Some people are really ignorant.  There are still people who say stuff like,  “So, who are the REAL parents?”

I know, YOU would never say that.  But people do!  If anyone says that to you, just ask them, “Where are your REAL manners?”  Because, hello, rude!

 

So, who ARE the real parents?  The birth parents, or the adoptive parents?

I would like to pause here and bring in a topic that’s been super-hot at work:  sciences vs humanities.  It’s a big thing right now in universities all over, as humanities departments find they have to step up, speak up, and make a case for their funding.  Science gives us answers!  What do the humanities do for us?  Happily, humanities-folk are good at expressing abstract ideas in words.  This is how a friend of mine summed up.

Science offers answers, and the humanities offer questions.

We’ll leave it at that, for now, and go back to the adoption thing.

When people ask, “Who are the real parents?” they are asking a science-y kind of question.   Does loving a child make you a parent?  (How much love?)  Does sharing chromosomes make you a parent?  (How many chromosomes?)  Does taking care of a child most of the time for most of their life make you a parent?   (How many hours are required?  If  – god forbid – a child should live only a few years, or only a few hours, are their parents not really-parents?)

Clearly these are the wrong questions.  Any simple answer (Sperm = parenting!   60% of waking-hours care = parenting!) is preposterously, offensively shallow.  To get a deeper answer, we need deeper questions.

Instead of asking “Are you a real parent?”  let’s get out a bottle of wine and ask, “What is a parent?”  “What is real?”  and “Who are you?”  And then, perhaps, once we’ve gotten to know each other a little better, we might ask, “What aspects of parenting feel most real to you?” and “Tell me about a moment when you first knew you were really a parent.”

For those sulking in the corner who insist on a more scientific and precise answer, I’d say “First tell me exactly how many parents a child is allowed to have, and then we can line them up in order of greatest parentitude and find the cut-off point.”  Or perhaps we can approach this logically:  “Instead of deciding which parent is real, let us first begin by determining which parent is imaginary.”

Ah, logic!  Who is real de re and who de dicto?  What is a parent in the context of desire?  Of thought? Or of modality? Could love, eo ipso, make all of us equally real?  Can a birth parent and an adoptive parent be interchanged ad absurdum without altering the truth-value of parenting or will we, at the end of the evening, be  – salva veritate! Q.E.D – rescued by reality?

Now I’m being silly.  I’ll try to be serious.

Here’s a story about me.  I wanted to adopt Emily.  She was my heart’s daughter and the sunshine of my life, but she wasn’t mine, and she never would be.  Every night that she stayed with me, I slept better because I knew she was safe, and every time she was a pain in the butt, I saw her fierceness, her strength, her courage shining through the “attitude.”  But she had a family already – simple as that.  So I took care of her when she was with me and missed her when she wasn’t, and I always felt like a piece of my heart was tucked somewhere in the bottom of her backpack or tangled up in her ponytail.  And one day one of my friends said to me, “You know what?  She’s never going to be yours.  But you will always be hers.”