It is sometimes claimed that adoption could be a climate solution. After all, if there are kids needing parents and parents wanting kids, adopting might replace the desire to create more children. Is adoption something we should encourage to reduce environmental risk?
Today we have four(!) parents of adopted children on the podcast. Each of them tells their story at the start of the show, including:
Ross Kenyon, Reversing Climate Change host
Lauren Gifford, Associate Director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson, Carbon Technical Project Manager at Grassroots Carbon
Chris Tolles, CEO and Cofounder of Yard Stick PBC
Then we all discuss if and how adopting children could or should fit into one's vision of climate activism.
This was a fun and big show to do! I hope you enjoy the change-up in format.
Resources
Here are the verses from the Bible that are referenced:
"...work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."
- Philippians 2:12
"Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."
- Matthew 6:1-6
All quotes from the King James Version
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello, and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m your host. I’m an entrepreneur in carbon removal and climate tech, and the host of this show. Today’s show is with some peers of mine in carbon removal who have all adopted children. Coincidentally, they all come from the world of soil. That was purely a coincidence. It made us all laugh. I’m not sure how that happened, but it is. It is what occurred. Each of us has a segment at the beginning of this show to tell our individual stories before we dive into a group session.
You can skip ahead if you want, but it will give you less context for the discussion, because the discussion that we have is predicated upon knowing at least some of our familial specifics that explains how we think, decisions we made, why we’re here, etcetera. I wanted to do a show about adoption for a long time, but it’s a tricky topic. Adoption is sometimes considered to be a climate solution, and those wanting to become parents sometimes consider adoption as an alternative to creating additional human life.
How we all feel about that, you’ll have to listen to the show to find out, but it certainly is a big question that touches many topics related to ethics, religion, why we’re here, where we’re going, what is the fate of the human species in the planet, questions like that. It’s not a small question, which are some of my favorite shows to do. Also, one reason that I haven’t done it yet, and we talked about this in the show, is that none of us really like the praise that comes along with adoption. And drawing attention to ourselves for becoming adoptive parents is not the goal.
And in fact, I don’t think any of us really have liked it. It’s often felt backward at the very least, and at most it feels like it’s misunderstanding what is happening and becoming a parent in that way. We know a lot about adoption. We have strong feelings about it. We certainly want to talk about something that is an important and impactful thing to do in one’s life, but also not wanting to generate any of those feelings that we’ve had directed at us that also sometimes can make this an uncomfortable bit of sharing.
So I hope you can understand and treat us with some grace here in how we’re trying to be open and make light of some of how difficult it is to talk about this, and also understand that it takes a little bit of a bravery. So I respect my peers here on this show for being courageous and even coming on to talk about it, because I know not everyone is champing at the bit to go and do that. There are also privacy concerns. This is, at least in part, another person’s story, namely the person who is being adopted, and there was a responsibility to honor their privacy and to use appropriate amounts of discretion.
Podcasting is a medium that rewards authenticity and in some cases even the overshare. So one has to be careful about boundaries, and that can be challenging to do a show. So that’s enough mea culpas. I put it off for long enough. It is a topic that deserves discussion, and so here it is. I can share with you my personal story. So I did not come into adoption for climate reasons. That was not really a part of the calculation at all. My story is that my wife became close with a child through volunteering at a special needs children’s home when she was younger, and developed a relationship with a child that persisted over a very long time, better part of a decade.
And after we were married — you have to be married for a certain amount of time for the program that we wanted to do. So as soon as we were able to meet the criteria for which we could become adoptive parents, we began that process. It took about two years. It’s a lot of paperwork, and it concluded more than three years ago. So I did not actually choose to adopt our son for reasons of climate. Insofar as that is a beneficial thing to do for the climate, I am happy, but I also don’t anchor every important decision I make to climate change, even though I am very passionate about this subject.
I in some cases have trouble even with good opportunities outside of the climate space. I don’t really want to leave. You know, I’m here for a reason. I feel vocationally called to do this. And the way that I felt about adoption was also very vocational. I felt called to it. It seems a little funny to describe things in terms of a fate or how things happen in that way, but it felt like a very automatic, natural — if I were not to do this, I would in some ways be disobeying what the universe has presented to me as a move in my life. You know what? Things are just going to feel right like that. That’s pretty much what happened.
In any case, there’s a lot here to talk about with regard to adoption. It is not a straightforward subject, and it is certainly not one that we have exhausted discussion of on this singular episode. There’s a lot of room and surface area for disagreement here, which is why I included so many people in this discussion. And there’s really a lot to talk about with adoption. So if you want to do it, search your heart. Make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. I’m not entirely sure that climate should be the driving onus for doing this. I think it can be a part of it, and that’s fine, but I really don’t think it’s enough for parenthood’s sake to do it.
But I hope you like it. Feel free to comment on the show, share it with a friend. Thanks for listening. I hope this is useful to you. If you like shows like this, please give us a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. In those places, you’re going to hear from Chris Tolles of Yard Stick. You’re going to hear from Brandon Bowersox-Johnson, who is a colleague of mine at Nori, and now he’s at Grassroots. You’re also going to hear from Lauren Gifford, who’s at the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University. You’ll hear their stories, and then I’ll go right into a group discussion. And thanks so much for listening. Hope you enjoy. This is a new type of show I’m doing here, and thank you so much for your support.
Lauren Gifford: I am Lauren Gifford. I am a social scientist who studies climate, and I have a biological child and an adopted child, so pretty interesting to see becoming a parent in two very different ways. My husband and I were on a wait— well, first of all, we found a private adoption agency that aligned with our values. There’s a lot of private adoption agencies. The one that we went with was queer friendly and pro-choice, and it was in New England. A friend of mine had adopted her son through this agency and they just came highly recommended. They were called Friends in Adoption, and we contracted with them.
There is so much bureaucracy with the adoption process — things like home studies and, you know, every type of paperwork, income verification and things like that. So I’d say we did about a year of paperwork and then two years of waiting on a list. And we kept saying, like, why is no one picking us? Because the birth mother picks the adoptive family, or the birth family, the birth parents pick the adoptive family. And we were like, why is no one picking us? Why is no one picking us?
And then I was walking my daughter home from her first day of kindergarten, and our social worker called from the agency and said a baby was born in New Hampshire, and you matched with him. And it turns out he was born at a hospital in the community I used to live in for seven years. And it was like pure magic. We bought plane tickets from Colorado to Boston. We were on a plane within a couple hours. We flew through the night, rented a car, drove to the hospital. And because I have roots in that community, my friends came out of the woodwork to help. They took my daughter on play dates while we were able to go to the hospital and meet our son. And it was just so incredible.
And so we had to stay in the hospital with him for a few days until a judge signed off that we could leave the hospital. And then a judge had to sign off that we could leave the state. So we lived in a hotel with him for about a week, maybe a little bit more than a week. And it’s partially a blur and partially was just delightful, because I was back in one of my favorite places in the world. And I feel like a forever bond to my son because he’s from a place where I feel like I’m from, I think I’ll say.
Adoption is a journey, but becoming a parent in any way is a journey, and there isn’t one way to become a parent or to choose not to become a parent, right? Like everyone, everyone, everyone’s life unrolled differently, and there aren’t absolutes to share. But I think if you sort of let go of control, respect the process, respect all the people in as part of the process, you can have really lovely outcomes. So I am really glad to, yeah, be part of this group.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: I’m Brandon Bowersox-Johnson and I work in carbon removal and also have a, you know, adopted kid and kind of complicated adoption family. In the carbon removal world, I work at Grassroots Carbon and first met Ross working at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. So a lot of soil carbon-y stuff. And in the adoption journey, my husband and I weren’t husbands at the time, we were just partners who had a commitment ceremony. We wanted to have kids, you know, a few years into our relationship. He wanted four kids and I was like, let’s start with one. Four, like, teenagers sounds really scary.
We lived in the Midwest in central Illinois, in like corn and soybean country, hence the, yeah, a bit of the like ag and soil carbon understanding. And so we sought out an adoption agency there in our region that was gay friendly, right? So that, like, us as gay parents could, you know, could come in and, like, that they’d be willing to work with us to help do the adoption process. So we made a book about ourselves with tons of pictures, our house and our dog and our family and, you know, all our — like the parents that were excited to have the new child in our family. And also went through the hard parts of the process, took a lot of time thinking through questions.
You know, when you’re going through an adoption process, you have to make choices like, am I ready to have a child with different sorts of disabilities? Am I ready to have a child of a different race who might look nothing like me? Am I ready to have an older child who’s maybe already been through struggles? Or do I only, you know, do we as a couple only want to adopt younger children, you know, newborn, and kind of start the parenting journey at birth? And anyway, we spent a lot of time — and I’m glad we did as a couple — talking about, like, what was our parenting approach and how we would answer all those questions, and ended up getting picked.
So a birth mother, you know, who was working herself through the adoption process, she was pregnant at the time and picked us from, you know, a lineup of other potential parents, picked us to raise her kid. And actually that first match, we were like elated and got a picture of a sonogram, and like there was this baby who, you know, who we were going to adopt, you know, at birth. And then within a few weeks, that person fell out of touch and we lost contact, or the adoption agency lost touch. And we have no idea to this day, like, is that kid okay? Is that mom okay? That was really heartbreaking, to sort of lose a match.
And then a few months later, got another match where another birth mom, yeah, picked us and she was pregnant. And so we got another sonogram and ended up getting to know her, go to doctor’s appointments with her. She lived like two hours away. And got to get to know her and sort of fell in love with her as like, oh my gosh, we would love to stay in touch with this person, have this person like be an extended part of our family and, you know, raise this child getting to know his birth mom. And she wanted that too, like wanted an open adoption.
So we got to be at the hospital for the birth and, you know, took our son home from the hospital and, you know, had regular visits with his birth mom ever since. And also he has a brother and grandma and, you know, uncles and, yeah, a whole extended family. So we kind of adopted one kid, but also sort of adopted or folded in a whole family. And that has just been a really lovely process, even though it takes like work and is complex, but it’s super rewarding. And I, yeah, I’m really glad that my son is connected to his birth, biological, you know, sort of family of origin, and has all of us as his adoptive family to, you know, to be there in his corner too.
So it’s been now 17 years. He’s a high school senior and yeah, it’s amazing. Now we’re like looking at sort of another big pivot in this journey of like, oh, okay, wow. We are still going to be this kid’s parent, but he’s about to be an adult, and we’re going to, yeah, be his parent in a whole new phase. So yeah, that’s our story, and excited to share.
Chris Tolles: Hey, I’m Chris. I am the CEO of Yard Stick PBC. We are a soil carbon measurement startup, so we provide a measurement technology for people doing different soil carbon-y things around the world. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I grew up in New Jersey, so a Yankee through and through. So we have four kids. We have an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a two-year-old. Our eight-year-old is biologically ours, and then our five, three and two-year-olds are adopted. They have the same biological mom and biological dad. They came one at a time.
So we had sort of an intentional matching process with the five-year-old. When he was about seven months old — he was placed with a temporary foster mom immediately after birth, and we got connected with him in fall 2019 when he was seven months old. We did not know that his siblings were going to keep coming, so his bio parents continued to get pregnant and we had the option to take them as they were each unfortunately removed from their bio parents. And we did. All three of them also have a biological brother, full biological brother, who was adopted by friends of ours that live nearby, so to make it more complicated.
There are actually four full biological siblings that live — three of them with us, one with a close friend and dear family neighbor of ours. That’s also how we got connected to our oldest, the five-year-old at the time, is because they were in the process of adopting his older brother. I’ve had a really good experience of fostering adoption in Massachusetts. It is also a like dark, weird, painful system. I have learned a lot by listening to adoptees who describe adoption as fundamentally about family destruction one way or another. And I believe that. I think it’s true. It’s also obviously about family creation. And they’re both true.
I think a lot of adoptive parents generally only want to see the good parts of adoption, because it threatens their confidence in their own sort of like good moral choice to acknowledge that there’s harm involved. But of course there’s harm involved. Particularly in Boston, I find it deeply troubling that foster families immediately start to receive cash compensation from the state to effectively reward foster families for the work of fostering. But the state definitely doesn’t give bio moms, bio dads cash for their parenting work. I don’t like the way the public system in Massachusetts effectively criminalizes poverty. Many of the reasons that kids are removed are inseparable from lack of good support, meaning income.
There is a true thing that kids in unhealthy, dangerous situations need help, and I find it really distressing how many people, especially within the foster and adoption movement, talk a lot about caring deeply about kids, which is actually a materially different thing from caring deeply about families. But I think a big thing that I’m working on is making peace with my own complicity in a system that is, at the end of the day, most basically separating kids from their families of origin. And yeah, that’s something that I’ll continue to deal with, and thankfully do so like in community with other adoptive parents. But it is a color to adoption that I don’t hear many folks talking about, which I think is to the detriment of adoptive parents and adoptees alike.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, well, in adoption, can we agree? Like there can be laughing, there can be crying. There’s [unclear] in general, a full range of it, and I’m super excited for this. I’m going to edit with the lightest hand, not saying anything that I will have to take out. We’re probably going to have to edit this, but adoption is hard. It’s hard to talk about this because it’s your kids. You don’t want to tell their stories, or the degree to which you do might vary parent to parent. We were just talking about this off the air and I had to start rolling the tape, because we should talk about it now. What are y’all thinking about that?
Lauren Gifford: Well, you know, I think it’s complicated to talk about this stuff because it’s not just our story, it’s our kids’. It’s their biological families, their birth family. It’s just — it’s a lot, and it’s scary to take that and make it public.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, so we can, you know, we can tell our own stories. Like I’ll try to use I statements, right, and like say how things were for me, but maybe not get so much into my son’s story, because I can’t really speak for him, and or his health issues or his diagnosis — like those are his details to disclose and decide how he wants to share. But I can definitely talk about what the journey of parenting has been like.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, same. In many ways. I have found that talking openly about adoption really demystifies it in a healthy way for many people not involved in adoption. So there’s lots of any identifying details, certainly of any of my kids’ story, that I generally don’t talk about publicly. But I come from like a race and class background, like white and wealthy, where the intersection with, you know, child family services is not a common thing. And my ability, I think, to like educate a lot of folks in my social circles about what it’s really like, I find means you sort of got to talk about some of the details, even as I absolutely honor the awkwardness of like, who’s my audience and what’s my goal here? And trade-offs is a common thing for me as well.
Ross Kenyon: Do y’all think it makes sense to talk about adoption in general terms? Is there adoption, platonic adoption in the grandest sense, or are they just individual adoptions and the commonalities are maybe more fleeting?
Chris Tolles: I mean, we just went through all four of our stories before you started recording, and there is probably very little commonality in any of those stories. I think what is common is the challenge of parenting, and I don’t see there’s all that much like consistent categorical difference between adoptive and non-adoptive context in my experience. Adoptive parents and adoptees deal with a bunch of unique kind of flavors of child-parent relationships. But yeah, I’m definitely on the end of every adoption is unique, even as particularly the flavor that I have experienced with public adoption in Massachusetts does have some trends and themes that I think are really important to acknowledge. I’m much more interested in sort of the differences and uniquenesses and ways to honor parenting differences generally, ’cause that’s a hard enough thing even independent of an adoption detail.
Ross Kenyon: I like to focus on it not being much different from parenting in general. One of the things that they really drilled into us in my adoption experience was you only adopt a child once and the rest is just parenting. I think one of the things that I’ve given advice to people before who were interested in this was, how motivating to you is that feeling of saving a child or pulling them out of an orphanage or a children’s home and giving them a parented home in this way? Because that actually is not that sustainable of a feeling.
Parenthood is a very difficult experience. It’s kind of everything, right? It’s the highs, it’s the lows, it’s everything in between. It’s the drudgery. It’s sublime. It’s almost not — it’s relentless. And if you have to rely upon a lot of savior-type feelings to make this possible for you, I just do not think that you could be a competent parent. I think it would wear off way sooner than your child’s age of majority, I think. I don’t know how you feel about that.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, my story is more I sought out adoption as a way to have kids. So I’m, you know, I’m like in a gay relationship, right? And my husband and I — well, we had a commitment ceremony even though marriage wasn’t legal at the time. But yeah, it was like, well, how can we start a family? And adoption was one of the ways, just through the network of talking to the few other gay parents that we could find at that point.
This was like early 2000s in the Midwest, in central Illinois. You know, you kind of have to go through the gay grapevine to find other queer families or families who can tell you about ways to, yeah, ways to be able to start a family or be a parent. And anyway, adoption was sort of the path that seemed at the time the most — that made the most sense for at least for my partner and I.
Lauren Gifford: Brandon, I’m curious, since your son is 17, you said — I’m curious how the landscape has changed, or like the discourse has changed in the 17 years that you have parented.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, it feels like a whole different world to, I don’t know, be raising kids or coming of age or anything. Like, I had only even like come out to my parents as gay a few years prior, also in like the early 2000s. But now that just feels absurd. Like, you know, kids come out maybe in middle school is like the average or something. But also in the adoption world, I feel like when my partner and I decided to explore adoption, that the question of even an open versus a closed adoption really seemed like a cutting-edge debate about whether or not open adoptions were okay or closed adoptions were okay or not.
And also gay adoptions was like not a common thing. And so we had to put in some work just to even find an adoption agency that would work with us as a gay couple who wanted to be parents, and to navigate the system and do a second parent adoption — sort of a bunch of extra legal steps to try to start a family and, you know, and carry out an adoption and have a kid that way, was sort of extra difficult. So. But I feel like things now, that’s 17 years ago, are totally different.
Chris Tolles: I love your point, Brandon, about like we just wanted kids. I know I definitely came into my initial interest in adoption when I was very young from an explicitly savioristic perspective. And now when I talk to people who are interested in adoption, I always ask them why. And I humbly suggest the best reason to be interested in adoption is ’cause you want more kids. And I’ve had to go through my own like learning and growing and changing of my own saviorism towards adoptees. But a big part of that for me has been that I’ve come to believe that looking to save other people is actually just a fundamentally unhealthy way to relate to anyone.
Never mind just like a child. Just wanting — being motivated significantly by trying to affect someone else’s situation rarely goes well. And particularly in my world of public adoption, my visibility into the reality of a kid’s home and family is so, so limited that I even just fundamentally doubt my ability to perceive a lot of the facts of their situation that might be used to sort of construct that narrative of, oh, they’re in a really shitty situation, I gotta make it better.
I think if you, at least in public Massachusetts adoption, if you fundamentally can’t believe that there is a parenting problem to be solved, obviously it’s pretty hard to participate at all. So there is some sort of reasonable threshold of like, hey, this is net net good for the kid or net better than the alternative. But just doing that with fear and trembling, because my ability to really know what the alternative is is just so, so limited. And that colors the narrative of like, adoptees need to be saved because bio parents are f*cked up, is really, really toxic towards everybody, adoptive parents included.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. You quote Saint Paul and then you say f*cked up in the same sentence. Okay. How do you help someone while being skeptical of the ability to help? Where do you think the line is? How do you deal with that ambiguity?
Chris Tolles: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a great question. Again, fear and trembling. A lot of what I believe about the world is that the truest things are about holding paradox. And I think like most of the deepest relationships of my life are some combination — are definitely proactively wanting to help them and caring about them in like a self-giving way, and also wanting to be helped by them and seeing like my wife, like, wow, I am like a way better person the more I try and, you know, listen to you and emulate you.
And so similarly, I don’t know, with adoption, I think I just try and hold two things that are irreconcilable, which is both like a savioristic attitude towards my adoptive kids is toxic to us both, and nonetheless, I do have a really important and special role in their life, and I need to be sober and intentional with the responsibility that’s been given to me. I just, I don’t know, I try and have a foot in each of those.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I asked Chris first so Lauren and Brandon had time to think it over, because it’s not a simple question.
Lauren Gifford: I know, and I don’t think I can speak to that particularly. Like I have thought, like, why did I choose to become a parent? Because I birthed my daughter who’s older and it was horrific. And then I was pregnant again and almost died. And I’m like, why? Why am I going through all of this to, you know, to grow our family? And I think there’s a lot of desire to have a family that is unspoken and that we can’t articulate through words. But I will say that our family has a lot of joy and a lot of happiness, and we just kind of — we wanted to make it bigger. Like it’s fun. We have a good time.
And it’s crazy, right? Like my house is crazy. There’s food all over the floor, and we clean that, and there’s books get pulled out the bookshelf. And like, every kid that comes in my house is loved, whether they’re a neighbor or my kid or, you know — I don’t know if they’re an adult, but they’re still a kid at heart. Like, everyone comes in and gets that same love. And my husband and I just wanted to grow, you know, have a bigger family. But we were also okay if that didn’t happen.
And I think my husband has three adopted siblings, so it wasn’t — and he remembers, you know, all of them coming into his family. They also had two children placed with his family when he was younger that the birth mothers took them back. So this was, it was a little bit of second nature to my husband. And this is just how we did our second child. And I know that there is a lot of trauma in the triad, and I just — we also see a lot of joy in it.
Ross Kenyon: Can you explain what the triad is, Lauren?
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, it’s birth parents, child and adoptive parents.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Right, so. Did you talk about adoption as an option before you had your oldest child? It sounds like your oldest is biologically yours.
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, I mean, I think I got pregnant pretty right after I got married, but I was also like 37 or 38 years old. So yeah, we had always said — I mean, I just love all the kids. And one thing I said when I became a parent, and it’s not about adoption, but it was that if I’m a parent, I have to sort of accept to equally love all the kids at the playground, because we’re all — the kids in my neighborhood — because like, they all need solid adults. And so I didn’t really care if my children were biologically mine or not.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah. I mean, for me, actually, these questions we’re asking here about the sort of the saviorism mentality, or the — why do you get involved with adoption or with parenting? Those same questions actually, I find apply in the climate change space too. Like I see a fair amount of people who get involved wanting to sort of be the savior and like, oh, I’m going to start my startup and save the world. Or people who get involved because of that identity, right? Because they want to be able to like say to themselves at the end of the day, like, I worked really hard on this thing and I personally, individually made a difference.
And that’s also a very different reason than like, oh, I’m getting involved to do what I can, but I know that I alone can’t change everything about this situation. Like climate change is such a big problem. We’re all going to play some role. We’re all gonna be part of the problem. We’re all gonna be a little bit part of the solution. We’re all gonna be entangled with this big mess the rest of our lives. And we’re all here like choosing to play some role in it. And so anyway, I think the same ethical questions about what motivates people to get into adoption — and are you doing it because you want to help this other person or help this other, you know, this other issue? Or are you doing it for your own identity or for your own saviorism? Those are the same questions that come up a lot.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, I think that’s a real wise observation. What’s the — what’s the so what? Like maybe Brandon, can you give me a few examples? Like what sort of behavior do you observe in being an adoptive parent that’s either like healthy or unhealthy as informed by that tension? And then what’s behavior you see in climate that’s either healthy or unhealthy in the same way?
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Wow, fascinating. I don’t know if I can answer all those, but I mean, I will say a partial answer. I had this interesting experience of parenting where there was a phase my kid was going through, throwing temper tantrums at like everything. But they would be hardest when we were at the grocery store trying to like get through the aisles, get food for the week into my cart and get out of the grocery store. And when I was first parenting, I was living in the town I’d grown up in, and I’d actually been an elected official. I was a city council member for eight years in that lovely city.
And so here I was like shopping, going through the aisles, and my kid would need to stop and throw a tantrum because that’s like what had to happen. But I was running into people that I knew in every aisle and they were asking about potholes or some zoning change or some tax issue that they needed to pay in on. Yeah, and I had to like divide my attention between like, wait, I can’t take care of my child who’s like flailing on the floor in aisle seven.
Chris Tolles: This is like a horror story.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah. So I have to like respond to people. Anyway, at some point in the arc of parenting, I guess, my kid was about seven years old, we moved to Seattle, we moved across the country. And now I’m in a town where I don’t know anybody in the grocery store. And I love it, because I can take my kids shopping. They can throw their tantrum and I can be 100% focused as a parent on just like sitting on the floor with my kid, trying to work through what they need and like, what are they going through and how do I help them through this moment?
And I also — like, I didn’t have to worry about what anybody else thought or serve, do any other community service or anything else. I could just be there for my kid. And so anyway, maybe Chris, that sort of answers your question, but I have loved those times as a parent when I can just try to do what’s right for my kid.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a good question. I often forget that I am working for some greater climate end state, mostly because you just get sucked into the daily grind of what needs to get done and whatever product you’re trying to ship or paper you’re trying to write. I think it’s pretty easy to lose track of whatever the grand vision is. I want to get reminded of it. I’ve been up for interviews for jobs that were outside of climate and I can’t even fake it. I do not care about this app at all. I couldn’t even have the diplomacy inherent inside of myself to make that interview worth it.
I get reminded of it whenever I peek out of it. But once you’re inside of it, it’s just a job. Obviously it’s a job that we all care very much about or we wouldn’t be here, but it’s still a job. And maybe it’s not the same as being a parent too. You’re still just a parent at the end of the day, however they came to you.
Chris Tolles: Ross, one thing you said — and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so correct me if I misstate anything back to you — but like, regardless of whether it’s good, like saviorism isn’t durable is one thing I heard from you. Like it doesn’t last. And I think that also applies to me very clearly working in climate, where my perspective is that there’s a ton of unacknowledged race and class guilt that’s motivating a lot of people, myself included. And like, whatever, like motivators are motivators. You can sort of come in the door anywhere you want. Like, I don’t think it’s worth judging myself about my initial enthusiasm.
But very quickly at least I’ve seen, especially over the last few years that have seen like some go-go days and the trough of disillusionment that we’re in now, for many situations that like doesn’t pan out, like it doesn’t last and it grinds you up, and it’s because it’s false. Like you’re not going to fix anything by yourself. And so I see a lot of parallels in my own life of like trying to examine my desire to approach climate change with personal enthusiasm and personal excitement, and also admit that I’m like dust and I’m a teeny part of a nothing thing.
And actually, the more that I try and attract like power and success to myself as an individual, in fact, the less likely I am to be successful, because of some of what you said, Brandon, around like everybody has to play their part, and any good solution will intrinsically include a lot of different people playing their part. A lot of that tracks for me with parenting — like the more I try and white-knuckle it and think that I can do it by myself, the less successful it is, particularly when in my case you had these additional dimensions of adoption and transracial adoption and all the other things that like make parenting uniquely hard. I see a lot of similarities there between self-compassion and self-acceptance and limits between working on climate and parenting.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s good to be humiliated every so often. Yeah. I like the Roman emperors having a lackey follow them saying remember thou art mortal. I think about that a lot. I think working in climate there is a tendency to think you’re saving the world. I just read — have any of you read Cobalt Red?
Chris Tolles: No.
Ross Kenyon: Well, read King Leopold’s Ghost and then—
Lauren Gifford: I haven’t read for pleasure in approximately like 8 to 15 years. How long — when did I start a PhD? And then I had a kid, so.
Ross Kenyon: Bang. I was hoping maybe it would intersect with your work, but it just talks about cobalt supply chains and it’s all in the Congo. And so it’s not gonna be news to anyone here, but just reading the stories and the details there, you’re like, wow, I am a piece of garbage. I replace my phone every couple years and I don’t think anything about it at all. So even someone who cares about this ostensibly is still just riddled with — I’ve talked about this on several shows. Sorry, I’m a broken record, but it’s one of the reasons why I think even if one is secular, the idea of sin is such a powerful concept, because your life is just riddled with it.
You might think that you’re a really great person working in climate. I’m still supporting, you know, supply chains that I have no business supporting, and do not prioritize that over my own convenience. And so I’m just — I’m as lowly as anyone else out there either. I think it’s good to have that reminder.
Lauren Gifford: Maybe not — and that statement on such a dour note, but I think it’s helpful to have that remember thou art mortal moment. You know, I think like, I don’t know, 15 years ago I was teaching my first class on climate change at a community college in New Hampshire. And people were like trying to one-up each other about like how green they were. And I was like, listen, the best thing you can do for the environment is die. So like if you’re living in rural New Hampshire and you don’t have much money and you’re driving like a 10-year-old, 20-year-old Ford Explorer, because that’s the car that you can get, you can’t talk shit about that person, right?
Like as like having a gas guzzler, right? Which was kind of where the conversation was going in class. And I think like, we really need to acknowledge the structures that we live in if we’re talking about consumption and, you know, our contributions to the climate crisis, individual or, you know, national scale. And I don’t know what this has to do with adoption, but I do think, like, yeah, I mean, we are all contributing, even if we’re fighting the good fight. We’re also contributing to the climate crisis.
Ross Kenyon: I think just a good reminder to not overindulge in those savior feelings, because without even trying that hard, one can — it should undermine that in oneself very, very quickly. I think it’s a healthy thing to do. Just, there are pathological versions of it too. We can also connect this more broadly to climate at this point. Lauren, that’s a good nudge. And I’m not sure to what degree climate influenced anyone’s decision to have more kids via adoption, but it wasn’t a big part of my story. I’m happy that a child got a parented home, but climate was secondary or maybe even tertiary for me. I’d be curious about the rest of you.
Lauren Gifford: No, yeah, not for me either. I do think one thing — I think that we see too much in the sort of climate narrative, you know, like everything’s like storytelling right now, and we want to know like, why these people who are like in the, you know, big people in the climate conversation who we see on social media and in the news, like why they do what they do. And almost every person says like, well, it’s for my kids. You know, like, I want to leave a better tomorrow for my kids. And I don’t know why, that always kind of annoys me.
Ross Kenyon: You should do like a Walter White. You did it for you. You did.
Lauren Gifford: No, I’m doing it — yeah. And I’m like doing it for like kids and people who aren’t in my orbit, because like, I don’t know, it’s humanity, right? It doesn’t have to be my kid necessarily. It’s humanity and — crap. I went the wrong direction with that, didn’t I? I made it more selfish.
Ross Kenyon: You made it less selfish.
Lauren Gifford: Okay. Ross, I’m so much more benevolent than you. See?
Ross Kenyon: It’s true. Remember that, mortal.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, for me as well, climate change look — wasn’t a big consideration in how to start a family or how to be parents for us. Let’s see, I guess we started the adoption journey like the year before the An Inconvenient Truth movie came out or whatever. So I was not thinking a ton about climate change even though—
Ross Kenyon: Pre-An Inconvenient Truth. I like that this is our like A.D. marker. You know, like, was this before or after Al Gore?
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Exactly, exactly. That’s the new before times. So yeah, some people knew about climate issues way before then, but yeah, I was not — they were not as top of mind, yeah, with every decision I was making back then.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, me neither. It wasn’t present at all. The thing that got me interested in adoption was the movie Nine Months starring Hugh Grant. And actually, like, I don’t know, I’d be interested in your perspective on this. I actually wonder if the climate framing of adoption is actually actively bad for two reasons. One, I think it reinforces the like personal moral capacity, good decision making, saviorism that I think is generally unhealthy, like we’ve already talked about. I’m generally not a fan of like personal climate footprint as a thing that matters anyway, so that all subtracts for me.
But the second is that like many people in the world have been told to not have kids, or have been like manipulated into not having kids, or prevented from having kids, or like present company included, like had their kids taken away from them. And it’s almost never, at least in an American context, then people like me who’ve been on the receiving end of that pressure. Again, like I’m white, I’m male, I’m high class, I’ve got like all the dominant characteristics. And so the idea that I would even like entertain a philosophy that implies that others should not have kids just strikes me as like deeply, deeply icky and weird.
Ross Kenyon: That’s eugenics.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I’m not quite there calling it that, but it’s at least like directionally queasy. And to be fair, I’ve never actually known someone personally who really finds that argument powerful. So this is all sort of a vacuum. And I think it’s actually probably a distraction, for the four of us at least, if none of us are particularly motivated by it. But because a lot of my conversations in the world are at the intersection of adoption and climate, it comes up constantly. And I kind of always just want to tell people like, no, bad, stay away. But I don’t know. That’s a half-baked opinion at this point still.
Lauren Gifford: I mean, I can say, and we probably all have had like people say f*cked up shit to us about our kids and the situation, right? And that I don’t even want to give air time to. But I do think like I hear from a lot of women in particular who are like, oh, this is something I want to do, can you tell me about it? And then the motivation is sort of like weird or off, right? And of course, those people are never going through with this with, you know, a year of paperwork or whatever.
But I do — I don’t know. I see a lot of folks who appear to have — but I think like, you know, I think there’s a lot of curiosity in the space, but also like, those are the people who tell me like, well, I just don’t want to give birth. And it’s like, well, the ick it leaves me with is like, are you sort of offsetting the labor of labor to someone else?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s just — it’s offshoring. It’s off-wombing. I just made that up. That’s bad. No one else is laughing. I’m uncomfortable.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: There’s some smiles. It’s okay. It’s kind of outsourcing this part of the job that, yeah, that you might decide you’re not ready to do right now or can’t do right now. And there can be all kinds of moral and ethical questions and considerations though.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, totally. I’m just thinking more about some of the ick things that have been said. Our son is older, he’s in his teens. So oftentimes I get the sense that people might think that I’m a formerly teenaged father. And then I always feel the need to correct that somehow. That’s a little thing.
Lauren Gifford: Yeah. This is awesome. You’d feel better if I was like, no, Ross, you don’t look that young.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. It’s not true.
Lauren Gifford: It’s not true. I’m just trying to, you know, make you feel better.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like a task failed successfully kind of a moment. Thank you.
Chris Tolles: So this is something that happens constantly with my wife and I, and I’d be curious how you three approach it. Like the single most common response from people, especially like people we’re not close with, kind of meeting people for the first time — it’s something that’s directionally like, oh wow, that’s so good of you.
Ross Kenyon: That’s our least favorite as well.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, say more. What about it?
Ross Kenyon: I think, well, one, I don’t like doing insofar as it is a charitable act. I think here I’ll use my own Christian dog whistle here: the left hand shouldn’t know what the right is doing when being charitable. Like, don’t remind me I did something good. You’re like sucking all the goodness out of it. I’m supposed to be collecting that, and now you’re reminding me that I’m like a great — now I have to flagellate myself and remember thou art mortal all over. [unclear]
Yeah. And I also just think it makes the child some sort of weird ethical prop that I just do not like, considering — like treats humans as means, not ends, as maybe a Kantian way of putting it. It just doesn’t feel right to do it that way. And when people say it that way, they’re reinterpreting my experience, and it feels intrusive and it’s incorrect. My wife and I are oftentimes very much like borderline rudely patronizing — every like, oh, thank you, but that’s nice, thank you — just like trying to end it, because I don’t want to have to correct someone and it’s going to be weird. But no, we do not like it. I think it’s the wrong way to understand adoption.
If you’re listening right now, maybe the most valuable thing you could take out of this is don’t say stuff like that to adoptive parents. Because — or say, oh my God, how much did that cost? Also, that’s weird, ’cause that makes it sound like it’s some sort of financial transaction primarily, which makes it seem like the thing that you started off the conversation with, which now I’m gonna have to edit out, of like it’s human trafficking and you’re buying a child. It’s not. Do we need to edit that now?
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Or people will say like, oh my gosh, your child looks just like you. Or like, then once you tell them you’re adopted, they’re like, oh, well, it’s such a good thing that they look just like you. And that’s weird too.
Chris Tolles: Like, what was I — yeah, well. It sounds like the one that we may have in common is just like the generally moral, laudatory, like so good of you. Do you get that, Brandon? Lauren? And if so, like what do you do? How does that make you feel? And then what do you do?
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, I hate that. I don’t know what I — I just kind of, you know, I think people just in general say a lot of things. Like after I lost a pregnancy, I still looked pregnant for a long time and people constantly would — yeah, I’m so sorry. Oh my God, you’re pregnant again, number two, yay! Or like, I saw someone at the rec center and I was in the pool with my daughter and they were like, number two! Oh my God, like, rub my belly. So, you know, people just say horrible things to other people that are seemingly well-intentioned.
Chris Tolles: Ross is like shaking his head. Yes, that’s the most of them all, I think, that we’ve heard, but—
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, yeah. And like finally one person pointed — I was like, I’m not pregnant, but I was, you know, like — or like the baby died, right? So like, but then I was like, I’m not going to even give people that. So I think there’s just, yeah, there’s — we just say f*cked up things to people. And I think if we, you know — what do they say? Like everyone’s fighting a battle you know nothing about. Yeah, it’s true. And whether you grew your family through adoption or not, like everyone’s had some. And like, we need to treat each other with more grace.
Ross Kenyon: How is this the most explicit show I’ve recorded in recent [unclear]?
Lauren Gifford: Because — because you have to. Like, you grew up in Philadelphia.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, is that [unclear]? Okay.
Chris Tolles: Lauren, do you just — and I don’t mean this judgmentally — do you just like duck it? Do you sort of ignore the conflict? Do you like — what do you actually do when people say, oh, that’s so good of you, you know?
Lauren Gifford: And just kind of, yeah, like redirect. He’s so cute or something like that. Or like, you know, he’s my — he’s my life partner. I don’t know what he is. He’s like my — I just, I feel—
Chris Tolles: Love that one.
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, I feel like [unclear] this guy. I’m like so in love with him. I, you know, he’s lucky. I’m lucky. We’re all lucky. We love his birth mom. We’re all — everyone’s, you know, it’s — this is working out for people.
Chris Tolles: How is this for you, Brandon?
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: I think I do try to — it sounds like Ross’s strategy is just to like find a reason for self-flagellation is what I’m learning about Ross.
Ross Kenyon: You’re not wrong.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: But my strategy often is to more like, if somebody puts like a pile of dog poop out there, to like step in it and like have the conversation if I have the time. I mean, maybe I don’t have the time or I decide I’m like not safe, like I’m in a parking lot and it might turn into a fight. Like there was a lady who yelled at us for the fact that our kid had like a pink bicycle, but our kid like had the appearance of a boy. And they’re like, you can’t put a pink bicycle [unclear] on a boy. And anyway, I think in that moment I decided not to have that fight, even though now I’ve regretted it. I’m like, I want to go back and have that fight with that lady in that parking lot.
But usually I will find a way to like gently step into the messy conversation and just, you know, saying things like, well, that wasn’t quite it. Instead, for our family, blank — and then like insert our actual reality or my actual perspective, or pivot to something that might be more eye-opening or interesting that, I don’t know, that gives people a different frame or a different story to be left with.
Chris Tolles: Yeah. Can I tell you what I’ve been trying and you can give me feedback on what you think about it? Okay, so one is I just like word vomit about how maybe adoption is human trafficking and have you heard about adoption abolitionism? And actually it’s the worst thing ever. Generally doesn’t help the conversation, but feels good for me. That’s number one.
Number two is I try and — what I have found is that I think most of the time what people are saying is, I admire you. And so I try and hear that, and I’m actually trying to work on like receiving praise and like thinking good about myself. And so I try and hear it through the lens of like, through the voice of someone whom I do know and trust to say like, I admire you. And that would make me like actually receive it.
And then the third is I say like — they usually say something like, oh, that’s so good of you. And then I say, oh, why do you think that? Or I say, you know, say more. And then they usually say something about how like adoption is really good. And I sort of ask a probing follow-up question that implies it’s a little more complex. And then they usually want to like actually ask me a question. And then I find that one gets into like the highest quality conversation because it’s sort of Socratic, but it obviously takes the most amount of time.
And I don’t know if any of these are like good or bad. But this is a central conflict with my wife and I. So I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and I’d love to know what each of you think. She’s just like—
Lauren Gifford: A lot of labor.
Ross Kenyon: Chris, just say thank you, right? We’re at the farmers—
Chris Tolles: No, no, no, she’s the opposite. She’s like, you gotta teach these people they’re idiots — and she’s not that kind of person.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s like, oh no. Had some bad guesses tonight.
Chris Tolles: What were you gonna say? Sorry to interrupt.
Lauren Gifford: No, I just said it’s a lot of labor.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, definitely.
Ross Kenyon: What’s your experience like navigating [unclear]?
Chris Tolles: Well, I definitely never get they look like you, ’cause they don’t. My adoptive kids have a black dad and a white mom. It’s interesting. I mean, as you can tell, I’m a talker. And so in one way I don’t mind that it makes it more visible, because it sort of just puts it on the table. That cuts both ways, for all the — in all the ways you imagine. I am particularly interested in the race dynamics of adoption. So it’s actually a really nice inroad to actually talk about those things. And since I process everything external, just like practicing on other random people, I think helps me figure out what I believe or think.
My oldest is five. And so I am going to have the experience of like black teenage boys and black adult boys. And that’s gonna be like a whole thing that I’m really scared of and I don’t feel well prepared to parent through. But like, welcome to all parenting. It definitely enhances my own anxiety about the race and class tensions of adoption. I don’t know. Yeah, those are some — that’s what’s top of mind.
One more, and I don’t know if this is good or bad — I’m also trying to resist the urge of like categorizing things as good or bad. But whenever I’m scared about like parenting, especially adult black boys, men, which is often, I often think about like what a gift it is that, God willing, I get to be near like a family member who is not white. And not like, oh great, like they get to teach me about being black, but also like all people get to teach each other.
So like, I don’t know, I wonder about the good flavor of that. Like, is there a way to honor the differences between my kids and I that doesn’t obligate them to do something for me that they didn’t ask for and that is not their job, while also acknowledging that we are different? And like, I think about my oldest biological daughter who’s white, and I think about what she’s going to teach me and I don’t get all tweaked about that.
So like, yeah, I wonder about the racial dynamic of our relationship long term and how their racial identity that they choose and experience will inform their understanding and experience in the world. And whether there’s a way for me to learn about the world that’s not just through my own eyes, but it is nonetheless like healthy and not asking them to like teach me about black things. You know, I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: I think about that a lot too. Yeah, there’s a lot of lines for you there of not wanting to put all the work on them, to have to articulate this and teach you, but also be curious as an equal. But you also are not equals, ’cause there’s a parent-child relationship there.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, totally. There’s a lot going on in there. And you just go back and forth forever.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you’re living in that paradox.
Lauren Gifford: I was gonna just say one thing that our agency told us to do that we’ve done for our son, that seems like it’ll be valuable for him when he’s older, which was basically to keep a scrapbook. And I’m like terrible at doing stuff like this, but they were like, write down his birth story. Write it down from your perspective. Have my husband write it down from his perspective. Take every single piece of information that his bio mom gave us, put it in this book. Like write about the first time I ever saw him and things like that, because you’ll forget it. And like, I already am forgetting it. But it helps him know his story. And that’s actually — I’m so grateful that they had us do that.
The other thing — we had a different agency than our home study, because one was in Vermont and New York and then we’re in Colorado. So the home study agency, they came by when he came back to the house with us and they were like, are you telling him his story? And I was like, well, he’s ten days old, I’m not telling him much. And they’re like, great to start practicing now, because you can mess it up. And our daughter is really sweet — for some reason, she was like recently, she says, I don’t think we should tell him he’s adopted, I don’t want to hurt his feelings. And I was like, well, he already knows, we like talk about it. And she’s like, well, let’s not tell him again until he’s 10 or something.
Ross Kenyon: How old is your daughter?
Lauren Gifford: She’s seven.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, interesting.
Lauren Gifford: And I was like, no, no, that’s — you know, he’s got to know his story and he has his book anyway. And we talk about his story. So it’s just kind of like normalize that story and don’t push it down. And I think a lot of this training that people are getting, agencies are giving families and stuff now, comes from trauma-informed scholarship and trauma-informed like therapy modalities, I guess, where like we don’t want to recreate and reinforce a lot of the trauma that adopted folks have from, you know — there’s someone in the climate industry, or in the climate world, that I’m not gonna name, but he told me he didn’t find out he was adopted until he was 16.
And he’s like, don’t do that to your kid. And I was like, no, I’m not gonna do that to my kid. It’s 2024. But yeah, so I think like we know a lot more now than even just, you know, even Brandon, even when you went through this. And luckily, hopefully, the kids will benefit from it.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, totally. And I’ll give a big plus one to your suggestion, Lauren, of like writing down the story as much as you can remember and like telling the story often. I feel like, 17 years into it at least, I feel like we’re very blessed by — we did take the time to do that. Like we made a little adoption book with a bunch of pictures and little captions of like what was happening and what was our experience and our son’s adoption story. And did that again, like for his first year of life, the second year of life.
And we constantly from the beginning have been talking to him about where he came from and like, at an age appropriate level, like at every age, just telling him about all this and about his birth mom and about his brother and that he had grandparents on that side of his family, and like just flooding him with stories of that part of his identity. And, you know, he rolls his eyes at us and he’s like, oh my gosh, dads, you’re not talking about this again. But I do feel like that was really powerful for us as a family and important to like, yeah, to give him stories of where he came from that he can decide what to take or leave, right?
And he can choose what is his own story and what he’s going to tell people. But I felt like it was one of the most, yeah, powerful, valuable things, to like connect him to where he came from and to his birth mom and as much of his biological family as, you know, as he wanted to meet. And we had a super open adoption. So that’s just the path that our journey took. But I feel like, yeah, telling him the story, giving him pictures and books and anything you can to remember, and at age appropriate levels, give kids like words they can use.
I felt also — the last thing I’ll say on this is that my son and his friends, like other kids, understood it all much more easily than adults. Like I think it was the teachers or the other parents or like the neighbors who didn’t understand like where our kid came from, or how could he have three dads, or how could he be an only child but also have two brothers? How is that even possible? Like it was the grown-ups who just didn’t understand, but the kids were like, oh yeah, this totally makes sense. And so anyway, giving our kid words to use and ways to understand where he came from in the world and how we all landed here together was really valuable.
Lauren Gifford: And I’ll say one other thing, Ross, which is sort of how we got to this podcast in the first place, is like sharing that we’ve gone through this and how many people — this happened today. When I was teaching, one of my students, I mentioned like, oh, my son was adopted. And he’s like, I’m adopted. And he’s like, I was born in Russia and I came here when I was nine months old. And he told me his story. And I was like, well, thank you for telling me your story. And he was like, well, like, you brought it up, you know, like, thanks for sharing.
But I’ve had so many conversations with folks, like professional relationships, folks I know through climate — when I share this, they’re either adopted themselves, they have a child or family member who’s somehow like, you know, in this space. And it’s been really cool to take professional relationships and sort of break down some barriers and sharing with some vulnerability and some personal stuff. And I think that’s so important to whatever sort of movement we’re building and what we’re working on.
And it’s been — I’m glad that I shared that without — I’m glad I’ve shared that with folks in professional circles like this, because it really like creates a dialogue where we get to know each other better. And then I think that we can build more in the climate fight together.
Chris Tolles: Yeah, I feel very similarly that every bit of effort I’ve put into talking about it has resulted in really good things. And it’s also been a great tool for me to deal with my own head trash of like getting it right. A big thing I struggle with is like, do I know what I’m talking about? Do I have anything to offer? Am I doing it right? And being able to practice sharing what I do know and what I do believe makes it possible for other people to engage with it with me.
And having that be a positive experience for me helps me dial down my own anxiety about like getting it right, just ’cause I can have had so many really positive experiences with folks with the stakes of like getting it quote unquote right being so low. Because again, there’s so little knowledge that like the 101 level of conversation is actually really, really eye-opening for many other people in the world, and life-giving for me to share.
Ross Kenyon: Well, is there anything else that we should cover before we wrap?
Chris Tolles: I have an idea. Yeah. So each of us, as far as I can tell, adopted very different ways. And so we each have a close-up perspective, a like first-hand perspective, on a different way of doing this. I would be curious maybe if we went around and everybody could share, like, now that you know what you know, what’s one thing that you’re enthusiastic about, about the way you adopted specifically, and then what’s something that’s worrying or troublesome or sits uneasily with you? Obviously all optional, blah blah blah, but.
Lauren Gifford: I’ll say two things. The first is, we went through a private adoption agency. I actually have a lot of friends who have adopted, and we basically asked all of them about their agencies and then got checked and found this agency that was pro-choice and queer friendly and just very, very respectful of birth parents. In fact, they don’t say birth mother, they say birth parent, because they have had sort of gender non-conforming birth parents that they’ve helped. And these are like women in rural Vermont, you know, social workers in rural Vermont. They’re not like who you’d expect to be the most progressive, but they were so kind and had such a big heart and really, really centered the birth parents. And I really appreciated that about our agency.
And I think one of my takeaways that’s so sad is just that we have no support system for parents in this country and people are struggling. People feel desperate. They feel like they did something wrong sometimes, you know. And there’s just — there’s no — I’m so frustrated with the lack of support for parenting and birthing in this country. And we’ve got to do better.
Chris Tolles: I agree with that statement about parenting help. Parenting without an extended kin network is — oh, it’s nearly impossible.
Lauren Gifford: I’m not — I have so much guilt right now because my husband is now with the kids, ’cause there’s no one else to be with the kids. And he’s babysitting right now.
Chris Tolles: That’s the worst one.
Lauren Gifford: I’ve always been, I think, actually—
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, that’s — I hate getting dad comments like that too.
Lauren Gifford: Like — and this is just another like parenting thing, right? But like, man, we are privileged and barely make it through. Like, empathize with folks who have so many things not in their court. Like, it’s almost impossible. Sure, this is not going in the show, but you understand that I’m not actually calling that babysitting, right?
Chris Tolles: No, I know. I — okay. [unclear] any mom groups that I get into. Got it. Okay, I get the joke. He’s so good to babysit for an hour.
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, it’s like so nice. What a guy. Yeah, what a guy.
Ross Kenyon: How about you, Brandon? Did you have the [unclear] response to that, or what do you think?
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: Yeah, I can try. I mean, I think I am super glad we became parents and chose adoption, and super glad that we like wove together this kind of complicated family tree. It takes extra work. Like holidays take a lot of like, oh my gosh, how do we get to visit all the parts of our family tree? And we’ll make sure everybody sees each other. And how do we all stay connected? Takes extra work, but is super rewarding. And I love the fact that, yeah, my son is like growing up with just a constellation of people in his court. So that part I super, super love.
I guess the thing that’s maybe the most worrisome or troublesome is — and this, yeah, isn’t I guess so much specific to my story, but just the era of parenting we’re in, where especially if you’re parents of kids who are trans or kids who are gender non-conforming or queer in any way, or if you’re a parent who needs health care that they now can’t get in certain states. It just feels like so many parts of parenting and medical care, even IVF and things like that, are like under attack in different parts of our country.
That I know people who are like moving their kids to a different state because they have a trans kid in their family and want to make sure they can create a safe space to keep being parents and keep their family safe. And it’s fraught, really troubling time. And yeah, luckily I’m like an American of a reasonable amount of privilege. And yeah, I’m like a white guy, you know, with a job and a two-income household and all sorts of advantages in my court. And yeah, to become a parent took extra time and money to like navigate adoption and get lawyers and do second parent adoptions and all this stuff.
But yeah, the people I worry the most for right now are just the average people being adoptive parents or parents in general in this country. Anyone seeking healthcare and trying to like navigate raising a family. It’s a really — it’s a really tough time.
Chris Tolles: So we adopted through public DCF here in Massachusetts. So that’s the only thing I really know. The things I love about it are the proximity. Like definitionally, you know, birth families are near us, and that’s not the only thing that matters, but I’m really, really grateful that we’re in a family context where relationships with biofamily or extended biofamily are feasible. That’s something I’m really grateful for.
The second thing is, for all the things that are like broken about the system, I really believe that we’re sort of like in the ring. I totally respect people that have chosen other approaches, including each of you all. And some people actively choose to adopt not through the public system because they see how messed up the public system is. And that’s great for them. Like everyone gets to make the best decision for them. And I really love feeling like we’ve got a position of some sort of influence or authority. I would be surprised if some part of my professional life in the future doesn’t include sort of like adoption, fostering policy stuff.
I love that. The things I don’t like are not like too late, but sort of in parallel with our actual experience. I realized that adoption is like a system like any other system in America. And my metaphor back to the like, oh, you know, you’re doing such a good thing — my metaphor is always like, is being a cop good? And some people are like, yes, full stop, right? And some people are like, no, all cops are bad or bastards, right? But I’m like in the middle. I’m like, a police force is an incredibly important part of all civil society. And there’s ways it’s like super f*cked up. And adoption similarly is like a tool of the state. And I am like a discomforted participant in that system.
Lauren, I have not thankfully been on Facebook for many years, but I find abolitionist like adoptee Twitter to be a really, really important network for me. And they say a lot of the same things that you were just talking about. And that’s no judgement on whether it was smart or bad for you to be in that group. That sounds like a really toxic, horrible group. And people that say things like, you know, it’s human trafficking — I just like learned a lot from them, and there’s a lot of options that aren’t permanent adoption, and being able to hear from them is really valuable.
I really love — there’s a podcast called This Land, and season two is all about adoption and native land and how adoption and native tribes in the US intersect in really troubling ways. There’s a really awesome book called You Should Be Grateful. It’s about transracial adoption. There’s just like all these voices of people who are like, let’s not net out the good and the bad to try and make it rosy. Let’s just like stare all the really like horrible stuff in the face.
And that’s the paradox for me, is like having total confidence in the decision we’ve made and total enthusiasm that like, this is our family. And I want to listen to people who are telling me that like, the whole thing is trashed and tear it down, right? The same way — I think a lot of like hardcore defund the police, abolitionist anti-police movements have actually really informed policy. Like that’s an audience that I’m trying to — a set of experts, rather, that I’m trying to listen to, even as I think it makes me deeply uncomfortable about the specific decisions we’ve made and how we’re essentially benefiting from a lot of the injustice in public adoption in Massachusetts.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here everyone. I’m glad we got to talk about this, even though we all decided that the link to climate is weaker than people think. I think that makes it a good show though, because everyone thinks the link is really tight, and so now we get to be contrarian and very smart. We are the smartest people out there now, telling them the link is not that tight, which is very fun.
Lauren Gifford: Let’s write a grant to get that funded, to write a report about it.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, is that an academic joke right there?
Lauren Gifford: Yeah, that’s all an academic joke. The whole thing, the whole project.
Brandon Bowersox-Johnson: We could start a committee to, you know, to write the grant.
Lauren Gifford: And make a dashboard.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, yeah.
