How To Become a Parent Overnight
Speaker 1: You know, people will think that you’re doing this great kind of selfless act. And I always, always say, well, like before you compliment, I was like, find out what kind of parents we are because we could be bad at it.
Amanda Ripley: Welcome to how to. I’m Amanda Ripley. Five years ago, marsha chaplin and her husband decided they wanted to adopt a child, and they seemed like perfect candidates. Marcia is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and a professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown. You might also recognize her voice from Slate’s podcast, The Waves, where she was a beloved co-host.
Speaker 1: My husband and I made the decision to become adoptive parents very early in our relationship. My husband had started a Ph.D. I had just finished one. We were early in our careers, and we just knew that we needed a lot of building time. And I felt like I didn’t want to feel like we had to become parents at this moment because of my age or because, you know, this was the time to have kids, but rather that, you know, we really had a deliberative process.
Amanda Ripley: But adopting a child in America is kind of like getting on a roller coaster ride, the kind that can last for, well, years. There are dark tunnels, sharp curves, highs and lows, intrusive questions and weirdly inappropriate comments from strangers.
Speaker 1: It’s incredibly, incredibly confusing. And the Internet is also infused with very kind of biased or very framed ideas about adoption.
Amanda Ripley: In the beginning, they pursued an international adoption, which seem logical.
Speaker 1: I’m from an immigrant family. I figured it would make sense for us to adopt from Haiti, where my family is from, because, you know, there’s fewer cultural kind of barriers.
Amanda Ripley: Years went by. They researched agencies, gathered documents, got many things notarized, underwent background checks and home visits, and on and on. At one point, Marcia even got on a plane to hand-deliver her documents to the agency in Indiana.
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of documents like that, you know, copies of our marriage certificate, copies of birth certificates, all of this stuff done. And the idea of putting it in a FedEx envelope. And so I think I got like a plane ticket for like $120. And I was in the privileged position to both have the time and money and energy to just fly it on a on a plane, turn it in and just fly home. You know, as a professor and a writer, like I had a little time off and this is what I did with my time off. And I was thinking to myself, like, if this stuff is gone, like, what am I going to do? And so all of this is to say that, you know, it’s a lot.
Amanda Ripley: And if that weren’t enough, then came COVID and travel restrictions and government shutdowns. So they pivoted to a domestic private adoption and another year went by. It started to feel like a ride they’d never get off. And then one day they got a call.
Speaker 1: We were like people in, I don’t know, like an eighties sitcom where we were given fewer than 24 hours notice that a child was available for adoption. Our son and we went to Target that morning to get stuff for a baby. We had always thought that we would adopt older children, and so a baby kind of wasn’t in our purview for a very long time. And so we knew a lot about kind of the feeding issues of two and three year olds and attachment issues of toddlers. And we we adopted our son at three days old.
Amanda Ripley: Oh, my gosh. Marcia, could you just tell us a little bit about your son?
Speaker 1: Oh, my God, he’s so cute. No, it’s actually he is stunning and so cute and so sweet and the best.
Amanda Ripley: So Marcia’s now made it through the woods, and that’s why we brought her in today, to give advice to someone who’s just staring off at the forest on the horizon and wondering if the adoption process is right for them. Meet Victoria.
Speaker 3: Now that I’m in these late twenties, I’ve been starting to think a little bit more ahead and thinking about having a family. And one of the options that is kind of floating out there is adoption. But what you need to do to prepare for that? What kind of steps are taken before you try and adopt a child? All that is pretty opaque to me.
Amanda Ripley: Victoria, a Ph.D. student in San Francisco, doesn’t know where to start. So today on the show, with Marcia’s help, we’re going to try to demystify the whole adoption process the best we can and maybe challenge your assumptions about family making altogether. Stay with us.
Amanda Ripley: Nearly 140,000 children are adopted by American families every year, and a lot of parents in waiting come to adoption as their last resort. But for Victoria, this is one of the first options she’s considering.
Speaker 3: I think on some level it’s an intuition that this would be something I would really love doing. There’s not a certainty for me when I’ll be able to have children or if I’ll have a partner, whether that partner will be male or female. These kinds of things made me think adoption might be a good option.
Amanda Ripley: Victoria, are you kind of a planner in general?
Speaker 3: I would say I’m a planner, yes. I’m the person who has an idea for a trip and I get a few people to say yes and then I immediately start planning. And then I have the Google doc and the links. And I love I think I love planning almost as much as as the actual experience sometimes.
Amanda Ripley: But this is like. Right.
Speaker 3: Maybe this will help out.
Amanda Ripley: So we’re not we shouldn’t be shocked that you’re thinking ahead on planning for possibly adopting one day, you know? You know, just hypothetically speaking, what kind of time frame are you thinking about?
Speaker 3: Maybe in 5 to 10 years. Somewhere in that range.
Amanda Ripley: Okay. Now, you might be thinking, why is she even thinking about this? It’s like half a decade away. But as we already heard with Marcia, the process can take years. There are different rules for domestic versus international adoptions and then other rules that vary from state to state. Plus, private adoption agencies can be their own maze to navigate.
Speaker 3: My sense was that there are a lot of private adoption agencies that have put up information, but it’s hard to know how much of that is universal, how much of that is more specific to their company. I didn’t find a lot of resources that seem to be maybe unbiased or like like coming from the experience of people who have actually adopted. Hmm.
Amanda Ripley: And was it easy to understand the process, like step one? Step two.
Speaker 3: I have no sort of stress.
Amanda Ripley: So it’s not easy to understand.
Speaker 3: No, not easy.
Amanda Ripley: What kind of what kind of research do you do in your in your work?
Speaker 3: So I’m a neuroscientist.
Amanda Ripley: Okay. So something very simple and straightforward. So you’re a neuroscientist trying to learn about adoption and so far online is not making sense. Is that right? Which suggests to me there is a bigger problem here. But I’m wondering, Marcia, what you’re thinking, hearing this so far.
Speaker 1: I was also doing a Ph.D. when I started learning a little bit about this, and I couldn’t figure a lot of it out.
Amanda Ripley: Marcia, if you could just take us back in time and tell us a little bit about what you might tell yourself if you were back at the beginning of this journey.
Speaker 1: People say really intrusive things to you when you make that decision, and there’s a lot of assumptions that are made. There is assumptions that we struggled with fertility issues. There’s assumptions that we did this because we thought of ourselves as like good or moral people. I think the first step is you have to disabuse yourself of the notion that choosing adoption for family making is kind of morally superior than any other way of family making, or that you’re saving a child, or that you’re doing something other than making a choice to build a family. It’s like one of many ways to do that.
Speaker 1: And then I think the second thing is that, you know, it’s such a personal choice that you do within the context of community. And so I know some people who have been interested in adoption, and they know that in their larger family culture that this would be really hard because either they’re open to adopting a child of a different race and their families are incredibly racist and problematic. I know that in some families they have some kind of old school ideas about adoption as a secret. And so that conflicts with, you know, very proven ideas. Rethinking the way that we understand adoption in a family as nothing to be kept a secret. So there’s all of this, like, stuff. And I think when you start talking to people about your choice, you get like their emotional baggage and their projection and it can get really gross, really fast.
Amanda Ripley: Part of preparing yourself is thinking about your various family members, the baggage that they’re going to bring to this.
Speaker 1: And personal baggage. Oh, my gosh. I mean, I, I love being a parent. I love it more than I could ever imagine. I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had, and having a child can be really emotionally triggering. All you think about is what you were like at that age, who was taking care of you, didn’t take care of you. I mean, if, you know, I highly recommend therapy as one of the greatest ways to start this process.
Amanda Ripley: So here’s our first tip. If you’re beginning to consider adoption, sit down with your partner and even your extended family and take a kind of inventory of everyone’s expectations. In this way, you can start to build a support network of people you can count on not just during this process, but into parenthood. Also, check in with yourself or your partner periodically to make sure this choice is still right for you. You can always change your mind.
Speaker 1: Just because you made one decision at one point doesn’t mean that you can’t ever revisit it. I think that’s really important. And I think the other thing is really spending. I mean, this is also kind of what’s problematic about choosing an adoption provider. Sometimes it’s hard to get a picture of what the agency is like because when people are really happy with outcomes are very, very happy. And when people are disappointed, they’re very disappointed. So I would spend some time just getting to learn about the different providers in the area that you’re in and really taking your time to choose who you want to work with.
Amanda Ripley: Marcia Do you think it makes sense to start saving money if people can? Okay. That’s a hard yes, I.
Speaker 1: Do, because, you know, again, there are a lot of people have a lot of feelings about the cost of this. And there are some really, you know, incisive critiques about, you know, is this is are are you spending money to purchase a child? And, you know, that those discussions can get really impassioned. I would see it as, you know, like saving for something substantial in your life. And there’s different I mean, there’s a range of costs. And they come again at different moments. Some are scaled by your income. Like, let’s say an agency says it’s $20,000 and you think that’s so much money, you know, all at once. But you have to consider that it’s a very long process of getting documentation of, you know, paying for home study. And so you can think, okay, you know, over three or four or five years, what can I put away towards those costs? It is expensive.
Amanda Ripley: That home study that Marsha just mentioned. That’s one of the most important steps in this process. It’s not just expensive. It’s, well, invasive.
Speaker 1: We took a psych eval with a trained psychologist. You have to disclose any prior criminal convictions you’ve had and explain the situations. Our social worker talked to us about our families and our family dynamics. They asked if we could talk about our partners and like, you know, what stands out about them. We’ve had all of the disclose, all of our financial information, our assets, our liabilities. There’s reference letters from friends, people who you’ve interact with in different settings. You know, your driving record. There’s a physical that looks at, you know, your prior medical history, and that can be really prohibitive and can also be really intimidating for people with chronic illness or certain conditions. So like they it’s a d it’s a deep dive, folks. It’s a deep, deep dive. Wow.
Speaker 3: Part of me is thinking, oh, well, all this, you know, testing, evaluation, and it somehow makes me feel better. You don’t know that the the standards you’re being held up to are fair in any way, but something about being being vetted makes you or makes me think that I would be more secure and more more confident in my own ability to be a parent if I were still allowed.
Speaker 1: I’ll be honest. I understand why I you know, it’s weird. It was I think it it is a tough process, but there are parts of it that I’m really grateful for because it’s not just kind of like being asked all these personal questions and made to feel very uncomfortable. There’s also continuing education. That’s part of it. And, you know, one of the things that I found in our education process that was really helpful was thinking about attachment and, you know, the various ways, you know, parents attached with children. And then there’s some real practical considerations about respecting and understanding some of the differences that you will have from your child because of the experiences that they may have had in foster care or in orphanages overseas.
Speaker 1: And then there’s some really powerful resources from adoptees who are critical of the adoption system. And, you know, engaging with all of those, I think, is really helpful because it moves you away from the purely romantic idea of becoming a parent to one that feels like a little bit more nuanced and textured. And I think I think that’s like a good thing.
Speaker 3: That part sounds like a wonderful experience.
Speaker 1: It’s like getting a third Ph.D..
Amanda Ripley: The other thing to prepare for, of course, is the waiting.
Speaker 1: This is like so corny and so cheesy. But, you know, I would have waited 30 years to be my son’s mom. From this vantage point, I could say, you know, it was all worth the wait. But I do know people who really struggle with these very long waiting periods or families that have struggled with receiving a placement and the placement, not caring through to a finalized adoption. And, you know, I think those are the things that you have to kind of existentially prepare for, even if you can’t always be emotionally prepared for.
Amanda Ripley: Victorious make you feel better or worse. I’m feeling worse, but maybe that’s a really.
Speaker 3: Good story once it worked out okay.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, right now we know the ending.
Speaker 1: I have I have a feeling that we are kindred spirits, Victoria of tiny brainy types. And so like, I mean, it’s like it prepped me like, you know, now when we have to file like, you know, paper, I had to get a Social Security card for my son and I stayed in the line for like 5 hours. And it just it was just like, oh, this is part of it, right? Like parenting is this incredibly, like emotional and deeply bureaucratic thing that you do. You know, it’s like trying to sign up for swim lessons and getting, like, shut out every, like, portal. I’m like, oh, this is this is what it’s like. And this is also part of it.
Amanda Ripley: And it puts everything in perspective. So then when you have to get the school health form filled out, you’re like on it. It’s not intimidating to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I’m totally permission. So I’m now because I was like FBI background check mom for many.
Amanda Ripley: So we’ve already given you a ton of things to do. But what about the things you shouldn’t do? After the break, we’re going to talk about parenthood and what you should never say to an adoptive parent. Don’t go anywhere.
Amanda Ripley: We’re back with our listener Victoria, who’s considering adoption and our expert Marcia Chaplin, who spent five years adopting her son. If you Google how to adopt, you’ll get a wide range of results, as you might imagine. But scroll with care because not all online resources are created equal.
Speaker 1: Initially, when I wanted to learn more from adoptive parents, a lot of it was about fertility challenges. I just didn’t share that experience. And I do think that there is something that that experience then informs how you pursue adoptions. There is a lot of anxiety about family making that happens in some of these online communities. For me, taking in a lot of those narratives was just not going to be healthy for me, so I just didn’t spend a lot of time doing that. Now that we have our child, I’m part of a black adoptive parents Facebook group, and that group is a little bit more diverse in terms of how people came to family making.
Speaker 3: That’s something I’ve I’ve thought a little bit about. So my mother is of Asian descent. My father is Caucasian, white. And I think because of that, we we do have some experience, like talking about how it is blending into other cultures and sticking out. But in terms of like actually adopting a child, I think it’s best to hear it straight from them, right? To know what they would think in terms of like what, what ethnicity and their adopted child for me would be because maybe, you know, you never know what people will say even in your own extended family.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah. You know, Marcia, you mentioned that people will say intrusive things. Can you give an example of maybe some less helpful things that people said to you? And maybe also what would have been better so that listeners out there don’t make the exact same mistakes if friends and family members are going through the adoption process?
Speaker 1: So, you know, I think most of the time people are so well-intentioned and they either have bad boundaries or have been subject to a culture that misrepresents, you know, adoption in so many ways. So I’ve told people that we were in the process of, you know, seeking to adopt a child and someone would say, well, what’s wrong with you guys? You know, like, you know, which one of you has fertility issues?
Speaker 1: The other thing is that I’ve heard from people, it’s a knee jerk reaction where you will tell someone that you’re going to pursue adoption and then they tell you a story that they either heard or someone they knew that had a very negative adoption experience. And sometimes it’s like in a very extreme kind of situation. And I don’t know. I don’t know why. But the impulse maybe it’s like to warn the person or to say like, oh, I think it what it does. I think it just shows that even with people my age or even a little younger, that there’s just been a lot of kind of generationally negative perceptions of adoption. So that the first thing you say is like, you know, this child that really struggled within a family structure and they often attribute it to adoption, though we know that, you know, children can struggle in a number of situations.
Speaker 3: Marcia, what do you think? What do you think is the best way to tackle some of these myths or stereotypes around adoption? Because I feel like, like you mentioned there, there are two main narratives I tend to hear. One is the saintly adoptive parents and one is the the sad parents or potential parents struggling with infertility. And it sounds like there’s there’s a lot more.
Speaker 1: You know, there are a lot of layers that I think are exposed and that are kind of put in your lap in this process. And I think the more thoughtful you can be in how you engage with people and say, well, you know, here are some things that I’ve considered and I understand that, you know, the choice to parent isn’t about choosing everything about your child. It’s about being open to a set of experiences and possibilities.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, that it makes me wonder. Marcia, you mentioned that we have these kind of reductionist narratives about adoption, right? Like and Victoria, you mention this, too. It’s either like the parent as savior or the parent as tormentor. What would be a movie you’d like to see, Marcia? About adoption.
Speaker 1: Oh, that’s it. I would love to to see a movie about a family that doesn’t know what they’re doing and then figures it out and can honestly address the, like, negative emotions of their child. I mean, that movie, no one would go watch. Well, I don’t know about like about, you know, an adult child saying, like, here’s the things that you did well, here are the things that I wish you could have worked harder on. And the parents saying, thank you so much for that feedback. I love you for giving us that. Like, let’s go get something to eat.
Speaker 1: You know that it isn’t like that. It doesn’t there’s that. The most dramatic parts of the experience isn’t always about how the family comes together. Sometimes the most dramatic parts are, you know, the ways that we kind of endure through it, you know? And so I think that’s the movie that no one wants to see and no one will make.
Amanda Ripley: I would told.
Speaker 3: You these the right soundtrack you know.
Speaker 1: Absolute.
Amanda Ripley: Here’s our next tip. You got to learn when to engage and when to set boundaries and try to get comfortable with the messiness of families, which includes adoptive ones.
Speaker 1: The only thing I will say, I remember talking to a friend about this and saying that, you know, there are things about my child’s experience of being in our family that it will never fully understand. But understanding that our family can be a source of a lot of joy and happiness and also a lot of, you know, bittersweet emotions and sometimes a place of pain.
Speaker 1: Embracing that because part of being a parent is being attentive to that, I think, is something that you have to become more and more comfortable with. Like there will be times that being in this family may be very painful for my son and really embracing that as much as the moments that being in this family is very joyful for him. And I think that taking the time to really, you know, like sit with that I think is super, super helpful.
Amanda Ripley: Marcia, I’m curious, you’re you’re a year into parenthood, right? Did your son just turn one or.
Speaker 1: He turned one in late March.
Amanda Ripley: Nice. What has surprised you so far? One year and.
Speaker 1: Just how much I love I love it like so much of my life has been defined by being a teacher and watching college students grow as they learn things. And I get to have that experience on this, like, tiny and amazing level. Like, my son started pointing, and now he can point to like the food he wants to eat. And to be able to kind of bear witness to that is just so incredible.
Amanda Ripley: And so nice. Yeah. Now, I remember vividly when my son was pretty young and he was in his highchair and I was giving him some scrambled eggs or something. You know, all you do is just seems like you just feed them and feed them and feed him and change him and feed him. And he clapped and it was like, Oh my God, it was so awesome, you know? And it is it’s a real privilege to to kind of experience that alongside another human.
Speaker 3: That sounds incredible, guys.
Speaker 1: I think that there are a million different ways to be happy in the world. And I am very, very glad that I got to experience this form of happiness.
Amanda Ripley: Victoria’s What’s something you’re looking forward to about being a parent?
Speaker 3: You know, now that you guys are telling stories about your kids, I’m remembering I’m seven years older than my younger sister and I’m remembering when she was little, even though I was still a kid like those. Even that was a kind of magic to see, like someone so small starting to become their own person. And I remember the transition from being an only child at age seven to being an older sister at age seven. And it was kind of it was kind of a shock at the time, but it was something that that I really took to. And I grew to really cherish that as part of my identity. And like I was one of the protectors for this little kid. And that that’s something I think I will really enjoy as a parent someday.
Speaker 1: And good feeling. I think you’re going to love it.
Amanda Ripley: Thank you to Victoria for not waiting five years to ask her question and to Marcia Chatelain for all of her hard earned wisdom. Also, you should definitely check out Marcia’s books, including her most recent, the Pulitzer Prize winning franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. How about you? Do you have a future problem that needs a crystal ball? Send us a note at how to at slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 6464954001. And we might have you on the show. And while you’re at it, do me a favor after you’re done listening. Find the share button on your podcast app and send the show to a friend or family member. That’s how we find more people to help. How TOS executive producer is Derek John Rosemary Belson and Katie Shepherd produced this show. Our theme music is by Hannah Brown, remixed by Merritt Jacob, our technical director. Charles Duhigg created the show. I’m Amanda Ripley. Thanks for listening.
