Insolent NDN

I bought me the new Hip Mama as a cheer-me-up gift; it was a lovely surprise, as I let my subscription lapse and have not been keeping up with the zine. Hell, it was news to me that AG is pregnant again. *lol*

Like all of the other issues I am familiar with, this one has a theme - open adoption. Interesting. I found myself entranced by the stories of birthmama’s who birthed in “mother houses” in the deep South in the early 1970s (”My Secret Son” by Lani Jo Leigh) and then had their babies scurried away to an awesome story (”Wide Open Adoptions” by Zoe Francesca) by a second mama who talked about her deep friendships with both of her kids’ first mamas and how the mamas are in their lives on almost a daily basis*. There were other great stories as well, and then there was the article that pissed me off and I am prolly going to write a letter to the editor, or a letter to Ariel, challenging the stereotypical “oh it’s my experience” subtle but it can’t be racism! all up in it.

The story is “The Unknown Quantity” by Margaret Gunther. The reader gleans from the article that Margaret is a white woman married to a dark-skinned Southeast Asian man; Gunther even mentions that she believes they were chosen by their son Micah’s birthmother because the husband is dark-skinned and she should have set off flags for her. Insert me going “the hell?” The article opens with the line: “Keisha worries me.” Eh, okay. The next paragraph is all about how Keisha is Gunther’s son’s birthmother and she “is the ticking timebomb in the landscape of my motherhood” presumably because Keisha is mentally ill and a felon; Gunther makes sure to get in quickly that Keisha was just released from a mental institution and has been in and out of jail. The article continues with Gunther sighing that t he adoption did not go as planned, as her other experience as an adoptive mother went, as Keisha did not grieve and “get on with the business of growing up, or finishing school, or whatever it is that she has chosen to forgo parenting in order to do.” Uh, what? I hadn’t realized that it was so cut and dry, thanks for the clarification. Gunther outlines the adoption process and the reader is told that Keisha was 15 and pregnant and being raised by a strict patriarch in a family of mostly boys; Keisha says nothing at the initial meeting to Gunther and her husband, as her father does all of the talking. The adoption is on and then the adoptive is off, of which Gunther says that she felt fine about… but I can’t help but think her quippy attitude is patronizing and reading between the lines I can see her in full drama make-up, back of her hand to her forehead, weeping “another baby born in the ghetto.”

Then the adoption is back on; it seems that Keisha went to visit her grandmother and gave birth in Mississippi, named the baby “Micah” and then decided that she wants Gunther and her spouse to parent Micah. The author and her huz rush off to Mississippi; Gunther relates that the hospital social worker tells her that the babe is in NICU but Keisha has not signed the papers yet. Gunther presses for more information and makes it clear to the reader that she is not stepping a foot out the door until she is sure of Keisha’s certainty. The social worker assures that Keisha will sign the papers. So off on the jet plane the affluent couple goes and they meet with Keisha in the hospital. Now this is where I start to get pissed off. The reader knows that Keisha is 15/16, Black in the rural South, no family around aside from the grandmother, no immediate family support, no mention of the social work/adoption agency support that she is getting (or not getting) and her baby is in the NICU. I am thinking of all of these factors as Gunther describes Keisha lounging about the hospital bed not paying attention to Micah in order to gaze at the tv, not going to visit Micah in the NICU, saying that Micah “has a bad attitude.” Gunther seems to understand that something is not right but the best she can come up with is that a social worker or nurse should have been there! Okay, maybe it’s because I’ve done this work but give me a fucking break. Gunther could not have gone three feet to the nurse’s station and asked for someone?? No. She chose to leave the room and leave Keisha there - alone - knowing that something was not quite right.

Gunther and her man come back a few hours later and baby Micah is ready to go. Gunther then takes the time to compare this surrender with the surrender of her other child and how this one is utterly lacking love and compassion. For who? Since the time period allotted for surrender already passed before Gunther arrived, she takes the baby and that is it - they have a plane to catch.

The rest of the story recounts that Keisha tried to contest the adoption in the first year but had no legal grounds to do so (no mention of race or class privilege is mentioned here… or anywhere in the story, but you know, small details) and that when she is involved with Micah, she acts disinterested, arrives late or not at all… and don’t forget: mentally ill! Felon!!!! But the best part, wait for it, is when Gunther says about her unbreakable bond with Keisha “I’ve been in abusive relationship, a bad marriage that I was able to escape.” I have seen some fucked up flawnologies in my life but this one, damn, this one frosts the three-layer cake. I’ll cut Gunther some slack and say in the last few paragraphs, she seems says that she wants Keisha to improve her position and stay in their lives. But why can’t I, a reader, believe her? Finally, Gunther relays the last telephone call she had with Keisha in which, five years later, Gunther realized that she and Keisha had been using different spellings of Micah; Gunther, of course, using the correct spelling from the Bible and Keisha using “Mykah,” which uses the traditional Afrikan K. Gunther chocks it all up to them being afraid to communicate with one another and then the big heaving sigh. The end.

Aside from the whole story reading like the script for Losing Isaiah, Part II, I am beyond irritated that Hip Mama would publish a story, even it is a memoir, that has no analysis of the privilege and differences between these two mothers. No mention of postpartum depression, no mention of the circumstances surrounding and contextualizing Keisha’s experience that may have lead to the behavior purported by Gunther. I believe that I am suppose to feel compassion for Gunther and her family and maybe a little bit of something for Keisha, something in the realm of patronizing “there, there, dear.” Yet how can I feel anything substantive for Gunther when I do not trust her as a narrator? All of the archetypes of a traditional transracial adoption are there: the loving white mother concerned first and foremost with the baby paralleled with her loving yet absent husband and then the shifty, dark-eyed (dark-skinned) birth mother whose indecision makes everyone ill at ease. *pursed lips* Gunther seems to go out of her way to set the story up as an us verses them and then seems confused when it plays out that way. She sets Keisha up as this wannabe teen mama who doesn’t know shit about shit so that she gets to sigh that she has the patience of Saint Ann to put up with this woman-child.

I will not say that all birth mothers do this or don’t do that… but just in the other stories published in this issue we see that birth mothers, regardless of how they may have come off to the adoptive/second mothers, grieved years into the future, experienced a range of emotions that were nothing like the linear process set up by Gunther, and surely did not “grieve and get on with doing whatever it was they wanted to do instead of parent.” Gunther relays that she saw that something was wrong in the hospital, on the day of the adoption and she chose to do nothing; she displays no empathy for a young woman giving birth in a strange hospital to a child in need of neonatal intensive care all the while having little to no support from family and friends. There is not even a nod in the direction of trying to understand what it may have been like, and that’s what I find the most offensive, the most beyond the pale. Gunther may have painted Keisha as the unstable birth mother, the stereotypical young woman who cannot make up her mind, other woman fighting for control in a relationship, but Gunther, possibly unknowing in her ignorance to construct the scale with her on one end and Keisha on the other, did not succeed with me. Even if it comes from the pages of Hip Mama, doused in the most liberal, bohemian truthiness, I am not going to swallow that this class-privileged white woman is the victim in an abusive relationship where the unstable dark woman is the insane, unschooled criminal.

But regardless of what I think or who I do or do not believe, I hardly matter; I am just a reader. I think: who is supporting Keisha now, where is her story in all of this? What happened to her honor-roll status, straight As in school, and plans for college? Was it depression, did anyone pressure her to place and how did that pressure mount? I send out songs for her and all of the other invisible, unspoken women out there. To-hi-du, v-gi-lv, gaest-ost yuh-wa da-nv-ta.