written by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Paula, crossposted from Heart, Mind and Seoul
Imagine you recently started a job you absolutely love. The manager to whom you report is kind, friendly, accepting and respectful. Though you’re not exactly sure of each and every project that you’ll be working on, you feel good about the work you’ve done so far.
As the months roll along, your supervisor has given you increasingly more autonomy in your position, something you find both refreshing but somewhat confusing. For instance, you have been given several assignments that you are completely unfamiliar with and you’re not exactly sure if what you’re doing is on the right track or not. Some of the material is a bit daunting as you have never experienced this kind of work before. This has left an unsettling and anxious feeling in your gut. You’ve tried delicately to bring up your areas of concern, but do so in a less than obvious way as to not offend or upset your boss; in fact the last time you tried to approach the subject your boss reassured you that you are doing a great job and that everything you’re doing is right. In your heart you know that your boss truly has no idea of the internal distress that you’re experiencing, but you continue to remain reticent for fear that she and all of your colleagues will think of you as incompetent and a poor performer. It’s all so mind-boggling to you; everyone is constantly telling you how confident and together you are, while inside you’re floundering and scared by the onslaught of feelings that you’re having – afraid that no one really understands what you’re going through.
Years later you and your former boss meet up for lunch. She still marvels at how composed, how mature and how focused you seemed to be in your former position. At long last you feel compelled to say what you couldn’t so many years ago. “I was so lost. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or who I could turn to. I tried to talk to you about it, but I don’t think we knew what the other was saying. As much as I liked working with you, it just would have been nice to have a little more guidance or someone to talk to.”
Your former boss looks at you absolutely stunned. “I honestly don’t know what to say. I just thought it would be best to follow your lead and since everything seemed perfectly fine from the outside, I just assumed you didn’t need my help. I truly really had no idea that you had any questions, apprehensions or concerns about your job at all.”
* * *
I must admit, I cringe just a little bit every time I hear an adoptive parent say they plan to follow their child’s lead when it comes to addressing the different aspects in adoption. Whether it’s talking about their child’s first family, integrating their child’s ethnic culture, addressing the subject of race and race consciousness, identity, loss, grief, feelings of rejection, fear of abandonment or resistance to trust, I can’t help but think what a tremendous burden it possibly might be on the child to have to be responsible to initiate and direct these kinds of conversations with their parents. . .the people a child looks up to, the authority figures and the ones who I believe should be behind the wheel.
As a child and even now as an adult, I know in both my heart and mind that I can talk to my parents about most anything when it comes to my adoption. And still, there are still a few things that I have been – and still am – reluctant to bring up on my own because they have never openly or directly talked about it themselves. Even as a grown adult, there is still a part of me that is so afraid of hurting or upsetting my parents. Never would I want them to think that I don’t love them or that my questions somehow imply that I’m not happy or content to be their daughter. Logically, my mind knows this doesn’t exactly make sense as they have never given me any reason to believe this, but still, there is a part in the deepest place of my heart that cannot take that risk.
Imagine being a child of 5, 8 or 12 years old and never having your parents approach the topic of your adoption other than saying things like “Be proud of the fact that you’re adopted”, “Being adopted makes you special” or “Other kids sure must be jealous of how lucky you are” without so much as an opening or opportunity to talk about the more complex and often times confusing aspects that accompany one’s status as an adoptee. Imagine how nervous, anxious and even frightened a child might be to ask their adoptive parents about his/her desire to know more about his/her first family, when it’s never been genuinely brought forth as a legitimate topic of discussion before. I personally believe that there are already so many responsibilities that many adoptees automatically take on and internalize when it comes to their relationship with their adoptive parents, that to ask an adopted child to be the facilitator of his/her own family adoption-related discussions is just too much of an unfair and unnecessary onus to place upon any adoptee.
Just today my son and I talked about his Korean family. I strive to find that balance in giving him the security of knowing that he is our son and that my husband and I are the mom and dad who are raising him while still honoring his beginnings including acknowledging the parents of whom he was born; the family who will always be a part of his identity and a part of who he is at his core. We don’t talk about adoption everyday, but we have authentic and unprompted conversations several times a week – it’s just something I feel very passionately about discussing frequently and openly in our everyday lives. Some days he says very little and shows hardly any interest and sometimes he has a host of questions about his Korean family, foster family or the differences in appearances between him and many of his peers. But I make it a point to provide numerous opportunities to talk about the myriad of different aspects pertinent to his adoption and allow him to share as little or as much as he chooses. And that is where I follow his lead.
I know certain adoption related conversations can be extraordinarily difficult and incredibly uncomfortable for adoptive parents. And sometimes, as we parents get swept up in the endless minutiae of everyday life, it becomes all too tempting and far too easy to set aside those conversations or discussions that we know we should be having with our child. But putting it off doesn’t make the topics go away, nor does it make it any easier on anyone in the long run. Especially on our children.
Thank you for this. I’m the mom to two daughters who came to me through adoption. My younger daughter came to me at 8 months of age and has been here 1 1/2 years. My older daughter came to me at age 7, about 7 months ago. Prior to her arrival she lived in an orphanage for about a year after her relinquishment. Because of her age, she remembers a lot about her family and her relinquishment. She remembers what she was told about the reasons she was relinquished. We talk about her first family and her adoption daily and most days several times a day. Sometimes she initiates it and sometimes I do. With her, there’s no way not to talk about it even if it bothered me. However, I really think her ability to talk about all of her life has really help her transition into being a part of my family. We read adoption books daily and talk about adoptive and birth families and how both are important and neither is better or worse than the other.
I’m sure having her here will make things much easier for my younger daughter because she will grow up with adoption and birth families being a regular part of the discussion (although my older daughter doesn’t want me to tell the younger one she’s adopted so she won’t have to be sad.) I can see how easy it would be to let those conversations slip if a child came home as an infant and how detrimental it would be to the child.
What an amazing analogy! The way you described it, I really could empathize with the “employee” in the work situation, to the point that I thought this post was going to be about the workplace. To think of a child being forced to cope with feelings within/regarding her family that would be challenging even for an adult to cope with regarding an adult’s workplace really puts things in perspective.
Imagine being a child of 5, 8 or 12 years old and never having your parents approach the topic of your adoption other than saying things like “Be proud of the fact that you’re adopted”, “Being adopted makes you special” or “Other kids sure must be jealous of how lucky you are” makes you special” or “Other kids sure must be jealous of how lucky you are” without so much as an opening or opportunity to talk about the more complex and often times confusing aspects that accompany one’s status as an adoptee. Imagine how nervous, anxious and even frightened a child might be to ask their adoptive parents about his/her desire to know more about his/her first family
i’m not sure if you’re an adoptee of 5, 8, or 12 you even have a concept of having another family at all. i mean, i sure didn’t.
there’s also a general feeling that to show any curiosity about anything other than the family you got is the height of ingratitude. this of course works the other way too, as the “you coulda wound up somewhere else” argument is a good one to squash down any of the usual childhood complaints.
being adopted of course also messes with your stance about abortion because of course you -know- you should be pro-choice but you also know that you were born in 1980 in a rural, fairly religious part of the country where the nearest planned parenthood is 100 miles away (in a very catholic city, who knows if it was there then) and so the pressures on your birth mother were likely to be pretty tough and really, you shouldn’t even be alive anyway.
Wonderful essay, and I also didn’t see where the analogy was headed. I thought it was going to be about being the only child of color in a classroom or school. I make a conscious effort to bring up adoption, as many different aspects as I can, with my three children. As a parent, I often feel I am the only adult who ever discussed these issues with my children. I don’t want their adoption related issues put on “display,” or made the topic of a family or class discussion, but I have noticed that family members and teachers NEVER even make a casual reference to birth mothers or adoption. My three year old is in a wild story telling phase, and one of her stories involves the imaginary death of her birth mother. The room falls silent when she brings this up, which gives me (and I assume, my daughter) a weird vibe that this must really be a taboo topic. This story might follow on the heels of a story of her driving a car and a Disney princess visiting our house, all part of her active imagination, but this is the one story that draws no follow up questions from doting grandparents and other family members (except me.) I think my daughter is at a phase where the phrase “fairy godmother” and “birth mother” are interchangeable. This essay was a beautiful reminder that I can’t expect her to take the lead in talking about the complexities of adoption and race. Thank you.
This post really resonated with me. [I read every new post at Paula’s blog with open eyes and a closed mouth. I keep listening and trying to learn.] I’m wondering where a new mother with millions of questions should begin? How do I even begin the conversation of transracial adoption with a two year old who is still learning to talk? Each time this subject is raised there are more opinions and “schools of thought” than I can wrap my brain around. The “data” is confusing at best and contradictory at worst. Being told to “trust my instinct” is useless. I can KNOW I should do something but if I don’t know HOW, I can’t get anywhere. I understand that many adoptive parents just stick their heads in the sand and pretend there’s nothing wrong. The truth is, many of us just don’t know where to start. Thanks in advance for anyone with a place to start.
Our daughter, also in a wild story-telling phase, is almost six. She was 2.5 when she came to us. These days, almost daily, she asks to hear stories about when we met, the brave things she did, what she had been afraid of, how she reacted to us before she knew us, the first time she laughed with us, the awful mess she made at dinner one of those first nights, how she’d screeched her sweet little head off on the way home on the plane, , what things were like in the orphanage, how her birth mother brought her to the orphanage, and how her birth mother and the orphanage nannies loved her–still love her. It’s the song and story of her life, and we want her to know what we know. Thank you for the reminder that it’s our job to tell the stories and to squeeze our brains for every detail we can. I watch her trying to sort this out and so much of it is difficult. Thanks too for the reminder not to leave a five-year-old to sort out alone things that I, as a grown woman, can’t think about without tears.
Irshlas, we started with books. We had several picture books about adoption and we read them to our daughter starting when she was an infant. By the time she was in preschool she could “read” them to us. “The Day We Met You” is a very simply book that makes it easy to fill in your family’s story while you read. It starts “The sun was shining the day we met you”, and we always added “oh, no, the day we met you it was a BLIZZARD”. All children love to hear their own story, and our daughter knows hers. I always figured when she pulled those books off the shelf, it was a sign that she adoption was on her mind.
We also talk with our daughter about her birthparents – we have pictures of her birthmother and half-brother and they’re in her album, so she looks at them whenever she looks at family pictures and we talk about them.
I don’t know how or when she’ll start wrestling with her racial heritage. She is biracial and fair-skinned; her coloring is not that different from mine in the winter. She knows her birthfather is Jamaican. We talk about it as best we can, and we’ve talked a lot about other biracial people in the news (Derek Jeter is a favorite in our house, and of course Obama has generated a lot of discussion).
My partner and I are mothers to 6 transracially adopted children, ages 5 to 9. The children all came to us during infancy or within their first 18 months and all came from our county child welfare agency, having been removed from birth families because of prenatal drug and alcohol abuse. We have always been as open and honest as we felt was appropriate, given the various stages of our childrens’ development. They all know they are adopted and know their birth parents’ names. We call their birthmothers their “tummy moms” because they grew in their tummies. We are their “forever moms” because we will be here for them “forever.”
To some extent they know their histories. One explanation we’ve offered is, “your tummy mom was taking some drugs that were not good for her. She became sick from the drugs and, though she loved you very much, was not able to keep you safe and to give you what you needed to grow and develop. We were able to take care of you so you came to stay with us. After a while, a judge let us adopt you and we became your “forever family”.
Kids deserve to know their stories-who they are, where they came from, who they look like, what they were like as babies, what brought them to the family of adoption. Our nine year old is full of questions- about her birthmother and about herself as a baby. She very much wants to meet the woman who grew her in her tummy, who gave her her beautiful brown skin, her full lips and her tall frame. We will work to make this happen someday as we know it will strengthen her journey of self discovery that will help her grow into her adolescence and adulthood.
Our children know they are adopted but their is no question that we are their “real parents” and that we are a “real family.” A line from a poem written by our 9 year old entitled JUST BECAUSE goes like this:
“Just because I’m adopted doesn’t mean I don’t have afamily.”
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. My 5 year old daughter and 22 month old son are both adopted from China. We use a lot of books as well as normal discussion. We’re just incorporating the discussion of her time in China, her birthparents etc., all along in discussions we have about everything. She knows that in our family, nothing is taboo to discuss — we have fabulous discussions — and either of us can bring the subject up at any time. (I might add we discuss everything from adoption to faith to politics to style/design to sports…all are integrated into our lives.) I love that you suggested letting them take the lead as to the “intensity” of the conversation. I will continue to be pro-active in the discussion of both children’s formative year in China.
I also had no idea where this was going. Very well written and I will share this with friends. Thank you.
Comment 8 brings up issue for me and I’m wondering how others feel about it. It makes me personally uncomfortable to consider myself the forever mom and my son’s birth mom NOT his forever mom? She is not raising him, but that doesn’t make her any less his mom, right? Same with real mom too…just because you don’t see someone that is part of your family doesn’t make him not part of your family.
I am also very uncomfortable and have to disagree with adoption language referring to “real” parents–in our case our daughter has had three, birth, foster, and us. All are equally important in her life just in different ways. I love this piece Paula and have linked it on my blog because I feel it is so important for AP’s to begin the discussion when their children join their family, it is not a “talk”, it is a part of their and our lives.
I was adopted when I was 2 weeks old. My parents constantly told me I was special and that felt great until my teen years when I didn’t want to be special. I wanted to be “family”. I held it in for a long time as well. I once told my mother that she wasn’t my real mother when we got into a heated argument during my frightful teen years. I will never forget it. I obviously didn’t mean it and regretted saying it immediately after. But I feel like she introduced me to the idea of “real” and “not real” parents. I have since met my birth parents and I have only called them my birth parents and never mom and dad. I have often felt like my parents should have never told me that I was adopted because I felt like it involuntarily separated me from my family. But I understand the distrust that would have come out of them not telling me. It is very difficult I imagine for adoptive parents to understand what is going on in their children’s minds. I believe my ‘age of reason’ came about when I was a pre-teen (12 or 13 yrs old). If I could travel back in time I would ask my parents to talk to me more about my adoption. I would let them know that they can ask me open ended questions about adoption and family. I think that would have eased some of my future concerns. Even reinforcing the fact that the adoptive parents are the “parents” and expound on what that entails. Most kids/teens do not understand what is involved in parenting in general so when parents give a blanket statement “I am the one who is raising you” if they don’t get an eye roll or blank stare I am surprised. I enjoyed reading your blog because it reminded me how both my parents and I felt very similarly about the situation, worried, naive, uneasy, etc.
Thanks!
Marci,
As an adoptive mom, I thank you for sharing your perspective! I know that every child and every situation is different, but I still feel as though I gain insights from adult and teen adoptees that may be helpful to my family.