A parent's perspective on RTT's episode about transracial adoption

-

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 would portray her story. She has been brutally honest about her experiences; how would that be portrayed in a show that is typically under 25 minutes 
long?

Three minutes in and I was in tears.

“Being a transracial adoptee, it is difficult to share what we really feel because we have parents who raised us and love us, and we don’t want to appear that we’re not grateful for what they’ve done. For me to talk about transracial adoption honestly is to hurt somebody,” she said.

Take out the word transracial and that is exactly how I feel about my family, specifically my mom. 
After several years of stops and starts, when I finally decided to search for my birth father, I felt that I had betrayed my mom. When I finally decided to search, it was partially because I was tired of hurting myself. From then on, every decision I made about the search was partially informed by this sense of either betraying my mom or myself. I think I will always struggle with that.

As I was processing these feelings, I also started praying that I can help The Kid avoid feeling the same way. She knows she was adopted, that Gladys and I wanted a family and jumped at the chance when God asked us to raise this little girl. She used to ask me if I ever met my birth father and is very aware of what the past year has been like for me. My personal experience tells me that she will probably want to know more about her birth parents, and I need to prepare myself so I can be as supportive as she needs me to be.

The rest of the episode was complicated. Knowing that there was probably at least two hours of taping to make a 22 minute show, I know there was a lot of the conversation that was left on the editing floor. It was edited to make the questions Angela has about her identity look more dramatic than they probably feel in real life. Sadly, it was edited to emphasize that she absolutely had to make a choice about her identity in that moment, ignoring her own agency over her life.

A few years ago, I read Laina Dawes’ book, What Are You Doing Here?, after listening to her interview on NPR. She was also adopted by a white family from a predominantly white community and became a heavy metal fan in high school, something she hid from the few black friends she had in order to be accepted. She wrote, “Most importantly, I learned that in order to maintain my sanity and love myself for whom I was, I had to be me – whether I lost my “black pass” or not,” a line that immediately came to mind when I was watching Angela’s interview on RTT.

Which is why I had trouble reading Laina’s book and watching this episode of RTT. Regardless of the steps we take to help The Kid learn about her birth culture, and no matter how black she feels, solely because she was adopted by a white man and a Puerto Rican woman who wanted to have a family, she will probably never be accepted by any of those cultures.  

Thought of another way, it’s just another obstacle that we will tackle together as a family. One that I pray will make The Kid a stronger person.


Popular posts from this blog

Marching for hope in our neighborhood

-
Image
The Kid and I walked our neighborhood this evening, but with a different purpose than usual. Many in our neighborhood gathered at Gesu Catholic Church to March for Hope . Roughly this time last year, a federal judge who lives a few streets over, was shot on his front porch in a botched robbery attempt. His physical recovery from the single bullet to the knee took the better part of a year and extensive rehabilitation, and his emotional recovery was sped by his church community and immediate neighbors. I don't know the judge, nor am I a member of his church Gesu Catholic. I'm not much of a protest guy either, I prefer to work behind the scenes. I read about the walk this morning , and almost forgot about it until Gladys started to do some work for a class she's taking. So we bundled up The Kid, and the two of us walked over to the church to support our neighborhood. When we walked into the church, I was struck immediately with the knowledge that this was not a protes...
Read more

Yet another blog of parenting advice

-
Image
A friend whose wife is expecting their first child was asking me for advice today. He's going to be a new dad, so he was asking in general terms because until you're in it, you really don't know what to ask for. My knee-jerk reaction was to tell him to get rest. Lots of it, whenever you can from now until the kids are adults. Forget the idea of work/life balance too, because balance is a myth. Sometimes work will take priority, sometimes the kids will, and sometimes dad has to be a priority. If you're too concerned about hitting a false measure of balance, you're going to miss something. The End of the Beginning And that was it. That's all I could come up with until I got in the car and scarfed down one of the sugar cookies I bought for myself as a treat that I had no intention of sharing. Here's what I came up with. Avoid watching Caillou at all costs. For some reason, kids are absolutely mesmerized by him. No adult on that show holds the kid acc...
Read more

The one question you can ask that is guaranteed to offend an adoptee

-
Image
The more I open up about my personal experience trying to find my birth father, the more convinced I become that people talk about adoptee experiences from the wrong lens. There is an implicit bias toward the adoptive parent perspective that can, and often does, negate the experience of the adoptee. I started really paying attention when people were asking me why I waited so long to reach out to my birth father. That is a legitimate question for his family to ask me, especially when considering he was in the last stages of his life. For the general public, I have a different standard and I would hope they would also ask me a second question, but few ever do. Did your birth family ever come looking for you? The only people that ask are my dearest friends. For the most part, I try to answer the first question sincerely and directly. Usually, I land on something like it took a long time to make the decision because I did not want to hurt anyone but eventually I realized I was ...
Read more