When the journey to adoptive parenthood is undertaken, doubts, questions, fears and some tension arise between the dream family and the possible family. Often, future parents carry years of attempts to achieve a pregnancy that never comes; they are overwhelmed, they are filled with uncertainties and, after the cocktail of failed hopes and the time they spend worrying about getting that pregnancy they desperately crave, they suffer.
However, paternity does not end with the biological facts of fertilization and pregnancy. María Adela Mondelli knows it well. This Argentine psychoanalyst, researcher of the consequences that the social, family and relational environment brings to people, is a mother by the adoptive path and has a long career of work and reflection in the field of adoption. We have had a long interview with her that we will share here with you in successive deliveries.
Today, the constitution of the adoptive family. “Being a mother, father or adopted son and daughter is essentially different from being a mother, father or biological child. Essentially, in its essence, different", María Adela explains, to add:"Any analogy that was intended to be made between one and the other would lead us to misunderstanding what is a function in the life of a boy or a girl. That is why it is very complicated to think of the adoptive family from the family paradigm as an effect of biology”.
Parenting has to do with the environment and not with genes, as is often believed; this is so?
Yes, motherhood and fatherhood are social functions in relation to the needs of protection and love towards a child, which no relationship has with biology, gender or the number of those who exercise them. This, the first that we have trouble understanding is the adoptive mothers and fathers, because we also come from the same cultural paradigm.
You would explain, then, to the family as a social fact and not as a biological fact.
Of course, what is considered is given by biology, in our families it is an eminently subjective construction, a subjective and subjective forcing. We produce mother, father, son, daughter, grandfather, aunt ... we produce family where there was none. We do not manage our families, we do not appropriate our families, we build our family with our sons and daughters.
I can think of the image of a son's production from desire, from love and arms ...
Indeed, a production driven by our desire to seem and the need of children for care, protection and love, certainly, but essentially it is a production driven by desires that had to be collated for its realization with reality and within it, confronting the Law. With the reality of abandonment, and with the reality of the renunciation of the biological son by impossibility or by decision, which does not change it. With a reality that is not that of assisted reproduction, or the donor of ovules or semen that "sells" the illusion of the biological as "the same" ... no ...
To close this attempt to define the family by way of adoption, how could you explain today its constitution?
The adoptive families are constituted on two duels: the one of the original and real abandonment in the boy and the girl and the one of the renunciation to the biological parentality of adult men and women. But it is sustained from the framework of the meeting of two desires: that of the boy or girl to live and that of the adult to prohibit it. The ethical dimension of this meeting demands respect from the community, the social and the legal.
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