Hospitious Adoption Consid- JAMES L
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GritterBookCoverFINAL:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:54 PM Page 1 Gritter How Hospitality Empowers Children and Transforms Adoption Using the lens of hospitality to explore the creative potential of adoptive HOSPITIOUS relationships, James L. Gritter offers a congenial yet challenging depiction of adoption. In his hands, hospitality becomes the next phase of open adoption. ADOPTION The hospitious perspective encourages families to forge meaningful, dynamic, and enduring connections. And with its insight that each participant will play the role of guest and host as an adoption matures, hospitality enables us to see the children of adoption in a bold new way—as emerging hosts. With case studies from the author’s experience, Hospitious Adoption consid- JAMES L. GRITTER ers each step of the process. The book also carefully examines potential barriers Foreword by Randolph Severson to hospitality: an expectant parent’s decision to discontinue a proposed adoption, HOSPITIOUS ADOPTION a pairing of very different birthparents and adoptive parents, an adoptive fam- ily’s concern about privacy, an agency’s worry about efficiency. Drawing on his personal perspective, Gritter discusses the link between hospitality and faith. With its power to bring people together and to help children feel “at home,” hos- pitality offers an encouraging way forward. James L. Gritter is also the author of The Spirit of Open Adoption and Lifegivers for CWLA Press. “Hospitious Adoption brings the adoption journey into the familiar world of relationships and the ingredients that allow them to blossom. Setting a valuable standard, it offers guidelines for a healthier journey for all involved. Written with clarity and thoughtful candor, it truly joins all partici- pants as valued, blended family members.” – Patricia Martinez Dorner MA, LPC, LMFT Author, How to Open an Adoption: A Guide for Parents and Birthparents of Minors “Jim Gritter’s new book is a thoughtful, uplifting joy of an addition to adoption literature. The path he illuminates with his insights is one that, if followed, will lead us all to a better place— one where (to paraphrase the author) we unite families rather than divide them. It’s a wonderful vision for adoption and beyond. I hope everyone reads this book, embraces it, and lives it.” – Adam Pertman Executive Director, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute Author, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America “Jim Gritter breathes yet another breath of fresh air into the world of adoption in Hospitious Adoption. To this adoptee’s heart, the words ring true and are life-giving.” – Sherrie Eldridge Author, Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-58760-123-1 2345 Crystal Drive, Suite 250 • Arlington, VA 22202-4815 703-412-2400 • Fax 703-412-2401 • www.cwla.org HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 1 HOSPITIOUS ADOPTION JAMES L. GRITTER Foreword by Randolph Severson Arlington, VA HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 2 CWLA Press is an imprint of CWLA. CWLA is the nation’s oldest and largest member- ship-based child welfare organization. We are committed to engaging people everywhere in promoting the well-being of children, youth, and their families, and protecting every child from harm. All proceeds from the sale of this book support CWLA’s programs in behalf of children and families. ©2009 by Child Welfare League of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For infor- mation on this or other CWLA publications, contact the CWLA Publication Department at the address below. CWLA HEADQUARTERS 2345 Crystal Drive, Suite 250 Arlington, Virginia 22202-4815 www.cwla.org CURRENT PRINTING (last digit) 10987654321 Cover and text design by Tim Murren Edited by Meghan Williams Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-58760-123-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gritter, James L., 1950- Hospitious adoption / James L. Gritter ; foreword by Randolph Severson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-58760-123-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Open adoption. 2. Adoptive parents. 3. Birthparents. 4. Adoption. I. Title. HV875.G753 2009 362.734--dc22 2009000794 HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 3 This book is dedicated to Dick Beachnau, a man of boundless grace and hospitality. An administrator who had the goodwill, respect, and courage to notice, listen to, and make room for idealistic young social workers, he created a culture in which amazing things could happen. HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 4 HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD BY RANDOLPHSEVERSON vii INTRODUCTION 1 TOWARD HOSPITABLE ADOPTION LANGUAGE 9 1. OLD DOGS AND FARMERS: Hospitality as the Gateway to Connection 17 2. THE ETHIC OF HOSPITALITY: “Strange and Amazing Things Can Happen” 27 3. SAVORING HOSPITALITY’S WELCOME: Through the Eyes of the Stranger 37 4. THE DYNAMIC POTENTIAL OF HOSPITALITY: The Adoptive Child as Emerging Host 45 5. HOSPITALITY’S SWEETEST FRUIT: Feeling at Home with Each Other 69 6. NATAL HOSPITALITY: The Art of Gentle Transition 75 7. INVERTED HOSPITALITY: Working Through a Change of Heart 89 8. DOING HOSPITALITY: Working with Differences 99 HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 6 9. HOSPITIOUS AVAILABILITY: Privacy as Friend and Foe 115 10. WELCOMING THE WELCOMERS: How Agencies Make Room for Programs Based on Hospitality 125 11. CHILD-CENTERED HOSPITALITY: The Next Phase of Openness 133 12. SPEAKING PERSONALLY: Hospitality as an Expression of Faith 139 13. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: Hospitious Implications and Applications 147 REFERENCES 171 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 177 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 181 HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 7 vii FOREWORD t is hard to write a foreword to a book whose candor and clarities Iare so revealing of a private resolve, of what has been generally intended and practiced but never truly identified, much less so art- fully anatomized, so usefully and comprehensively described. One must feel a bit exposed, a trifle envious, but entirely grateful. These feelings, I suspect, I’ll share with many readers of Hospitious Adoption. The hardship is worth enduring because adoption is such impor- tant work. Adoption touches millions of people, literally, but touches is hardly the word; adoption, its aches and its intimacies, grabs, grips, crushes sometimes, and always shakes those who find themselves involved in it as triad member or professional, to the farthest reaches of their foundations. It’s volcanic in intensity, seismic in effect. The sad fact, however, is that some people don’t know it, or more truly said, deny it, and as a result—whether as birthparent, cowering in shame and secrecy; or adoptive parent, hoping that love is enough and will heal all wounds; or as adopted people, trying to persuade someone, not least of all themselves that “my adoptive parents are my only real parents”; or as professionals maintaining their objec- tivity—live quiet lives of alias identities. It has been said that God created the world because he loved a good story. He must love adoption, because adoption makes a whale of a good story. Adoption throws into sharp relief so many of our ulti- mate concerns and worst failings as human beings—abandonment, suffering, loss, separation, the soul and body split, sex, illegitimacy, orphanhood, power, society, imagination, men and women, mystery, soul searching, reunion—so that they can be known not in the abstract, but with a human face and story. HospitiousAdoption4:Layout 1 3/13/09 2:53 PM Page 8 viii Hospitious Adoption Adoption is an important work and this book goes to the heart of adoption, where the author maintains hospitality resides. Hospitality may be at the heart of humanity too, the defining fea- ture of what makes us human, just lower than the angels as the Bible says. Humanity not so much as worker or wise, but hospitable man, the animal able to lift himself above the other animals by the virtue of showing hospitality to the stranger, even the enemy. Even amidst the worst kinds of conflicts, the most vicious of divisions, human beings seem astonishingly capable of suspending for a moment their grievances and feuds, even their age-old hates, of stepping beyond their normal roles and into a larger self through acts, small and great, of hospitality. I think of a scene from Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust, when Bayard—the Southern archetype of the lost generation, home from World War I; decadent, cursed by survivor’s guilt, hurtling and sinking into headlong self-destruction and unreachable despair, incomprehensible to his aging aristocratic Sartoris family—flees through the woods, running away from something, frankly, when on Christmas Day he enters into the home of a black family preparing to sit down for their Christmas dinner. From the outside, to the per- son of Bayard’s race and rank, the home would normally be almost invisible, a shack in the woods; but once he is graciously invited to cross its threshold, it is a home where Christ’s birth is being cele- brated with all due honor in a dinner that represents the best the house can offer. As Bayard begins to eat, he realizes that the mother and father are waiting for him to eat first, but he overrides their objections so that they all sit down, the mother and father and chil- dren, to dine together. They break bread together in a fleeting act of human communion that defies stored-up evils and leaves only Jim Crow standing at the door.