Recently, I had a book of interviews with transracial adoptees home from the library. I dipped into it, but didn't read much before returning it. "The interview format just doesn't work for me," I said to myself, and this is true: I don't normally enjoy reading or listening to interviews.
But the other reason I didn't read it deeply is that I have Yehva now, and I did not want to imagine her in some angry adult complaining about how her mother (it's always the mother) got it wrong. The book may not even have had any angry adults complaining about their mothers. It's just that I'd read that kind of thing before, pre-Yehva, and I didn't want to encounter it again now that I could be the mother in question.
I agree with you 100% that this is cowardly of me.
So, the other night I decided to make the best of insomnia by finally spending some time reading what adoptees have to say. If you go to John Raible's blog and look at his blogroll, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I was reading, though I also read some that aren't on that list, and I don't necessarily remember who they were or how I found them, and I couldn't necessarily find them again; they link and inter-link to each other, though, and it's clear there's a community there of activist, sometimes angry adult transracial adoptees (or TRAs).
I have a few observations about my reading.
One is that there seem to be more--I want to stop saying angry because it might seem dismissive and judgmental--maybe politicized is a better word?--OK, politicized international adoptees. Often these are people who were adopted from Vietnam or Korea after wars that America was involved in, and it seems to have been very common for families to simply ignore or deny racial and cultural differences. I found myself hoping that we do better these days, that maybe even the imperfect ways that families wrestle with questions of race and culture will mean that we're doing better by the children we have now. People who were adopted from Vietnam after the war have a common refrain: "I was pulled away from my culture and every person I had ever known, and expected to be grateful for it." I hope we do a better job of not laying that kind of burden on our kids. (I think I'll come back to the gratitude thing later.)
Another is that they make some right-on, valid points. For instance, it it certainly true to my own experience that the primary voices that are heard talking about adoption are adoptive parents. Apparently there are a lot of people like me, who are so fascinated by this whole thing they're going through that they churn out endless blogs and memoirs and confessionals. I would say the second most common speakers on adoption are people who work in the field; birthparents are a very distant third, and adoptees are rarely sought out for commentary when adoption hits the news for some reason. So when John Raible asks us to call media outlets on this--to drop them a note saying, "Hey, why did you not interview a single adoptee in your recent story?"--he has good reason to.
This issue also matters because the perception of parent and child about how the family is doing can be very different. And it matters because adoptive parents are not necessarily very good at listening when adoptees speak; Harriet at Fugitivus later apologized, sort of, for asking adoptive parents to stay out of the comments on one of her posts, but her original request came from experience. She wrote:
I put that disclaimer out there because in the adult adoptee blog sites I’ve frequented, thread derailments seem to be most often started by adoptive parents who are terrified at having their choices, motivations, and privilege questioned.
*su sheepishly raises hand*
But, on the other hand, sometimes people complained about an experience they had in their family, and attributed it to adoption, when it just seemed like bad family shit to me. In a conversation about adoption on MetaFilter, one person described feeling like she did not fit in with her family at all. She didn't look like them, she was the only one who was musical, and so on. This was painful to her, and she attributed it to being adopted; for her, being adopted meant she never fit in with her family. A number of people chimed in to say that they had felt exactly the same way about the family they were born into, but she insisted that her situation was different. Maybe it was, or maybe it was just easy to blame this unfortunate dynamic on adoption.
A few weeks ago, an adoptive mother told a story on her blog (I am so sorry I don't have links for a lot of this; I didn't bookmark stuff and the content has stayed with me but I can't seem to recreate the path I took to find this stuff) about telling her teenage daughter to stop complaining: "If you were still in China, you'd be working 14 hours a day in a factory."
This gets to that gratitude thing I mentioned above. You can see that Asian adoptees are not making it up, and I hear it sometimes from people, who tell me that Yehva is lucky to have us. Sometimes they just mean we're good parents, and I appreciate that. But sometimes they mean that she is lucky not to be living where she was born (which, for the record, is Chicago). I don't think about it that way, and hope that I would never suggest to Yehva that she is lucky that her birthmother was a drug addict and her teenage birthfather was ignorant of how to protect his parental rights, because that meant she got to be in our family instead.
But I also thought this mom's comment about factories in China wasn't necessarily an adoption problem at all--it seemed like a parenting problem to me. Any woman who would say something so unkind to her daughter would say something unkind to any daughter she had, biological or adopted. In a parallel universe where that woman had a biological child instead of adopting from China, she'd be saying something just as nasty and posting about it on her blog as if it were the most OK thing in the world. Adoption shaped the form that her disrespect for her daughter took, but I have seen too many biological parents treat their children just as badly to assume that adoption caused the disrespect.
That sounds dismissive, and I don't mean it to. Maybe it is and I shouldn't have said it. Maybe that was just me being defensive again. Maybe I'm just reacting out of my hope, as one of those bad-fit kids (I was convinced through most of elementary school that I was a changeling), that parenting can make a difference, that if this woman (and I) had had parents who did a better job of accepting our differences, we wouldn't have felt so out of place.
The truth is, it is hard for me, as an adoptive parent who wants everything to be good for her kid and isn't sure how best to make it good, to listen to adoptees talk about what wasn't good for them. And to hear the challenge in what they say. I took a break from writing to read this post on white LGBT families adopting children of color, and the particular tensions that can arise. I was very interested in what he had to say about the white siblings of adopted children of color, since I have those kids, too, and I was chugging along nodding my head at how on-target he seemed, and then I was suddenly brought to tears by the question: When will your child get a break from being the obviously adopted child?
Raible was talking about the subtle pressure that is always present for transracially adopted kids, and for some reason that question made it real for me. As a lesbian, I experienced that background tension that gets so familiar you forget it's there until you walk into a place where practically everybody is a lesbian and you feel it melt away. When and how can it melt away for Yehva as she gets older, and stops being, in Raible's words about his own childhood, "a cute and cuddly curiosity in [the] neighborhood"?
I did not when Yehva was born, and do not now remotely meet Raible's criteria for white adoptive parents. If I am being honest with myself, this means I probably have some changing to do.
5 comments:
Hm.
I don't believe that adoptive parents are always more likely to be dismissive of their adopted kids in the ways that you describe.
But I do know, from talking at length with one of my friends, who is adopted, that her mom spent a while creating a narrative for her two adoptive kids that somehow did play up the difference, which she didn't do with her two bio-kids.
So yes, absolutely. People can practice bad parenting.
But I'm not convinced that some adoptive parents, at some points in time, have not gotten more of a pass for doing so.
I am surprised that there are fewer adopted kids who talk about it than birthmoms. But I don't know anything, there. :-)
One of the things that makes discussions about topics like this difficult is that racial dynamics are still in quite a bit of flux in many parts of the country, including ours, I think. So anyone who was a trans-racial adoptee child 30 years ago would have a different experience than a child now. Certainly, there are issues that never go away -- most poignantly the one about always being the obviously adopted child. But feelings of fitting into a larger community, acceptance by friends of different races -- I do think those things are evolving in a mostly positive direction.
I had a similar feeling of discomfort when I read the book "Black, White, Other" in which bi-racial children (mostly not adopted, but many raised by single white mothers) write of their experiences. There's a lot of "anger" in that book as well and it made me nervous. One thing that reassured me, however, was that the most common theme of pain was the feeling of being unique -- every one was a single "race" except them. Sometimes this worked in their favor, but more often not. My own kids' experience is noticably different. I'm sure they will (do?) struggle with racial identity issues at some point, but they are by no means "unique" in the sense that there are no other mixed-race people like them. Lansing is full of such children, and my kids know several other bi-racial kids personally. Any sport they play, class they take, etc., usually has at least one other bi-racial kid. (Bi-racial kids are more common than African American children in many of their circles, truth be told.) So while I respect the experiences of the adults in "Black, White, Other" and try to learn from their insights, I recognize that my kids will face different, hopefully less painful, challenges about their identity. I hope the same is true for trans-race adoptees who are young children today.
There are no guarantees in parenting either way, are there? I think your point about respect is important. The respect thing goes both ways. Especially among young adults, there is often a lack of respect for parents in spite of mistakes, but I expect part of that is a reaction against not feeling respected when they lived at home. Older adults often come to have more understanding as they themselves face parenting difficulties, but a lack of respect takes longer to forgive, I expect.
Stephanie
dan, I think the critique I'm hearing (and maybe didn't express very well) isn't so much that adoptees aren't talking and writing about it, but that, for instance, when adoption hits the news (like with the recent case of the woman who put her son on a plane back to Russia), media outlets almost never interview and quote adult adoptees when they're looking for people to give comments.
I appreciate and respect your ability and willingness to ask hard questions, and to admit that there's no way it's all going to be perfect -- while still going on with your daily life. Hopefully one thing all of your kids will have is a toolkit with which to deal with the crap life hands out. (I worry that this comes across as dismissive on my part; I don't mean it that way. I think, based on my own experience, that said toolkit is a very important thing parents can give their kids.)
I don't know how this fits in, and I almost didn't share it, but it hit me so hard, and it seems important:
"If you were still in China, you'd be working 14 hours a day in a factory."
Something my birth mother -- who is one of the people who raised me, but whom I no longer consider my mother -- said to me often was: "If I'd listened to your father's mother and aborted you,then you wouldn't be here right now. Would that make you happy?"
(I am pretty sure, now as an adult, that the notion of my very Catholic grandmother wanting my mother to have an illegal abortion -- this was pre-Roe -- was a lie; but I believed it then.)
Parenting problems, as you say, are parenting problems. I grew up in two violent and abusive households. A lot of the problems I faced as a teenager and face as an adult stem from that. But some of them don't. How do I sort them out? Does it even matter? In my life, it does, b/c sorting them out -- certain of them, anyway -- has been central to reclaiming my life, to healing, to living as a reasonably happy and sane adult.
I have to agree with Stephanie that a LOT of it depends on time and place, as well. My ex's ex grew up in the 70s in a town of 700 white people, and him (a mixed African American boy) and, later, his adopted sister, who was also African American. He actually doesn't seem to spend too much time feeling angry about this. Certainly there were major lacks, but he loves his parents and they love him and he knows they didn't know what they were doing and in many ways lacked tools.
My friends, white lesbians, have 12 year old African American twins. They have some concern that they tend to only make friends with kids from mixed families (isn't it GREAT that that can be a concern? even with the kids having an average number of friends?) but they live in Minneapolis in the, what are they, the aughts? now the teens? and in a neighborhood where they have numerous families living within a block where not everyone is the same race (the primary of these are two Asian kids with white parents, but there are AA adoptees (with white parents) and mixed kids with a variety of races of biological parents.)
They stand out sometimes, in some places, and I suppose they are "obviously adopted" - but they also move in circles where lots of kids are adopted, and lots of kids don't look like their parents (my ex, a small woman of Scandinavian heritage, has two bio kids who are 25% AA and 75% Scandinavian. They look like me (I'm Italian) - larger, with dark curly hair, olivey skin, etc. NO ONE thinks on first glance that they came from her body, but they did.
One of my best friends from childhood is white and has an adopted sister who is mixed AA/C. They lived across the street from another family with white birth kids and one adopted mixed kid. I was riding somewhere with this woman (from across the street) as an adult (I didn't know her well) but she said to my friend that it saved her having another family kind of like hers so nearby. The two adopted kids were maybe 4 years apart in age, and I don't think they played together or were particular friends, but just not being THE ONLY ONE was huge for her.
So, given my limited exposure to the subject, I have gathered that that is a big part of the struggle. Not necessarily how your parents parent (which is important for all kids) but what sort of environment they find for you. I know few other white families with African American children who have not, for whatever, reasons, chosen to live in areas where the child won't "stand out" so much, and will go to school with at least some kids in a similar situation. I think that's a huge mistake, personally, but it's not my call.
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