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CHAPTER 1
Suspect and Spectral (M)others
I see you are not there.
— AVERY GORDON (2008: 16)
ADOPTION RATES EBBED AND FLOWED with the seasons at First Steps, and 2010 had seen a very slow summer. Staff usually did not arrive at the office until 10:00 a.m. and rarely stayed past 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, and an extended lunch break in the middle of the day was not unusual. After a couple of meetings in the city, Stella and I met up with Dotty — First Steps' founder and director — and her sister-in-law at a small café around the corner from the agency. After polite chitchat, the conversation shifted to the general goings-on at the agency, and inevitably to the serial fall-throughs that staff and prospective parents had been experiencing. In referring to expectant mothers as a group, and particularly the ones who seemed prone to "changing their minds" about the adoption plans they had made, Dotty, nonchalantly and in between bites of her salad, called them "slippery little eels," a metaphor at once direct and loaded with a range of implications. The conversation continued without missing a beat.
Several structural issues informed Dotty's conception of First Steps' expectant mothers as "slippery little eels," a crude metaphor that can be understood as a resurrection of the figure of the "welfare queen" of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. First Steps was a very small nonprofit agency that struggled each year to stay afloat financially. In 2010, Dotty and Stella were the only full-time employees, and the only social workers, aside from seasonal interns, who interacted with expectant mothers. A handful of contracted social workers carried out home studies with prospective adoptive families. Due to the logics of supply and demand, social workers were stressed by an imbalance in caseload in which prospective adoptive parents greatly outnumbered expectant mothers. Every year the situation seemed bleaker, the list of waiting adoptive parents — final installments of fees from whom could not be collected until after the successful placement of a child — grew longer, and the "link list" of expectant mothers seemed to grow shorter.
Intimate speculation entails a set of practices for making subjects visible in the service of gaining predictive knowledge. This whole book is very much about birth mothers, but there are very few birth mothers in these pages. Indeed, that is, and was, precisely the problem — both for the agency and for my research. In order to understand the nature of fallen-through adoptions, it is necessary to begin at the source, which is a space and subject position of intense marginality, highly constrained choice, and often, disappearance and invisibility. This story of adoption, therefore, is best begun with absence. Indeed, a disappearing mother can lead us to important methodological, historical, and ethnographic insights. In my field site, the absence of expectant mothers — at first a methodological conundrum — proved an important, and critically revealing, ethnographic fact. Everyone was always looking for "birth mothers": social workers, adoptive parents, adoptees, and ethnographers. The particular modes by which they were located (or not) and visually conjured provide insight into the roles of surveillance, power, and knowledge in the adoption process. Through examining the structural modes by which expectant?/?birth mothers are rendered (and are perceived to render themselves) absent, invisible, spectral, and ultimately unknowable, this chapter demonstrates how power dynamics in the adoption process are highly conditioned by questions of who can see and be seen, who looks and is looked at, when, how, and to what effect.
REACHING OUT
There were two primary reasons for the growing list of prospective adopters and the dire financial situation in which First Steps found itself. The first was that there were simply fewer expectant mothers working with the agency. Social workers were not sure why. Perhaps they were flocking to some other agency, or placing their babies informally with relatives, a practice common in black communities (Roberts 1997: 54; Stack 1974). Indeed, my first summer at First Steps had been spent delivering flyers to the city's hospitals, women's clinics, and shelters as a mode of "outreach" in an effort to reverse this trend.
A couple of times each week, the social work intern, Christine — a bubbly white woman in her early twenties — and I would set out in her small, well-worn car to visit area hospitals and medical clinics. It was 2009. We were armed with stacks of flyers describing the agency's services to potential birth mothers. The hospitals and clinics we visited were primarily in low-income neighborhoods with which both Christine, a suburbanite, and I, having only arrived in Chicago a year prior, were unfamiliar. It comforted Stella to know that we traveled in a pair, particularly in the heat of the summer, which was known as the most violent time of year in Chicago. On our first day, we went as far south as 111th Street and visited a total of fifteen establishments, mostly women's health and family planning clinics, a YWCA, one shelter, and one hospital. Most, but not all, of the people with whom we spoke were African American. The second day, we distributed flyers on Chicago's West Side, where we visited twelve clinics, only to find that six of them did not exist (Christine had compiled a list of likely targets using Google and other databases and we had mapped them out before leaving the agency). It was a lot of driving, but not much else. It was oppressively hot and muggy, and the air freshener dangling from Christine's rearview mirror made me nauseous. The two of us, pounding the proverbial pavement during those early July days, constituted the closest thing First Steps had to a marketing department.
The flyers were printed in color. The lines of the text and agency logo were smooth and crisp. The single glossy image — of a light-brown-skinned woman, man, and baby — occupied a third of the page. The baby looks directly into the eyes of the viewer. Her (she is wearing a pink jumper) ostensible parents' eyes are closed or downcast. Mom's lips are pursed into a kiss planted on Baby's right temple. Dad rests his cheek on the other side of Baby's head. It is left up to the person viewing the flyer to decide whether these adults are this baby's birth parents or her adoptive parents. This ambiguity widened the image's potential appeal. All of the cultural clues are there to let us know that they love her very much, regardless of the qualifier we apply to "parent." At the top of the flyer, two questions are posed, the former loudly, the latter more of a whisper: "UNPLANNED PREGNANCY? Looking for adoption services?" An unexpected pregnancy produces an expectant mother. The flyer then answers its own questions, using the second person along with future and conditional verb tenses to great effect: "First Steps will provide you with an adoptive family who will give your child everything you would ... if only you could!" The reader is somehow benevolently cast as an unfit parent. The monologue is interrupted by the image of parental love, before the entreaty continues below with a list: "Many qualified families waiting ... Open or closed adoptions ... Special needs accepted ... Culturally sensitive staff ... Confidential." The reader is then encouraged to "Call Toll Free." This form of marketing?/?outreach — along with connections at area hospitals for "born babies" — was one of the primary ways First Steps sought to locate new expectant mothers.
At the 2013 staff holiday party, Dotty and Stella reminisced about a time earlier in the life of the agency when placing over seventy infants annually was the norm. Dotty told me about one year when there were eighteen babies in August alone. She had four newborns in the office at one time, lined up in their car seats, she said chuckling, with adoptive parents waiting to fill out paperwork. She recalled worrying she might mix up the infants, literally switching them at birth. By the time of my fieldwork, placements had steeply declined. In both 2013 and 2014, only thirteen babies were placed per year, scarcely more than one each month on average. Fewer expectant mothers at First Steps meant fewer babies and fewer adoptions, which in turn meant less revenue for the agency.
Let us return to the "slippery little eels" comment. In addition to the dearth of expectant mothers, the second phenomenon informing Dotty's eel metaphor was the recent spike in fall-throughs. Most of the time these fall-throughs occurred after social workers had spent a considerable amount of time on the case, and after prospective adoptive families had also become involved and invested, emotionally as well as financially, in the form of "legally allowable birth mother expenses." In the summer of 2010, the agency seemed to be experiencing fall-through after fall-through, and social workers lamented not only the loss of "business" but also the emotional fallout experienced by adoptive families. From my vantage point, it seemed as though expectant mothers were frustratingly slipping through Stella's grasp, despite her numerous efforts to retain them. This is not to say that Stella and Dotty did not believe wholeheartedly that expectant mothers had a legal right to parent, and they did their best to support mothers in making that decision, but their existence as brokers — and adoptive parents themselves — depended on relinquishment. Regardless of individual intention or motivation, the system itself was oppressive. Indeed, the social workers at First Steps operated within a structure that was — and remains — a great deal more violent than they ever were as individuals. Their moral stance, however, did little to stem the frustration they felt when it seemed like every single adoption plan was failing midstream. It also did little to prevent them from carrying out everyday practices of erasure and marginalization, even if they intended otherwise. Even progressive adoptive professionals committed to the mission of social work were not immune from ideas circulating about poor black women.
A conversation I had with Stella one day while out running errands illustrates simultaneously her awareness of the marginalized position of expectant mothers and her frustration with what she perceived as inherent expectant mother unknowability. In discussing an expectant mother who had recently approached the agency, she said, "I think there's a lot about this girl that I don't know. Is she a scammer? I don't know." Her repetition of "I don't know" illustrates the central place of uncertainty in the adoption process rooted in the figure of the expectant mother and the need for social workers to manage it (and her). Stella talked about the structural inequities affecting the lives of many expectant mothers as producing social norms of guarded secrecy and mistrust: "It would seem more normal not to disclose. You learn very quickly that you don't tell everybody everything. Then you add in shame, guilt." Guilt factored not only in terms of remorse, but also in social workers' framing of expectant mothers as potential "scammers." The expectant mother's structural position rendered her always already suspect, a word whose etymology suggests a distrustful look (Ayto 2006). Visual, temporal, and moral logics were intimately bound up in social workers' encounters with expectant mothers.
Stella spoke briefly about another expectant mother she had been working with out-of-state, who had suffered from postpartum depression and bipolar disorder and had not initially disclosed that while pregnant she had overdosed on sleeping pills in an attempted suicide: "People in her position have learned not to share a whole lot of information about themselves." Here Stella alludes to the social and economic constraints that put certain groups of people into positions in which control over presence, visibility, and self-disclosure is one of the few powers they possess. The expectant mother's lies of omission link her to the welfare queen, who was defined by guilt and dishonesty. A perceived dynamic in which expectant mothers "choose" whether or not to disclose certain information (and whether or not to render themselves visible in particular ways), places social workers in a position with little control over certain forms of predictive knowledge about expectant mothers, and this dynamic contributes to the construction of the expectant mother as a shadowy and unpredictable figure, an object of suspicion.
As I believe it was intended to, Dotty's comparison of expectant mothers to "slippery little eels" engendered feelings of aversion and disgust in me — toward the metaphoric eels, and by extension the expectant mothers, but also toward Dotty for the way she so boldly and insensitively described this subset of Chicago's low-income women confronted by unexpected pregnancies. At the same time, I empathized with her. I can imagine how one might find this sentiment of an adoption social worker toward her most vulnerable clients horrifying — a product of the perhaps unrealistic idea that social workers can hold only unconditional positive regard toward their clients — and dismiss it as callousness or insensitivity at best (racism, classism, and sexism at worst). But much can be gleaned from a more careful consideration of Dotty's chosen analogy, for it reflects a sense of frustration produced by the perceived difficulty of her work, and begins to reveal the structures and practices through which the "birth mother" is constructed as a spectral figure — the ways in which the adoption process produces and enables certain types of erasure and invisibility.
From Dotty's perspective, slippery little eels, and by extension expectant mothers, were adept at disappearing. They slid through her frantic grasp; in some cases, when she did succeed in catching them, she got a nasty shock. Her analogy also gives a sense that expectant mothers were mischievous, conniving, or bad in some way, mirroring a cultural association with snakes. Indeed "slippery little fish" would not have produced the same response as "slippery little eels." "Slippery" conveys slickness or smoothness, but also sneakiness, untrustworthiness, difficulty, and stealth. In the cultural context in which Dotty was speaking, there is a general aversion to eels, which is reflected in popular media, and informs both the use and reception of Dotty's metaphor. Expectant mothers, as imagined within the metaphor, often slithered away into the depths, difficult to track. First Steps was located in the suburbs, and expectant mothers often disappeared into what Dotty may have construed as the dark — really, black — dangerous, and murky depths of the South and West Sides of Chicago. In the case of a fall-through, social workers would grasp for contact, and they were often met with silence, darkness. The loss was usually ambiguous, and the social workers were left to make the official call of failure. The expectant mother had simply "disappeared."
Throughout the adoption process, even in cases that did not end in fall-through, First Steps' expectant mothers were generally difficult to locate. They often vanished from social workers' field of vision, and therefore constituted a problematically unknown entity — at once opaque and transparent. Cheryl Mattingly (2010) mobilizes the notion of the "familiar stranger" in her analysis of racially and socioeconomically fraught interactions between low-income African American patients and upper-class white clinicians in a pediatric hospital: "a troublesome familiar stranger is the sort of character whose actions are predictable but unreasonable, unaccountable, deeply flawed, possibly immoral" (107). For social workers, the expectant mother who "scammed" or "fell through" was a sort of familiar stranger, one who often acted in expected but unfortunate (for social workers and prospective adoptive families) ways. As perceived by social workers, expectant mothers as a group were predictably unpredictable — they often missed scheduled appointments, and they were difficult to track. Their motivations and intentions were impossible to discern. After every meeting with a new expectant mother, Stella would invariably ask me if I thought she would complete the adoption. The outcome was always uncertain. Did she intend to place? Would she change her mind? Or was she simply "flipping the script"?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Contingent Kinship"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kathryn A. Mariner.
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