Adoption story is one of love

Sometimes Jana Wolff feels invisible. <br><br>She can stand right next to her 9-year-old son, and yet strangers will assume that the brown-skinned boy is all alone. <br><br>People can't see what Jana,

Tuesday, April 4th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Sometimes Jana Wolff feels invisible.

She can stand right next to her 9-year-old son, and yet strangers will assume that the brown-skinned boy is all alone.

People can't see what Jana, her husband, Howard, and their son, Ari, feel - they are a tight-knit, loving family. What they can see is that Jana and Howard are white, and Ari, the biracial child they adopted as a newborn, is not.

"Sometimes I feel like I have all the badges of motherhood: I wake up at night, I worry about him. I smell like Cheerios," she says. "We are a very, very close family, and I forget that people can't see that."

Adoption, says Ms. Wolff, is a complicated process that stirs a wave of mixed emotions.

That is why when Ari was 2, Ms. Wolff began writing a book about her feelings and the challenges of raising a child of another race.

Called Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother, (Vista Communications, $12.95), the book offers a candid view of adoption.

"Society thinks adoptive parents only have the happy emotions, and we don't," the Honolulu resident says. "There are a whole set of experiences that need to be given a voice."

As a little girl, Ms. Wolff writes, she use to pretend she gave birth to a baby doll. When the time came for her to start a family, she instead traded her girlhood dreams for expensive infertility treatments.

When the treatments failed, the Wolffs turned in desperation to adoption.

She and her husband carefully weighed questions that biological parents rarely consider. Would they consider a baby with physical or mental impairments? Would they take an older child? Could they parent a child of another race?

The Wolffs decided they wanted a healthy newborn of any race. And they decided they would have an open adoption, a process that would allow ongoing contact with the birth mother.

When an adoption attorney told them she had a prospective birth mother, the Wolffs were flooded with emotions.

In her book, Ms. Wolff publishes the letter she wrote to her son's birth mother, a then 18-year-old Mexican-American high schooler who lived in California. The letter praised the young woman's courage. Then Ms. Wolff writes the letter she didn't dare send, a passage that expresses her resentment "for having to beg a complete stranger for her baby when I really want my own."

It's a passage, Ms. Wolff says, that she has been criticized for by birth mothers.

"All of us buy into unfair stereotypes about birth mothers. We think the guys are sleazy, that the birth mother will be lurking behind every door waiting to get their child back.

"But one of the benefits of open adoption is that you don't see a myth. You see a real person and that this is an enormous decision. I couldn't do what this 18-year-old did," she says.

Martie, the birth mother, chose the Wolffs to adopt her son and allowed them to attend the birth. Right after Ari was born, the Wolffs faced the first challenge of raising a biracial child.

Ari's birth father is African-American and white. The newborn was clearly brown, dark enough that a pediatrician and social worker paid the Wolffs a visit to gently remind them that babies generally get darker and they still had time to back out.

Ari's birth, says Ms. Wolff, forever changed the way she views race.

"Your radar goes up. You see racism all around you, and you think, 'Why didn't I see that before?'" she says.

Ms. Wolff often encounters what she calls "friendly racism," the remarks from well-meaning folks who think Ari will grow up to be a basketball player, or those who must touch his curly hair.

Then there are her fears of how society will judge Ari as he gets older.

"Ari was into soccer for awhile, and we would stop at the 7-Eleven afterwards and he would get a Slurpee. We'd be really happy, and the girls behind the counter would joke with him.

But then I thought, five to 10 years from now, he will go in there alone and the girls won't see the happy little boy. He will become a suspect," she says.

Ms. Wolff has endured glares from blacks as well as whites who don't approve of interracial adoptions. It's a sentiment she understands.

Life would probably be easier for Ari, she says, if he had been placed with a black family. But Martie chose the Wolffs, "and that comforts me," Ms. Wolff says.

Besides, if the alternative meant that Ari would have languished in foster care when their home "was so ready and wanting, it seems cruel to have given him anything less," she says.

The Wolffs, who are Jewish, make a concerted effort to teach Ari about his cultures. They live in a culturally diverse neighborhood. They seek out friends in Hawaii's tiny black community. They surround him with family love that they hope will be strong enough to support him.

"It's a hard balance. Ari loves us, but I don't want him to grow up wanting to be white. I want him to love to be black. But I can't teach my son how to be black. We reach out for help for that," she says.

Ari has also learned to answer the questions that his parents once answered for him.

When a classmate asks about his "real" mother, Ari sometimes will say "You must mean my birth mother.' Sometimes he'll deflect the question with humor. And other times, when he is as tired as his mother from answering questions, he'll simply walk away.

Adoption, says Ms. Wolff, may not be for everyone. It certainly wasn't her first choice. But the process has given the Wolffs the child they wanted and has enriched their lives in ways that they cannot measure.

"Adoption is a wonderful way to create a family. It's not as easy as having a biological child, but I can't imagine not having Ari in my life or loving him anymore than if we shared DNA," she says.