Yes, This Is My Baby—Please Don’t Ask Me How
-By an anonymous mother
I swing back and forth: what are my parenting stories to tell, and what are my babies’ private stories to disclose? Inevitably, I get kicked in the head, or someone tumbles off their swing, or I’m too dizzy to continue pondering. So I share an abridged and anonymous sanitized version, in hopes that other adoptive/foster/kinship parents find resonance.
We welcomed our second child home abruptly, chaotically, and quite literally overnight. In a tongue-in-cheek attempt to divert unwanted attention, I made myself a large pin for their carrier that read “Yes, this is my baby, please don’t ask me how.” This was helpful not only in public but especially in more intimate settings. Places like my book club or walking in the neighborhood, where the sudden arrival of a baby conspicuously absent from a pregnancy would have drawn lots of unwanted questions.
I knew from a young age I wanted to be a foster parent. My naive savior complex brought me to social work, but this alone could not satiate the desire to help more babies and families in a personal capacity. We grounded our foster journey on the incantation: “whatever happens is what is supposed to happen. Not in a religious sense, like many other foster and adoptive families might contend with (and this is another essay all on its own), but rather, we would relinquish expectations and trust in the process. The Foster care journey grants very little control to caregivers, so there is little sense in gripping onto any particular outcome. Our conviction and desire for this process, not outcome, would be our guiding light. We had done our homework: trainings, support groups, online forums, and the ‘interview a foster parent dates’. This brought us the following clarity: no two journeys are the same, and you cannot possibly predict or prepare for all of the various outcomes. We thought we were ready for the range of outcomes: from supporting the reunification of children and ideally, sustained long-term honorary auntie & uncle privilege, to adopting when that wasn’t going to be possible. But just as biological parents can’t anticipate the true experience of the transition to parenthood before it happens, we really couldn’t have ever conceptualized how our story would unfold.
Five years after beginning the licensing process, and three years of serving as foster parents, we closed our license. Our child welfare worker required us to assemble and maintain an empty staged bedroom for a potential placement during COVID-19 shutdowns when our license was paused on placements. An aside that illustrates the idiocy of bureaucratic systems inherent in the Family Policing System (Child Welfare System). The final email from the worker simply stated, “Ok then, thank you for your service to families. Your license is closed now.” We were affronted. There was no flexibility or acquiescing to keep us – good, solid foster parents. “OK, BYE”. And of course, that was not the final chapter of our journey. The sequel was an epic in its own right. The story of Baby Z, which brought me to the brink of psychosis.
Two years after closing our license, on an early spring day, I returned from a walk to the post office. I was mailing some of our beloved board books, now irrelevant to our 4-year-old, to family friends with a newborn. I arrived home in a novel, quiet, and contemplative mood, reflecting on transitioning to auntie era. I fantasized about the supporting role to new parents in my community, and getting back to my doula practice. We had provided respite for a friend’s baby over the weekend, happily returning her to her mom after a sleepless (but fun as a one-off!) weekend of baby activity. Rapt in this fantasy of newfound freedom, I did not feel the weight of a text burning a hole in my pocket as I walked home.
I opened the message from a relative inquiring if I had gotten a call about our family member. She had given birth that weekend to a baby who needed to go somewhere after their NICU discharge. My stomach lurched, my heart throbbed. When she answered my call, it was clear the text message was sent to conceal, or maybe protect, me from her despair in her voice. Our estranged family member had been so out of contact and unwell. The idea of a pregnancy, let alone a baby, wasn’t even a remote possibility we could have conceptualized. The room spun. Without hesitation, I emphatically declared, “We got this.” A conviction I was willing into being as the thoughts tumbled out (see: my naive savior complex).
After that, everything happened in an adrenaline-fueled mania. The ring didn’t even finish before I snatched up the social worker’s call in the interminable two hours it took for her to return my frantic voicemail. She urged, “Are you willing to be a potential placement for this child?” This child. This child? The social worker wouldn’t even tell us their name, or maybe she didn’t even know it. An absurdity that only confirmed the upset and disbelief I was feeling. This child, days old and hours young to my consciousness. If we said no, we would lose all access to, contact with, and knowledge of, once relinquished to stranger care, aka the formal foster care system.
Because family members are not the child’s biological parents, they are not ‘legal parties to the case’. The only way they can maintain involvement is by accepting placement. If we said no, that would’ve been the end of our story. The social worker would have crossed our name off the short list of prospective potential kinship placements and moved on to stranger care, never to speak with us again. The decision seemed enormous and yet irrelevant; there wasn’t an option that would let us knowingly condemn them to such a fate. Because this far-fetched possibility was now becoming a pivotal subplot to our story, it was at this point that the baby became “Baby Plan Z” to us, or “Z” for short.
We weren’t allowed to meet Z because legal status was still pending as an unattended infant in the hospital, alone, with a rotation of nurses tending to their needs, until two days later, on Friday. The weekend was spent furiously sourcing infant supplies and visiting the NICU until the early morning hours, and then somehow, we brought them home on Monday.
In less than a week, our lives had been completely turned upside down. I went to sleep every night questioning my reality, our family’s reality. How had I become a new mother again? How to integrate this person into our already established life? How to manage the needs and care of a newborn while working a full-time job? How would our big kid adjust? The questions and implications were endless. There wasn’t an aspect of our lives untouched. Each event on the calendar that preceded Plan Z came and went as another reminder of its impossibility in our new reality. From spring break travel plans to Disney to dinner dates, everything was a wash.
I struggled to integrate the reality of the situation in those first weeks, even after bringing them home, holding them, feeding them day in and out, I would find myself questioning if I was in an alternate reality or dreaming. How had my life been so completely changed without any warning? We did, technically, have a choice to bring Z into our lives, but it didn’t feel like it. I felt robbed of my agency and my identity. An identity I was newly connected to as a parent, recently out of the diaper and daycare era. What did this mean for the vision we had for our lives? What did it mean for my relationship with my previously only child? My relationship with my partner? One-kid life was so chill. While the internal identity crisis persisted, I worked to counter the external forces at play.
There was an endless slog of paperwork, interviews, evaluations, or rather, interrogations to confirm our ability to care for this child. Having a foster or kinship child means you are, in the eyes of the state, a glorified babysitter; there is a total lack of claim to the child, and they are not yours but rather wards of the state. Medical decisions are made by the state, and even haircuts must be authorized. Granted, I note this to highlight my experience as a kinship and adoptive parent. The protections granted by these restrictions are designed to protect the parental rights of a child’s biological parents to determine their child’s care and appearance. In our circumstance, however, there weren’t biological parents able and willing to be involved in the care or decisions, thus we were robbed of any agency in the decision-making. In the first three months alone, two different social workers held that responsibility. Although our situation was unique, the feeling and experience of being in the dark and limited in any decision-making power is a common challenge for foster parents. It is extremely challenging mentally to do the day-in and day-out laborious caretaking for a child and know them deeply, and not be involved in decisions made about their care and lives. To add insult to injury, the caseworkers are their legal guardians, who have such high turnover rates that there is rarely any continuity during the lifespan of a case. From placement to adoption, we’ve had at least five social workers and two different Guardian Ad Litem. One of the main differences between kinship placement (relatives or family members) and foster placements (licensed strangers) is that in kinship placements, the family is permitted to care for the child before completing the necessary licensing paperwork. This is an effort to minimize transitions for the child and ensure their establishment of care in your home. Whereas in foster care, you are a stranger to the children and must be licensed from the start. Because of this structure, often kinship placements, like ours, are entrapped in a multi-assault overhaul of their lives: navigating caring for a new family member and the logistics that entail, and a complete investigation into their physical health, mental health, finances, and home life.
I worked for nearly a month after Z’s arrival, while my partner worked full-time for two months and part-time the final month before summer break. During which time, he spent entertaining our 4-year-old while I was secluded in the newborn cycle of feed, soothe, repeat. Like with many placements for adoption or foster care, and especially for kinship families, there is not a perinatal period as much as an abrupt crash landing into post-partum. Not having nine months, let alone the two required weeks to give advance notice for an absence, I had nothing in place to leave my team, colleagues, or clients. As a professional in the perinatal field, I became acutely aware of my inability to hold space for other perinatal parents as my new baby clutched my finger while I typed with my other hand, back aching, head throbbing, mind numb. Quickly and as ethically as possible, I transitioned them to other providers and wrapped up what administrative tasks I could, handing off the rest in haste. I used the full 12 weeks of WA State PFML granted to families for bonding leave, and still couldn’t return to a workplace so intimately intertwined with my daily struggles of new parenthood. I considered applying for PFML for mental health leave, weighing the consequences of what it would look like as a licensed foster/kinship parent and mental health provider to cite ‘the adjustment to parenthood: bordering on psychosis’ as my qualifying medical event. The fear and implications that could have on us as a permanent option, as the legal case continued to slowly proceed towards adoption, made that option immaterial. Although triggering, the benefit of working in the field was that I was generously granted additional mental health leave to ease my return to work. But in the end, I was delaying the inevitable and was forced to transition fully from direct client care to administrative behind-the-scenes work. A role I still occupy long after the perinatal period.
Within my relationship to my own autonomy and body, I struggled. Physically, I knew I shared many of the telltale signs of new parenthood, the dark eye circles, messy mom bun, and obligatory soft pants. But body dysmorphia haunted me, feeling questioning eyes tracing me wherever we went. I did not have a recovering postpartum body and didn’t look like I had earned my baby. I struggled with the relationship to my body’s lack of ability to feed them. As a new mom to this baby, but not a new mom generally, I felt estranged from the new mommy clubs in their excitement and novelty. Alienated, when parents eagerly divulged the intimate details of their birth stories and the trials of breastfeeding, they looked at me expectantly. Sharing nothing, I held close the weight and grief of my little ones’ heavy and complicated birth story, the few details that I did know, and the many that I didn’t.
In the circles of support around us, there were swells of gratitude and alignment. Our older child enjoyed many weekends away in extended family sleepovers, a giant leap from our previous norm that they took with excitement and pride, a tug at my mom-heart at their ease to wave goodbye. We had a couple of weeks of take-out courtesy from our community, but with a large helping of so much grief for the transition and strain this brought to many of our relationships. For many of our friends, our lives became unrelatable. It drastically tilted the scales on our capacity to show up for others, breaking the seesaw with the seemingly endless favors we asked of them. And then, of course, the challenge of stewarding the complicated relationship they had with our new baby. Holding for them the surprise, awe, and appreciation for our “sacrifice”, the “I just can’t get over it” phone calls. The complexity and endless explanations of the value of having them foster attachments that might be abruptly severed if the child returns to their biological family. Fending off the assumptions and judgements of Z’s parents and early life circumstances, deflecting probing and intrusive questions became an intolerable burden. I felt then, and remain protective of Z’s first parents, eternally grateful and humbled by their experiences and how we have come to share this child and family, however distant and strained.
And, our baby, like so many that enter the foster care system, was, and remains, medically complex. We endured a ‘period’ if you could call it that, of purple crying so mind-numbing and horrific, I would pace for hours, wearing divots into our bedroom carpet. They suffered painfully from GERD and dysphagia, which went undiagnosed with agony for months. We only found glimpses of relief around their first birthday through endless trips to urgent care, the pediatrician, and the resulting eternal waitlists leading to (clueless, often assumptive, and offensive) specialists. Z was, and still is, a baby that required constant physical contact; it felt like I could never suture the gaping mother-wound that throbbed in the wake of their biological mother’s absence. I knew on an intellectual and embodied level that Z’s experience permeated all of our interactions as they became a permanent fixture on my chest. Heart-to-heart for months, we forged a new bond as I attempted to absorb the grief radiating from their tiny body.
The Adoption Industrial Complex is a multi-billion-dollar industry profiting from the sale of babies. It serves in its interest to downplay the impact of the adoption trauma of babies on expecting and well-meaning adoptive parents. Misguided attempts by providers and friends alike to placate my distress about this reality only served to invalidate what I knew to be true. To all those citing nurture as having more impact than nature on the relationship between the parent/child dyad, I rebuked over and over. The effort to coddle the feelings of adoptive parents and accommodate their “generosity,” of adopting, of fostering, of their benevolence, is not only misguided but harmful. The first experience of an adopted or foster infant is that of trauma; the separation of a baby from their attachment figure, who grew and shared a body with them for their entire existence, cannot be eschewed. I say this not to belittle non-biological parents’ connections to their babies, but rather to accurately represent the objective reality. It is impossible to cut and paste a child from one family to another without ramifications. I know that Z loves me and that I am their mom, I know that we have a connection that cannot be severed or replaced, and I know that I am not their biological parent and cannot provide for them as their biological mother could.
The best analogy I can put to our adoption story would be that of dialysis. I’ve never had dialysis, but I feel like it would be similar to having all of my blood removed from my body and fundamentally altered and then returned to me in a modified form. I was filtered over and over again by the experiences of our shared postpartum, changing me invisibly but fundamentally. As the vector that brings oxygen, nutrients, and antibodies to the rest of our bodies, the blood we do not share seems to infuse all.
Around Z’s first birthday, a close friend began kinship care for her niece. She was not a parent beforehand; the child was six and, in true kinship family formation, she became a single parent overnight. Witnessing and supporting her during this transition became my calling. As she reflected to me all of the ways her community was failing her, all the extra labor she experienced traversing the legal challenges, the school system, the mental load of navigating formerly supportive and involved relationships, I saw myself. My own unique challenges were mirrored in the same circumstances at each intersection of system or interpersonal absurdity. The exercise of validating her brought validation back to me. Providing peer support during her postpartum period with a six-year-old brought healing to me in ways I didn’t know were possible, as we lamented the long and involved social worker conversations and mocked inappropriate and confused questions of strangers. Early on in that transition, I was reflecting on the experience of supporting her during those first few weeks to another friend, who told me, “You need to find more friends who are not in crisis like you.” And in that moment, I realized I couldn’t have disagreed more. The ability to share in the crisis without fear of alienation, overburdening, or exposing myself was the unsaid pact of our peer support dynamic and what became affectionately called the mommune.
I felt like I was being witnessed in my experience despite having largely different-aged children. We shared so many similarities around the false choice of caregiving, the complicated family dynamics, and the resulting challenges and joys it brought to our lives. The beauty of peer support can also be the gift of a shared language of absurdity and humor that might not otherwise be in good taste if you do not share the same lived experience. Having these connections for ourselves and having another child in our mommune with similar family dynamics as ours felt like coming home, providing me a peer connection, the one I couldn’t find in my first months postpartum with those newborn moms. It wasn’t until this process that I began to integrate and heal from the rupture to our lives that was Plan Z.
The elated adoption stories promoted during November’s National Adoption Month are almost always the obscured, tragic endings of biological families. Even in 2025, when various forms of open adoptions are in fashion, adoption is the legal end, or termination, of a biological parent’s rights to their children. So much so that after an adoption, a child’s birth certificate is remade with adoptive parents’ names and the often new name of the child, and the original birth certificate is sealed. Each posed photograph in a courtroom pricks another hole in my heart. While I don’t pretend to know the circumstances for the dozens of adoption posts I see each November, I know that, at the very least, a natural and biological child and parent were separated, and that this was a trauma for them both. Regardless of the preferences or circumstances biological parents may have had, in the majority of cases, those biological parents are not provided the financial or systemic resources that could’ve permitted them stability to continue to parent. In many circumstances, they were coerced into the decision or forced due to systemic inequities that our society could have alleviated by providing a better social safety net.
So, as we finally reached the point in our journey to close the book on kinship care and conclude with Z’s adoption, I hold the grief tenderly alongside our relief to be done with the unnecessary burdens and surveillance of the Family Policing System. With mixed emotions this adoption month, I open the email from our adoption lawyer,
“What wonderful news! The court has lots of openings but I had hoped we could schedule you for [adoption] finalization on National Adoption Day, November 21st. Are you interested in this date?”
To which I simply reply. No, we’re not.