Image via Joanne Bamberger/All rights reserved

Last time I checked I thought that using candidates’ children as targets of attack was pretty much off limits, especially after the 2000 presidential campaign when supporters of George W. Bush engaged in “push polling” to suggesting that John McCain’s daughter, Bridget, who was adopted from Bangladesh, was actually an African-American child he had fathered out of wedlock. The candidates themselves pretty much stick the straight and narrow when it comes to leaving young children out of the ugly world of national campaigns. But some Ron Paul supporters apparently didn’t get that memo.

Jon Huntsman’s two youngest daughters — 12-year-old Gracie who was adopted from China and five-year-old Asha, who was born in India — are the inadvertent stars of a new negative ad produced by some group calling themselves “NHLiberty4Paul,” asking in their “Manchurian Candidate” ad, as if its a bad thing, “China Jon’s Daughters: Even Adopted?”

In the 2000 presidential race, McCain tried to ignore the attacks, hoping they’d go away. Huntsman is taking the opposite approach, saying to reporters that he could only comment on how stupid it is to suggest there was something sinister or Manchurian Candidate-like in his family’s decision to adopt.

As a mom by international adoption myself, I am constantly battling what seems to be a common view in our society — that there’s something wrong with your family if you’ve got a child that you didn’t create the old-fashioned way.  But the larger question for me that’s raised by this negative campaign ad, is this — when will our society stop viewing families formed by adoption as something that’s “other.” News reports dealing with families generally don’t make a point of commenting about whether children are biological members of their families. So why do so many people feel the need to point out if adoption was involved? Are they scared? Nervous? Uncomfortable? I think it’s a combination of all those things, but most of all it’s just wrong.

As adults, we can handle it when an inappropriate remark is made about how our families came to be. But our kids can’t. Huntsman is doing a great job making both the press, and whoever this “NHLiberty4Paul” is, back away. But their actions and insinuations are going to linger with Huntman’s daughters — especially his twelve-year-old — forever.

I know because we’ve been there as a family. Obviously no one has ever suggested my husband and I were Communists for adopting our daughter from China. But every comment our daughter ever reads or hears that is in anyway negative, hurtful or insensitive about the fact that she came to us through adoption is like having a rug pulled out from under her sometimes shaky sense of self and where she belongs in this world.

So Ron Paul fans, you need to step off this one.  Attack Huntsman’s policies all you want.  But leave his children out of it.

Sure, I get to leave the dishes in the sink and the dirty laundry in the hamper today. And it’s great that “some people” (you know who you are!) are going to make me dinner tonight, but on the tenth anniversary of being able to celebrate Mother’s Day as a mother myself, I’ve been thinking of some things about babies and children and motherhood for which I am eternally grateful:

1. The Pill. It’s the 50th anniversary of this amazing medical feat and, in many ways, my life as it is today is a direct result of that miracle. Yes, I think The Pill was a miracle. For me, it wasn’t about being a wild teen or crazy college co-ed who was sowing wild oats and didn’t want to be bothered with responsibility. Ask anyone who knew me in my teen years and they would roll on the floor laughing (their A’s off) at the thought that my name would be used in a sentence with either the word “wild” or “crazy.” Unless I was talking about Steve Martin. But I digress.

The word “dating” didn’t get a lot of use when it came to describing my life then, either. But I did start dating in college and, though I don’t know how I’m ever going to explain this to PunditGirl, I got married the first time when I was 19. Not a good choice for many reasons. But I am thankful every day that in that short, two-year marriage I did not get pregnant. If I’d had a baby at that point in my life, I can only imagine how much harder it would have been to get out of a truly bad situation and what that would have meant for my life — and my child’s life going forward.

2. Roe v. Wade. I came of age in the era just after the Supreme Court ruled that women had a Constitutional right to have an abortion. Don’t think that I wasn’t also grateful for that knowledge every day during my first marriage, even when I was on The Pill, that if I had still gotten pregnant (hey, no birth control works 100 percent of the time), that I had the right not to bring a child into the world when I was in the midst of an abusive relationship. Today, as a woman of a certain age (as I was called recently on Twitter!) looking back, I’m not sure if I ever would have exercised my right to end a pregnancy, but I certainly felt much more in control of my destiny knowing that I had that right.

3. The Women of Newsweek (and so many like them). When some brave, young women filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against Newsweek for not allowing women to be reporters, I was an impressionable 12-year-old (not so much older than PunditGirl is now. YIKES!) I was reminded about their brave act recently when I was asked to moderate a panel with some current Newsweek journalists who wrote about that lawsuit. Without those “women’s libbers” forging the way for me while I was still pondering pre-algebra and just how long I was going to have to wear those darn braces (trust me, they weren’t the fashion statement then as they are today), my ability to major in political science and dream of taking over Tom Brokaw’s job one day wouldn’t even have been on the table. While not directly related to motherhood, their desire for professional lives and their commitment to fight for that was all the proof I needed that it was okay to think about motherhood later. Which was a very good thing for me.

4. Women online. My sisters on Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and group blogs were there for me after I became what CNN recently called an “older mother.” Being in the ‘burbs with a baby, I felt pretty alone. I’d been in the workplace for over 20 years as a reporter then as a lawyer before I became PunditGirl’s mom. Most of the women I knew were still in the office 60 hours a week. I found myself without a job shortly after we returned from China with our new daughter and I didn’t know any other moms of young children. And I was woefully unschooled then in the ways of play groups and Gymboree. When I started my mom journey, I was unprepared for a lot of things and there were plenty of times when I wished that there was a Xanax in the house, especially when our three-year-old screamed with night terrors and I was afraid someone would hear her and call the police, thinking that only a child who was being beaten could make noises like that.

Thank goodness for the wonderful, amazing women I’ve met online who became my lifeline. All of a sudden, just by reading their stories, I knew I wasn’t the only one. And then I met some. And then I met some more. And they became my friends and they helped me in many ways. (I purposely left out site links to my amazing sisters in social media because inevitably I would have forgotten someone and would not want to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially on Mother’s Day).

Aside from being grateful for these things, I will continue to fight to keep access to effective birth control, abortion and equal pay for equal work so that one ten-year-old girl I know won’t have to worry about them quite as much as I did. I’m hoping she’ll find her own way in the world of women and friendship!

5. And, of course, last, but not least, I’m grateful for “some people.”

Because without them, well, I can’t even imagine that life.

Photo by PunditMom, all rights reserved.

There’s a reason there’s so much spitting in the large Chinese cities — you’ve just got to get that stuff out of your lungs any way possible.

But we were glad that we would be able to bring our little girl home to a place where she’d be able to breathe more freely, where the air was more suitable for developing lungs as she ran and played outside in our big back yard.

Sadly, while our air may look cleaner on certain days than what we saw most when we were in large Chinese cities like Beijing, our clear blue skies are deceiving.  According to a new report toxins in our air are making us and our children sicker every year, with environmentally caused illnesses in children costing $76.6 billion dollars a year.

Yeah — that’s “billion” with a “B.”  The cost to help out kids with their asthma is $2.2 billion dollars.

It sort of makes you wonder where the priorities are for our lawmakers — the ones who work hard with lobbyists to cut their polluting corporate constituents tax breaks for the “good of the economy.”  But when it comes to the good of our children, they’re not so focused or concerned about what it costs the families of those children.  It’s no big surprise — kids don’t contribute a lot of money to re-election campaigns. But big corporations who don’t want clean air standards enforced or beefed up because it would cost them too much money to update or remediate their plants?  Their money does some serious talking in Washington. D.C.

So where are the people who are supposed to be keeping all that crap (yes, that’s a technical term) like mercury and lead out of the air?

As we all go back and forth on the never-ending health care debate, lawmakers need to be convinced that one way to cut those health care costs is to make sure that the corporate culprits who are pumping tons of pollutants into our skies either must cut back on harmful emissions or pick up the tab for all our sick kids.

Do you know any American school class that doesn’t have at least one child with asthma?  I bet there are a lot of moms who would love just one Mother’s Day gift this year — for their children’s air to be cleaner so they can stop worrying about severe asthma, childhood cancer, and other diseases that could impact their families.  I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’d rather have that than any gift money can buy, especially if that means we can avoid the spitting!

Beijing, 2010. Image by Joanne Bamberger, all rights reserved.

That’s what PunditGirl told her class when we presented a slide show of photos from our recent trip of a lifetime — one that will result in the first memories our daughter has of her birth country.

I included this photo for our presentation to her classmates as an example of one of the many types of street vendors you find all over China.  But she was right — this was also taken in the general area where we were told she was found before being taken to her orphanage when she was just a few days old.

Mr. PunditMom and I were blown away that she chose to share that piece of information with a roomful of her friends.  We were in the midst of photos of The Great Wall of China, the pandas and other photos of daily life in China when this one popped up in the slide show and she made her rather matter-of-fact announcement.

Without drama.  Without tears.  Without making it sound like it was any big thing.

We have other images of that location that show in more detail the area that was her “finding place” …

… so we were a bit taken aback that she recognized that the close-up photo of the fruit vendor was actually shot near the location where she was discovered as a baby ten years ago.  The place where her life changed in monumental ways that most of us will never be able to comprehend.

I’ve often tried to piece together what little information we had about the first days of PunditGirl’s life.  When we traveled to China to bring her home, we were given varying information about where and how she was found.  We weren’t sure of her real story, though we tended to believe that she had been found in the bus station after receiving a copy of the “finding ad” that was required to be placed in the local newspaper at the time she as discovered.

When we were told on this trip that we would be taken to visit  PunditGirl’s finding place — something that many adoption social workers recommend as a way to help adoptees put together some of the missing pieces of their story — we said that we had conflicting information about the location.

A lengthy conversation ensued in Chinese between our agency contact and the local guide/interpreter.  “Oh no,” they replied, “this is what the official account says.”

We still can’t be 100 percent sure.  We were given “official accounts” in the past about other things that may or may not be true.  But it turns out there is a hospital across the street from the bus station — another piece of information we had never been told, but one that could suggest that the bus station story is the true one.

But it had never occurred to us that our daughter had been left on the sidewalk.  In December.  In the cold.

One of the first photos we have of PunditGirl is a 2-inch-by-2-inch portrait-type photo against a ruby red background — a baby just a few months old with the angriest scowl you’d ever want to see.  I still get a glimpse of that look on her ten-year-old face from time to time.  But when we first saw it in the photo, we thought, “What could make a little baby look so angry?”  Before we knew her story, we joked that the bad baby comb-over she’d been given for the photo had to be the cause of such indignation.  Now we know it was a lot more than just having a bad hair day.

At the moment, PunditGirl is taking this part of her story very matter-of-factly.  We’ve tried to plumb her mind a bit to get a sense of what feelings she might really be having about this piece of her life story.  For now it seems that she hasn’t formed any discernible judgment about the fact that she was found lying outside on a sidewalk in the winter (though it is a sub-tropical climate, and from the weather records it apparently wasn’t below freezing on the evening we believe she was found).

We know she’s still processing everything we saw and experienced.  Heck, I’m still trying to get my head around all of it, especially as it was experienced in such a whirlwind kind of way– it was a ‘if this is Wednesday, it must be Chengdu’ sort of trip.  Maybe the fact that we came face to face with more of PunditGirl’s story than we had known before is one of the reasons I’ve been so disturbed by the Russian-adoptee-gets-sent-back-to-his-birth-country story.

No adoption story is ever easy.  No matter how much happiness that comes from celebrating the creation of a new family, adoption, by definition, is also a story of loss — loss of birth family, loss of first identity, and for most children who were in orphanages, loss of the happy baby story that most other kids have.  And that loss can produce significant issues that have to be dealt with and worked through, often over a lifetime.

Even with the countless hours we’ve spent over many years trying to manage PunditGirl’s anxiety and attachment issues (she was never diagnosed with full reactive attachment disorder as some children are and I suspect that Justin Hansen probably was), and even when it felt like I was the worst mother in the world because I couldn’t figure out what to do to help a child who thought she was unlovable, and I prayed I could convince someone to write me a prescription for Prozac or even a little Xanax, I never imagined getting to a place where I could have said, “Hey, China.  Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s not brave.  It’s not noble.  It’s just me as a mom.  And us as parents.

Photos by PunditMom, copyright 2010

And I’ve ranted before about how the media covers adoption-related stories — that somehow parents who decide to adopt are more suspect in their desires and motivations than those who choose to (or are able to) have children the “old-fashioned” way.

But today this is on my mind — the media this week is obsessed with the potential abandonment aspect of the story of  seven-year-old Russian adoptee Artyom, aka Justin, by his American mother.  Trust me — I will make NO excuses for her or any parent who puts a child on a plane and ships them off somewhere as she apparently did.

But I have to ask — where is the media coverage every other day of the year about all the other children — mostly families’ biological children — who are abandoned, neglected or abused?  I’d like to think that the story of this little boy — who is now an American citizen, by the way — would be getting this much 24/7 coverage if the same actions had taken place but he had been the biological child of this mother, not a child who came to her family by adoption.

I’m pretty sure if I was a betting girl, my money would be safe on that one.

This story is getting attention because it involves adoption.  And the media love to sensationalize stories about adoptive families.  I don’t have the energy to get up on this soapbox for too long again, but it’s just a fact — when children are hurt or neglected or abandoned by biological parents, the stories might get a little play, but not for long.  But make that family an adoptive family, and that changes the whole calculus of its purported newsworthiness because people still like to stare at families like mine, both in real life and on cable news.

You can read more about my take on Artyom’s story at my new column at CafeMom’s The Stir, called Speaker of the House!

Yes, the PunditMom family is back from our amazing tour of China, and I’m trying to decide what I want to share about things other than the tourist stops — our visit to PunditGirl’s orphanage and the events of those few days are still circulating in my mind as I try to find a way to share that she’ll be comfortable with.

Of course, I can share that I’m checking this one off my “bucket list:”

Yes, I was as happy as a little girl!

In the meantime, here are some fabulous Mothers of Intention you need to spend some time with –

Kim Moldofsky from Hormone-Colored Days shares her experience with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and talking about her pre-exisiting condition in connection with the health care debate.  She totally rocked that news conference!

My fellow MOMocrat Julie Pippert discusses the tenuous situation with our country’s textbooks and the undue amount of influence Texas has on that process.

Morra Aarons-Mele at Women and Work blog talks about ther experience at the White House Workplace Flexibility Summit.

And my honorary M.O.I (I hope she doesn’t mind!), E.M. Zanotti at American Princess takes on Michelle Obama about pizza!

Enjoy!

Being here on this trip has been a nice little respite from politics, though you know I’ve been doing a little happy dance about the health care bill!

In the meantime, here are some of the highlights so far:

We survived the sandstorm from the Gobi Desert while we were in Beijing.  We were prepared for just about everything, though I admit I hadn’t anticipated this!  But we managed.

We did have some clear weather in Beijing and were able to hit the must-sees.

Then, it was time to make our way to Xi’an and the Terra Cotta Warriors.  I figure after visiting there and learning about the Chinese emperors, I’ve learned a few things about taking on the political opposition!

Does the smile take away from the fierceness of the armor?

Fortunately, while PunditGirl is recuperating, we have a lovely view from the hotel room.

Maybe tonight we should just order in?

This journey is our first return to China since we brought PunditGirl home and made her part of our family in 2001.  I really can’t believe it’s been that long, yet I also feel like it’s been a lifetime  since we stepped off the plane at National Airport, our lives changed by a baby who spent the first year of her life in an orphanage with about 100 other children and about eight caregivers.  We’ve talked for many years, as our PunditBaby grew into a PunditGirl, about the amazing things we saw and experienced in January of 2001 when we brought our daughter home from Hunan Province.

I keep trying to come up with the usual PunditMom fare to write about in these days before we get on that 15-hour flight, but with the pressure of a book deadline fast approaching, as well as this trip of a lifetime almost upon us, it’s hard to focus on the health care summit, financial regulation or any of that other stuff that usually gets me all riled up!

So I’ve decided not to fight it, and to give in to the need to write about the trip.  PunditGirl can hardly contain herself as we are finishing up our preparations — getting our visas, buying a snazzy new polka-dot suitcase for her, and thinking about how much rice (her favorite food in the whole world) she’ll be able to eat while we’re there.

And I’ve promised myself, I am buying that Mao watch this time!

But there’s much more on everyone’s minds.  PunditGirl has confessed that one reason she’s excited about this trip is the fact that for the first time in her life she will be surrounded by people who look like her.

“Now you and Daddy will be the ones who look different,” she’s repeatedly told us, her chest puffing up with pride at the thought of a whole country full of people who share her skin tone and facial features.  We’ve made many efforts to make sure that her world has Asian friends and families in it, but our neighborhood is not the most diverse in the world, so for better or worse, she sees many more Caucasian people than Asian.

Aside from her apparent joy at being the one who will not look different from everyone else,  there’s also a good dose of anxiety that’s showing itself.

“What if China Mom and China Dad show up and decide they want me back?”  A question full of so many things — the longing for her birth parents to take back a decision they made ten years ago, the need to know that , as her parents, we would never allow anyone to take her from us, and the age-appropriate fantasy about what her life would be like if she had grown up in the country where she was born.

Yes, we’ll be doing the tourist highlights — the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terra Cotta Warriors, and the panda preserve.  But we’ll also be spending a few days in the city where we met her.  We’ll visit the baby home, though it’s not in the same building as the one she lived in.  We’ll see the babies who are there now and waiting for parents, though today, almost a decade after we adopted PunditGirl, more Chinese families are being encouraged to adopt these children rather than Western families.  And, if all goes according to plan, we will be able to visit with the woman who was the head “ayi” (nanny) when she lived there, and who brought PunditGirl (then known by her Chinese name that translates as ‘eternal river’) to us, dressed in worn but clean clothes that we had to return so another child could get some use out of them.

I’m anxious, too.  As an adult, I’m logically able to understand the historical reasons that so many Chinese girls have been available for adoption.  When I look at PunditGirl’s face or watch her wake up in the morning all warm and snuggly from her sleep or watch her race across the soccer field determined not to let the boys outrun her, I can’t imagine being the mother of any other child.  But I know for her, no matter how much she nods and says she understands why China Mom and China Dad couldn’t keep her, I also know that the thought remains in her head, “But maybe they could have if they’d tried a little bit harder.  Maybe they would have kept me if I’d been a better baby.”

I’m bracing myself for the possible emotional fallout of these thoughts colliding with the reality she sees in China.  PunditGirl has struggled with questions about attachment and permanence — I’m not sure if this trip will help heal those issues or exacerbate them.  But in my heart and my gut I think this is the right time to make this first journey to where she was born — to see the baby home and possibly to visit her “finding place” (I think I’m going to need more tissues than I can carry with me for that moment).

Right now, we’re trying to keep it light — talking about whether she can play the games on my iPhone on the plane, wondering how far up the Great Wall we’ll be able to hike, what it’s going to feel like to hold a baby panda (yes, that WILL be our holiday card this year!).

But I feel the low level anxiety starting to creep in for all of us.  I have half of a Xanax left from a procedure I had last year.  That’s definitely going in my carry-on.  After that, I’ll have to find other ways to keep my emotions under control so I can help PunditGirl with hers.

Photos by PunditMom, copyright 2001, 2008, all rights reserved.

Photo of Mao watch courtesy of ChinaSprout.

The government building in Port-au-Prince that housed all the official adoption paperwork crumbled in the earthquake.  Many of those who worked in that building reportedly died.  And there doesn’t seem to be a rush here in the U.S. by the State Department or Homeland Security to ease the paperwork burden to allow these children to enter the country without having crossed all the ‘t’s and dotted all the ‘i’s.  Some in Miami, however, are trying to plan a major rescue effort for these children and the thousands more who have been orphaned as a result of the earthquake.  But shouldn’t the orphans be some of the first to get relief?

As my friend Amie at MammaLoves … put it on Twitter:

Why is it that healthy, white, well-dressed adults were being shuttled out of Haiti and those orphans are still outside in the heat? #BRESMA

Excellent question.  Plenty of are mothers are writing about waiting for their own children or their friends who are waiting and not knowing the fate of the children for whom they were patiently navigating the sometimes inscrutable adoption maze.

Yvonne at L.A. Moms blog wrote about her friend Lorraine’s story in One Mother’s Struggle to Get Adopted Daughter Out of Haiti.

ParentDish blog talks about adoptive families in limbo.

Jessica at Silicon Valley Moms blog wrote, Saving the Bresma Orphans of Haiti.

And MomLogic blog has the post Are My Kids’ Birth Mothers  Dead or Alive?

These are just a few stories.  According to a Washington Post report, before the earthquake there were about 50,000 orphans in Haiti, with only about 800 to 900 of those children part of the official adoption process.  If you are writing about families waiting to bring their children home, leave me a comment here or Tweet about it with the #moms4haiti hashtag.

Maybe in some small way, we can gather these stories and help unite these families as soon as possible.  For a list of organizations that are supporting Haitian orphanages, check this link from Creating a Family.  For a view from the adoption community at large about adoption and Haiti, here’s a post from AdoptionTalk blog.

UPDATE:  On Tuesday, 53 Haitian orphans were airlifted out of Haiti to Pittsburgh even though much of the paperwork was lost in the earthquake. As this story unfolds, it is an amazing one.  Initially the U.S. government was only going to allow 47 of the 53 children to leave Haiti because several had no pending adoptions and the flight they were scheduled to be on had to leave Haiti before everything was ironed out.  According to Ed Rendell speaking on MSNBC, there was an NSC contact that cleared the way so that all the children could leave Haiti and the military supplied a plane to airlift the children out.

While the Punditfamily takes a little break this week, I thought I’d revisit a few posts I felt strongly about this year.  To start off, my thoughts on the “octomom” and how we view adoption vs. birth children.

*********************************

I am weary of the Nadya Suleman coverage. The tiny octuplets. 14 kids altogether. Unemployed mom. Not to mention that whole sort of looking like Angelina Jolie thing.

But one aspect of this baby circus is worth talking about — the fertility industry. Yes — it’s an industry, both here and around the world. It’s a business to the tune of billions of dollars a year. The more fertility treatments that women have, the more money doctors make. It’s not really complicated.

Don’t get me wrong. We went down the fertility road when we were trying to have a family. I have no problem with anyone deciding that fertility treatments are appropriate for them.

While I was on the Clomid train, there were no questions about what kind of parents we’d make, or what our joint incomes were. No one stopped us at the door and demanded to take a peek for dust bunnies in our house or to check the expiration date on our kitchen fire extinguisher. There were no laws we had to comply with and no one wanted to know how much any baby that resulted from those treatments was going to cost.

All that changed when we stepped off the societally accepted way of making a family, the new-fashioned spin on the old-fashioned way, and decided to adopt.

Once we were on the road to adopting the baby who ultimately became PunditGirl, we were required to be fingerprinted by the state and federal governments to make sure we had no criminal background. Health and fire inspectors were mandated to come to our house to certify that we had a safe environment for any child who was to become ours. We had to submit several years worth of financial statements to prove that we could afford to care for a child. Many of our friends were called on to sign notarized statements that we would be good parents. And, just for good measure, Mr. PunditMom and I had to sit through several sessions with a therapist to talk about our family social histories, as well as our feelings on corporal punishment. Then, and only then, were we permitted to be considered as a potential adoptive family.

Oh, and the best part? We really enjoyed spending time with people who felt like they could ask us how much our baby would “cost” and those who kept urging me to keep trying one more treatment in the fertility arsenal so I could have a baby “of my own.” And, of course, there are also those who think I’m not even a mom since PunditGirl, as she used to say, wasn’t “borned” from me.

Many in the fertility industry contend that it would be too burdensome to have requirements surrounding fertility procedures, claiming that self-regulation is the way to go. Free markets, and all. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing for there to be hoops to jump through before someone can adopt a child. But if there are scores of laws that address and regulate the adoption process, why is it any less important that there be some regulations when it comes to giving the go-ahead for people to have eight embryos implanted at one time? In one article, an ethicist reasoned that government is “loathe” to tell people who can and can’t be parents. Except that the government does it every day when it comes to adoption.

The regulation question isn’t about parenting. It’s about business. No one’s bottom line was enhanced by the fees we paid to the non-profit agency we chose. And it’s OK with me that the orphanage she lived in for a year, where a handful of caregivers manage 100 or more babies every day, might have used some of the money to buy modern washing machines so they didn’t have to wash all those baby clothes by hand.

But don’t tell me that the lack of regulation in the fertility industry is about the government wanting to stay out of decisions by those who want to become parents. The government had no problem poking its nose into just about everything in my life before I was allowed to become a mother. If that’s going to be the case, then I don’t see how it’s all that different for fertility businesses.