All I remember is her request that I not use her name.

August 11, 2016 11:12 AM

When NBC commentator Al Trautwig felt it necessary to point out that U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles' parents are biologically her grandparents, some on Twitter pushed back. Trautwig briefly dug in, tweeting "They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.", then deleted the tweet and apologized. Cece Lederer of the Daily Dot says that this is just another example of how we still don't know how to talk about adoption.
posted by Etrigan (28 comments total)

First, what a douche.

Second, why does anyone need to know about the parentage of an Olympic athlete? I mean, I know it adds a "feel-good" element and humanizes the Games, but still.
posted by Kitteh at 11:14 AM on August 11, 2016 [12 favorites]

in her case it goes so far beyond people not knowing how to talk about adoption and way into the usual demonization of black families that the media just loves to push at all costs. the whole "addict black mother/absent black father" thing naturally got played up big time, and then there was that one headline, repeated in various conservative media outlets, that simpered breathlessly about how she was "taken in" by a "kindhearted christian texas couple" as though her accursed vilified birth parents couldn't have also been christian and texan, and as though the adoptive parents weren't also already her blood relatives.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:22 AM on August 11, 2016 [53 favorites]

Its like the whole world is Royal Tenenbaum, endlessly reminding Margot that she was adopted, that she's not really his daughter, and that he assumes she wouldn't have any interest in visiting her grandmother's grave, even though he gave her his mother's name as Margot's middle name.

I know it is complicated to talk about adoption. I tracked down my biological family two years ago yesterday, and a local newspaper did a piece about it, constantly framing as a search for my true identity and my real parents.

I have real parents. My parents. The ones who adopted me. Finding my biological mother answered questions I had always had, and I like my biological relatives and am glad to be in touch with them, and has enriched me in a lot of ways, but it didn't supplant the fact that I already have a family.

A pro-tip for journalists: Unless the adoption is a necessary part of the story, it does not need to be mentioned. You don't need to identify parents as adoptive parents except to contrast them with biological parents, and unless that contrast is important to the story, it does not need to be mentioned. They are just parents.
posted by maxsparber at 11:22 AM on August 11, 2016 [47 favorites]

There's a quote from a Jodi Picoult novel, Handle with Care, that feels appropriate for this conversation:

“Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.”

posted by Fizz at 11:24 AM on August 11, 2016 [11 favorites]

really there's only one thing america loves more than the story of someone overcoming obstacles to become a great success, and that's when the aforementioned story also lets them feel like their extant bigotry is justified.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:25 AM on August 11, 2016 [40 favorites]

I also want to mention that the experience of being an adopted child is quite unique. More so than people might expect. So it's the sort of thing, like other things, where you should not presume expertise, but instead rely on adopted people to be experts in their own experiences. They should be consulted about how their experience is described, and not have that dictated to them.

I have two family trees. One for my adoptive family, one for my biological family. And I work on both. I have been researching my mother's ancestor, a very early Hasid and disciple of the Ba'al Shem Tov named Wolf Kitzis, who is buried right next to the Ba'al Shem Tov.

For some Jews, it might seem strange that I claim him as an ancestor, since I was adopted into his family. But reading the earliest collection of stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov, I discovered that he took in an orphan boy and raised him as his own son, and the Ba'al Shem Tov, himself an orphan who was raised by his community, had taken in an orphan girl and raised her as his own. And these two orphans, raised by the founders of modern Hasidic Judaism, married each other, and there is a story about Wolf Kitzis demanding a dowry from the Ba'al Shem Tov, just as a father would do, and the Ba'al Shem Tov being irritated that someone delayed the wedding, the sort of irritation a father would have.

The story means a lot to me, because it means adoption is not something new in my family. And it means a lot, because that legacy of adoption makes me a relative of a tremendously interesting historical character. And that's an adoption story I can tell, but you're not going to know it if you decided to speak for me, and decided what adoption looks like, and what it means, and leave me out of the discussion.

Which is a pity, because it's a good god damn story, and just one of many I could tell.
posted by maxsparber at 11:32 AM on August 11, 2016 [71 favorites]

Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

As a general standard, I disagree with the bold part of this statement, at least in situations where a a woman makes an uncoerced* choice to give her child up for adoption. A woman who chooses to give up her child is choosing to not be a mother to that child. There's nothing wrong with making that choice, and we shouldn't shame women who do, but I don't think that being a birthmother automatically makes you a "mother."

That being said, everybody gets to define their relationships in the way that they choose, and outside of strict legal definitions, it's not really anyone's business who gets called a "real" mother (or a "real" father) except for the child and the parent.

Anyways, one slip up about Simone Biles' parents is understandable (especially when you want to give that feel-good narrative) but the doubling down is just dumb. At least it was Gabby Douglas (and not Biles) who got yelled at by the Internet for standing wrong this week, so Biles isn't getting *all* of the shit poured on her.

*coercion takes many forms
posted by sparklemotion at 11:45 AM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

My situation's a bit of a foil for conventional ideas about adoption, too. My grandparents kidnapped me, for what they believed were good reasons, and the US courts eventually reversed a previous award of custody to my mom and legitimized my grandparents' custody. So my adoptive parents were my kidnappers, but became my legitimate custodians. They were great parents, though I think they went too far in how they restricted my access to my mom and were a little cruel to my mother in how they timed what they considered their intervention on my behalf, but they were mom and dad to me (though I called them by different honorifics)... It may be difficult to talk about adoption because the realities of it can just be so complicated...
posted by saulgoodman at 11:46 AM on August 11, 2016 [10 favorites]

"They may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents."

First, this is a weird hill to die on. Second, it's largely a matter of semantics regarding whether or not anyone agrees with it. Mom, dad, father, mother, parent, bio-mom, bio-dad. People use different words to refer to different life situations. The one big given, though, is that you don't be a jerk about semantics and try to make someone's life story an overly analyzed issue in a detached way, especially without their permission, as it can be very othering to someone you are talking about.

We've adopted two girls. Even being "in the know" can require a little bit of thinking, both with our girls, between each other, and also with others who are close to our situation, or just simply curious. For example, bio-mom or bio-dad has been a convenient way to differentiate between those who are "Mom and Dad" versus those who gave birth to a child (and are now out of the picture), but it some circles, I have seen bio-person used in a more derogatory way rather than a descriptive way, so I use it hardly ever. Even between my wife and I, we will refer to the biological parents (see, I wouldn't even use the same term of "parent" as this guy) as mom and dad, knowing that we are Mom and Dad.

In one sense, semantics is not a huge deal, as I tend to run with people's intentions and don't make a huge issue of word choice in close company. However, I am pretty sensitive to using terms to primarily make points about something in the presence of those who can be affected, and I wish this guy had thought more carefully about who has the right in the first place to have this kind of discussion about someone in public.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:00 PM on August 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

I only know that guy's name because of his stupid commentary position on US Tour de France coverage during the Lance years. This surprises me not at all.
posted by indubitable at 12:00 PM on August 11, 2016

And that's an adoption story I can tell, but you're not going to know it if you decided to speak for me, and decided what adoption looks like, and what it means, and leave me out of the discussion.

This applies to so many things. Also the "You know what I mean" response from the article when the author protests that she does know her real parents - so familiar, that way of throwing one's weight around when you know that the bias of language is on your side. I'm a bit hesitant to comment because I know fuck all about adoption (other than having a few acquaintances who are adopted and not thinking much about it because their families are their families), but I am mixed-race and the way people treat that, the absolute insistence on making my family and my experience bend to fit their expectations instead of trusting me to know what my own life is like, fits this pattern so exactly. I've been reading a book about families headed by gay parents, and there's a documentary the author talks about that treats all three subjects (LGBT families, mixed-race families, and adoptive families) together because the general resistance from society is so similar.

The capitalized "NOT" in Trautwig's tweet was what really stung. Why was it so important to this man, and to the many responding to @jenunexpected's tweets about his insensitivities, that everyone know the genetic facts? What difference does that make except to a eugenicist?

That's a great line. What difference does it make? People are so afraid of what they can't understand - which is usually a line that gets pulled out to explain the invective against gay families, but I don't think that kind of hate is the general attitude toward adoptive families, or even mixed-race families, anymore. It's more that they just have their unconscious vision of what a family is, and when something doesn't fit that (even in a benign way), to acknowledge that would be admitting they don't, in fact, know everything. Admitting lack of knowledge takes trust and confidence. For some people it's more comfortable to draw a line in the sand and scream on twitter that someone's parents are NOT their parents. A sad, shallow mindset.
posted by sunset in snow country at 12:13 PM on August 11, 2016 [7 favorites]

I am raising two adopted kids and am now running into the question of 'ancestry' with my older son (who is six). He asked me the other day "do I have ancestors?" The first thing that came to mind was, 'sure, Great Grandpa X is your ancestor, since he died last year, he was your great grandpa and now he's your ancestor.' And then we started going further back up my family tree.

Family history was super important when I was raised, and I am just going ahead with talking about his ancestor who was an abolitionist who fought in the (US) Civil War, and his ancestors on his mom's side who fought against the French colonizers of her homeland. I guess at some point he's going to question whether those people count as ancestors?

I am super curious what adoptees here think about this particular little conundrum. We've always been very direct and frank with him (and his little sister) about what adoption means, but doesn't it make sense to treat his family tree as ours?
posted by jackbrown at 12:27 PM on August 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

but doesn't it make sense to treat his family tree as ours?

I think so. I have always treated my adoptive family tree as my own.
posted by maxsparber at 12:29 PM on August 11, 2016

but doesn't it make sense to treat his family tree as ours?

I think that you mean treating your family tree as his, right? That's how I've always felt. My parents parents were my grand parents, & stories of their upbringing & families were stories of my family. If you are a member of the family, then you are a member of the family. It doesn't matter how you got there.
posted by Burgoo at 12:34 PM on August 11, 2016

but doesn't it make sense to treat his family tree as ours?

It's complicated. If someone adopted by a person with native American ancestry tries to claim their adoptive family tree as their own, they might end up getting unmasked as frauds for claiming those roots, in a different context. Not sure how all the different needs and tensions get resolved, but something like letting people tell their stories and not necessarily accepting them uncritically, but not automatically assuming the narrator is totally reliable or unreliable either, or that the truth is simple seems like the right approach. But that's not a simple enough idea to get easy traction...
posted by saulgoodman at 12:44 PM on August 11, 2016

There's a Yiddish phrase, mkhutenshaft, which is used to cover all the various in-laws that happen as a result of marriage. I think we need a word like this to cover all the ways people find themselves related through adoption.
posted by maxsparber at 12:45 PM on August 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

My wife was adopted. Her parents are the people who raised her, period. They are grandparents to my children (and each is named partly in their honour). So when my boys research their family tree, that's who is on her side. My wife has always been clear, she has one set of parents only.

Her sister, who is also adopted, went looking for her biological parents, and eventually contacted some members of her biological family. They don't have much if any role in her life, but there is some tenuous contact and connection there. I don't know if she considers them family or to what degree.

So that's two adopted (and non-biologically related) sisters with different views on it. So I think the right answer is, whatever the people directly involved want to decide is good enough for me.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 12:55 PM on August 11, 2016

Unless the adoption is a necessary part of the story, it does not need to be mentioned. You don't need to identify parents as adoptive parents except to contrast them with biological parents, and unless that contrast is important to the story, it does not need to be mentioned. They are just parents.

I'm curious as to what you mean by contrast. My older brother was adopted, and he doesn't know anything about his biological parents and probably never will. Are you saying it's only worth mentioning if you have something evident to compare it to?
posted by girlmightlive at 12:55 PM on August 11, 2016

Are you saying it's only worth mentioning if you have something evident to compare it to?

No, I'm saying that unless you mention the biological parents, you don't need to use the term adoptive parents. I see a lot of stories like this:

Pictured: Sailor Tim Ryan poses by his yacht and his adoptive parents Mike and Judy Ryan

And, it's like, why? And it relates to a tendency to highlight adoption that in general I think needs to be considered. The subject does not need to be mentioned unless it is an element of the story, and shouldn't be an element of the story unless it contributes to the story.

If someone does a story about me as a playwright, and they mention that my mother came to a play, I expect her to be identified as my mother, not my adoptive mother. Not unless the play is about my biological mother, and so she needs to be identified as my adoptive mother to clarify.
posted by maxsparber at 1:05 PM on August 11, 2016 [23 favorites]

It seems like your brother's knowledge of his adoptive parents could be a relevant contrast to his lack of knowledge about his biological parents... assuming that one was talking about, say, how well he knows his parents.

Otherwise, unless your brother or your parents wants to make a thing of it... how likely is it that this part of his family history will be relevant to anything newsworthy that might be printed/said about him?
posted by sparklemotion at 1:06 PM on August 11, 2016

As an adoptive parent and as a triathlete who has had to listen to Trautwig's overwrought Ironman commentary, I think I can say, with authority, that Al Trautwig should quit his job and spend the rest of his time on this earth doing something else that does not involve him talking into a microphone.

Ever.
posted by RakDaddy at 1:14 PM on August 11, 2016 [14 favorites]

Respect and compassion: the solution to all the world's problems.
posted by bq at 2:02 PM on August 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

As a general standard, I disagree with the bold part of this statement, at least in situations where a a woman makes an uncoerced* choice to give her child up for adoption. A woman who chooses to give up her child is choosing to not be a mother to that child. There's nothing wrong with making that choice, and we shouldn't shame women who do, but I don't think that being a birthmother automatically makes you a "mother."

"Mother" is both a noun and a verb. Noun: a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth. Verb: bring up (a child) with care and affection. You can decide that you are more comfortable with the verb than the noun, but that preference does not erase the experiences or identities of other people.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:06 PM on August 11, 2016 [6 favorites]

My motherhood didn't start when I actively mothered my child out of the womb. She drained my blood and bone, left remnants of herself in my DNA, bloodied and bruised us both on her way out. That, no matter what happens after, is motherhood.

I would never tell a woman whose child died in childbirth that she is not a mother. I would never tell a woman who agreed to adoption the same thing. They carried this child within them for months, felt them move within their body, and wanted or not, that has an effect.

I have always had a respect for the ways the First Peoples of my land do this. There is your mother, the woman who bore you into the world. There are also skin mothers, the women who nurtured you and fed you and your mother. There are near-fathers, who fed you and your mother. There are probably as many ways of identifying family as there are tribes. Much more sense to me than 'this is one and only one and there are many gates to claim it'.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:17 PM on August 11, 2016 [11 favorites]

It's like NBC set out to hire assholes to commentate on the Olympics this year.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:54 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

We go by time, first mom and second mom. There's another mother in the family tree (open adoption) so she's the third mom, chronologically. Everyone has at least one mom, and then some children have another mother and father. Real and adopted and biological are too loaded and specific terms for what can be so massively complicated. My kids at home use their mother's name or languages to distinguish, but inn referencing themselves, they will say adoptive parents only with me because I'm clearly another race. With their father who could pass, they just say, their dad.

Actually, my teenage son went through a phase of referring to me as his white lady tutor when I embarrassed him by existing near his school friends. Definitely not his mom. But transracial adoptees go through a whole extra lot of stuff.

That commentator was an ass. Reminded me of the nastiness about McCain's daughter from Bangladesh.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:27 PM on August 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I am super curious what adoptees here think about this particular little conundrum. We've always been very direct and frank with him (and his little sister) about what adoption means, but doesn't it make sense to treat his family tree as ours?

I think in your case you should present the family tree to him as his but be prepared that he might one day reject that, and not to take it as reflective on you or your relationship with him.

I am an adoptee who knows my birth family, but my birthmother was also adopted, and her birth family has not been so interested in knowing her (and her birthmother died before she found them). So my genetic family tree is not very accessible to me.

I have always thought of my adoptive family as my "real" family, in almost every way possible. One of the few ways where this breaks down is how I feel about genealogy. When I go back more than a couple of generations, the people I am thinking about in that family tree neither had any personal connection to the family members who are alive today, nor do they have any blood connection to me. What makes my mum and dad my family is personal relationships, and distant ancestors don't have that. For most non-adopted people, they still have genetic connections to those people, so there's something there. For me, I don't feel like there is. I can't look at a portrait of my great-great-great grandfather and see my eyes, or my nose, or think about how people in our family have gotten taller over time or how our shared ethnic heritage has manifested itself in us physically.

My mother's family is originally from England, but several generations ago, and the family over there don't have much contact with ours. When my cousins have visited England, they have met the relatives there, and stayed with them, and so on. I've felt weird doing the same thing, because they don't know I'm adopted, and they look for family resemblances, and I worry a little that if I do tell them, they'll feel like they don't have any connection to me and why am I staying with them anyway. It's not like they know my parents - as far as they are concerned, it's only blood that binds us. And in this case, it doesn't.

Rather, I think sometimes about the fact that one of the few things my birthmother knows about her birthmother is that her birthmother's parents were Scottish. And that means I have some genetic connection to people in Scotland, and at that generational distance, I feel like that's more "real" than the English connection through my adoptive parents.

IAAA, IANYA, YAMMV (I am an adoptee, I am not your adoptee, Your adoptive mileage may vary).
posted by lollusc at 10:37 PM on August 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

I was adopted at 10 days old. Never knew any other parents. Have zero contact with any of my genetic heritage people. I don't really care. My parents are my parents, and my family is my family.

But this whole "we don't know how to talk about adoption" thing came up in my life a few months ago in way that has bugged me ever since.

I had a pretty traumatic accident back in December (I was sandwiched between a sideways-sliding semi truck and a van on the side of an icy road -- walked away with a few broken ribs but also a broken psyche).

Things were fine for a while but then the nightmares set in and the anxiety and all kinds of things, and I tried to seek some mental health care for the PTSD symptoms I was undergoing that were entirely outside of my experience until that point.

During the interview to start treatment, the psychiatrist asked me if there was any history of mental illness in my family. I said "well, none that I know of. I'm not genetically related to my parents because I was adopted, so I don't know about genetics, but my family was all fine".

At the end of the interview the psychiatrist was talking about how I had suffered trauma and how he felt I needed to work on this trauma and he said "I think your adoption is the primary trauma in your life".

I mean, this is pretty classically Freudian, but I was all WTF?!?! I had a specifically traumatic event happen to me only a few weeks before that was causing me to have all kinds of problems in my life that I wanted to talk about, and this man who had only met me 45 minutes previously was telling me that this thing that had always been a fact of my life, and a joyous one at that (how many children are chosen by their parents instead of just being squirted out of one of them?), and he was declaring that my adoption was the primary trauma in my life.?

Needless to say, I did not pursue help from that individual.
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM on August 14, 2016 [5 favorites]