Adopting Fatherhood

Regardless of what you think about race in America, my experience as a white man is undoubtedly different than the experience my daughter has, and will continue to have, growing up. I never feel like I understand quite enough, and I always want my daughter to feel like she can come to me for help, so I always push myself to learn more. Her experience growing up will be vastly different than mine in part because we are a transracial family. To try understanding what The Kid might face growing up, I follow several transracial adoptees and their journeys online, including Angela Tucker and her series, The Adopted Life . Watching the series and reading any of the interviews she shares online has helped me confront fears that I have as an adoptive parent and to better understand my own history having never met my birth father .   When Angela took to Twitter to announce that the episode of Red Table Talk featuring her story was going to air soon, I was nervous about how they ...

This post originally appeared in the Detroit Free Press as an op-ed in November 2014.  When my wife Gladys and I were going through the mandated screening needed to adopt our daughter, our social worker joked that there is a no-return policy on adopted kids. I am sure she intended it to be our final reminder that adopting a child is a permanent lifestyle change. I heard her and immediately assumed that someone she worked with must have changed their mind at some point, and she wanted to make sure that never happened to another child. I do not know if my assumption was right, but I was reminded of it reading some of the comments on the hashtag for National Adoption Month, which is happening right now. There is very little “real talk” in recruiting potential adoptive parents, and that needs to change. The reality for adoptive parents is that for you to have a family, another family has experienced a tragic loss and the child you are adopting knows it, even the little o...