out was the “real” mother, was the one who was willing to sacrifice all that she wanted as a parent in order to save her child from being cut in half. In the contemporary world, the example of  those Jews from the Holocaust who turned their children over to Christian families in order to save them from the camps and/or death, transcended their feelings; and did so for the good of their children.

It is possible, very much so, to give up one’s children and still love them; even give them up because one loves them. But the love is measured by the good done for the children, and never by the feelings entertained or indulged within by the parent, no matter how strong or overwhelming those feelings may be.  Attachment, after all, is not love.

How on earth can we show that to this eleven year old?

Jack

Yes. Looking at that title on paper now, it’s the right title. The execution of this part of the surrender plan felt very much like an execution, period. As someone pointed out to me later, all that was missing was the black hoods. And as I predicted, it was all about blaming him; and portraying him as broken, faulty, defective – in much nicer words, and by implication only. And of course their decision was not a choice, but a “must.”

Many years ago, my then seventeen year old son brought to me a cartoon and said to me, “Pop, this is how I feel.”

It was a man in a spacesuit, standing on the moon, reading a note, left by his fellow astronauts, who were in the spaceship flying way above and leaving the planet. The note did not say what it should have. It didn’t say, “Henry, we are so terribly sorry to have left you here. We did wait as long as we possibly could. But the window of opportunity for us to get off the planet was upon us. Had we stayed any longer we all would have died. And we chose not to let that happen.”

Instead, it read: “Dear Henry, Where were you? We waited and waited, but finally decided that…”

Not only blaming Henry for their decision, but minimizing what they have just done. “We finally decided to go to the movie without you” does not have the same import as “we finally decided to abandon you on the moon.”

And what on earth does “where were you?” matter now? Blaming the victim was a concept that I first heard named in college when I read the book of the same name (thank you William Ryan) – but by no means was the experience it named new to me.

In their first words today, the parents not only told their “son” that they loved him, but that this decision was best for him. Really? Fact? Not opinion? Not a belief? Fact? Wow. So typical and predictable for people who blame others.

It could have only gone downhill from there. And it did. Nineteen times, “you, “ “your,” or “yourself” was used. Nineteen times. One paragraph.

Abusers are always
always
always
the same:
“you made me do it.”

Maybe, in the end then, they were right after all: them saying goodbye was best for him. Not because of who he is, but solely, and surely, because of who they are.

I need to take a shower.

I am on my way shortly to a meeting where a pre-teen child is to be told by his long term adoptive parents that they are giving up their parental rights to him. I am willing to bet – almost to guarantee (assuming the boy even chooses to come to the meeting) – that the parents will blame the child for their decision. I further (almost) guarantee that their blame will consist of portraying him as someone who is barely short of being a monster.

Those two themes – blame: specifically blaming someone else for your decisions; and portraying others as monstrous beings – I will come back to in this blog. Probably next entry, but also certainly repeatedly over the course of time.

Jack

Television writers get so much wrong about foster care, adoption, and “natural” parents (see “Dexter” on Showtime), that it is a joy to see when they get it right. Forest Whitaker’s character, Sam Cooper, got it very right in Tuesday’s episode of “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” entitled “Devotion.”  A father had abandoned his two children to foster care after his wife left him, and he went on to spend years in a new marriage with a new child,  because, as the father character later says to his son: you had “so many problems.” Cooper than blasted the father, with that moral stance that Whitaker does so well: “You abandoned your kids because you thought they were defective?  You have a responsibility as a parent: you encourage, you nurture. Even if you think things are going to go wrong. You just threw them away like they were garbage?  What gives you the right to hide behind your money, your fears?  You are a coward.”

Strong words – and necessary words for the purposes of the episode.

But they are strong and necessary words for our culture also.

A joy to watch and to hear (the episode can be seen on the CBS website.)

Jack

[I spent some serious time last week writing an entry for this blog, but forgot to give it a title – required – and off to the non-blogisphere it went never to be retrieved. I couldn’t bear to try to rewrite it. Thus the gap in time between entries.]

I have been in the adoption field for many many years now, and I am well aware that all adoption is subsequent to deep loss. The loss of one’s birth family, no matter the reasons, cuts very deep.  But all loss is not the same.  A young teen mother, creating an adoption plan for her newborn, whom she recognizes that she cannot take care of is not betraying her child. On the contrary, focused on the good of her baby, she is making a decision to love her child.

During the Holocaust, there were a significant number of Jewish families, who gave over their children to Christian families, lest the children be killed. Too few of those parents lived to come back to get their children.  Terribly sad and painful – sometimes even for those who did return – but in no way a betrayal of their children.  Rather, a decision to love them.

Even many of those parents who lose their children to the foster care system permanently because of drugs or alcohol,  or some other expression of abuse or neglect, can be viewed as not competent to care for their children, rather then as betrayers.  Admittedly, the line there can be rough to delineate, but the power of addiction can only be known fully by addicts.  And incompetency is understandable, even to its victims.  Perhaps a decision never made to love their children.  But even that would not be betrayal.

But what of parents who give up one child yet hold onto their others?  And worse: what of adoptive parents – who have been taught to know better – yet do the same?  Even if there are no sibs?  Is there any way to describe their behavior other than betrayal?  Can the child understand his experience without understanding the concept of betrayal?

One of biggest lessons I learned in going through sex abuse training over two decades ago, was that it is always the adult who is responsible for the abuse. Not half responsible, nor even mostly so. Totally. It was a revelation to me that even the most seductive fifteen year old, had absolutely no responsibility for being abused.  It was, I learned, the power imbalance in the relationship that determined the responsibility.   That power imbalance always also determines who betrays whom in child-parental relationships. Parenthood is – over and over and over – an adult permanently claiming a child. When the claim is real, it is irrevocable.  And, I think, for children who have had that experience (and then, say, the parents died), adoptive parents would become second parents, though no less real. Such was my own experience with my aunt.

But for parents who do claim a child, and then later renounce their claim, it is almost never based on the good of the child, but rather on how the parent feels. No child should remain with parents who renounce their parenthood, so it can be stretched into a decision “made for the good of the child.” But that would be a lie, no matter how technically true.

When parents choose protection of their feelings – even if the child’s behavior is outrageous, or perhaps criminal – over protecting the good of their child, there is only one word to use: betrayal.  When adoptive parents do it, they do it, by definition, with children who have already lost one set of parents.

That makes it a parental betrayal like no other.

There are no words for that.

Jack

Someone pointed out to me that I had not introduced myself, nor given enough information about why I am doing this blog – its context, in other words. Good points.

I am an adoptive parent of kids (all boys) – now long grown – from the foster care system. I also, as I referred to in the first post, have the experience of being given a second mother, after my first one died. Although never legally adopted, I became a permanent member of my second family. I am also the director of the adoption-from-foster-care-program of Family Focus Adoption Services, working with families in eastern NY, and based in Queens, NYC.  Adoption from the foster care system is my primary interest and focus.

Although informed by my many adoption experiences, I don’t think this is necessarily going to be an adoption blog.  That’s why it is not being posted on the Family Focus website (familyfocusadoption.org).  Keeping the two separate seems to me to give me more freedom of subject for the blog. Time will tell if that turns out to be true. And, of course, it also means that what I say are my own views, beliefs, and perspectives, and not the official stance of Family Focus.

Nonetheless, there are many adoption issues that I would like to explore using this blog.   What is the difference between attachment and love?  Is there one?  How do you explain to a child or youth, like my seventeen year old in the first entry, that it is never ever ever the responsibility of a child for the ending of an adoptive relationship?  Or any parental relationship for that matter?  How do you teach the kids that they are never to blame for their own familial situations?  How do you teach them that blame is not the issue anyway?  That responsibility and blame are not the same thing?  How, in short, do we free our kids from being trapped by their histories?

Big questions, big issues. Let’s see how this blog evolves over time.  I write not knowing who will read this blog, or when. I welcome any feedback anyone wishes to send.

Jack

I met a foster kid recently who is seventeen. I am very grateful to him for giving me permission to write here about our conversation.

He’d been adopted out of the foster care system when he was ten. But a year or so ago, his adoptive parents had surrendered their parental rights and given this young man back to the system.  His understanding of why?  Because he was gay.  I knew that that reason, by the definition of parenthood that I live by, was nonsense.

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