June 16, 2010 at 10:53 am · Posted by Tara · Filed under Adult Adoptee, Finding a Voice, Race, Transracial Adoption
Blog post written by Astrid Dabbeni
Several weeks ago, I was followed around a grocery store in the Pearl, an upscale neighborhood known to some as “Portland’s best-known art district.” At first, I didn’t realize that I was being followed on suspicion of shoplifting. Initially, I thought I was being stalked by another shopper. He followed me from aisle to aisle, watching me through display cases, at times crouching down as he crept closer. As soon as I realized that this man was an undercover security agent working for the store, I made a beeline for the check stand. After paying for my items, I went straight to customer service and asked to speak with the manager. Two managers came to talk with me and, after I explained the situation, they apologized profusely. One of the managers said I had been followed and profiled as a shoplifter because I was placing items into my reusable cloth grocery bag instead of a cart.
Knowing many people use their cloth bags to shop I was not satisfied with the explanation as to why I had been followed. When I asked whether they follow everyone who uses their own personal shopping bag, they replied, “of course not.” I had no doubt this was a case of racial profiling, so I asked the managers what it was that flagged me as a shoplifter (I was dressed to attend meetings that particular
day…not that this should matter, but as we know, it does). They had no answer for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what this experience would have been like for someone who didn’t feel safe to ask to speak up and how easy it would have been for me to go to my car, sit in the parking lot and cry. I believe that is what made me stay and ask the manager what they were going to do to prevent something like this from happening in the future. At a loss of words, the manager asked me if I had a suggestion. I offered three:
1. Put signs up in the store asking that customers NOT use their recycled bags as carts while shopping, announcing that they may be followed and accused of shoplifting.
2. Notify staff that, if they see someone using their personal shopping bag, they should nicely offer them a cart or basket and explain that they have a new policy that customers not use their own shopping bags. They should not accuse them of shoplifting!
3. Inquire with the security officer about what it was exactly I was doing that was so suspicious it made him think I was shoplifting.
The managers agreed to all three requests -with the exception that posted signs would not say folks will be accused of shoplifting!
After telling a friend/mentor (an African-American man) of my experience, he said “Good for you for going to customer service! Where do you think you learned to feel so entitled?” Instead of answering his question I responded with “Of course I felt entitled! Entitled to be treated fairly…period! Not because I am a woman of color but because I am a good person and I don’t deserve to be treated this way!” This was the first time I have really felt the truth in what I was saying about this power dynamic.
But, to really answer his question, it took several days and a lot of thinking…where did I learn to feel so entitled?
When I was 18, and began experiencing the world apart from my parents for the first time, I learned quickly that the world outside my parent’s umbrella didn’t first see me as Astrid, but as a Latina woman. And, certainly not as one who was entitled to white privilege. With this present situation, I wonder whether my sense of entitlement is the flip side of growing up with white parents in an all-white community…of course, I am entitled to being treated fairly, and I can’t help but wonder if I got a headstart on this journey, a headstart that my non-adopted Latina sisters in the U.S. do not experience and, therefore, don’t realize they have access to.
***
Update: I am excited to report that the grocery store now has posted signs at the entrances stating that customers are not to use personal shopping bags while shopping. I also have a meeting next week to talk with the store manager to discuss other ways this situation could have been handled.
June 2, 2010 at 10:05 am · Posted by Tara · Filed under Adoption Blogs, Adult Adoptee, Birth/First parents, Guest Blog, Kinship, Talking about Adoption, Transracial Adoption
From Guest Blogger Melissa Konomos visit her at Yoon’s Blur, and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
After reuniting with my biological parents last year, my husband asked me whether my need to conceive biological children had diminished at all.
(Just for clarity’s sake, we both want to have children, so he was not asking because he was hoping to escape the simultaneous joys and horrors of raising children. But rather he was asking a very valid question based on previous conversations, in which I had expressed a desire, almost a longing need, to conceive a biological child.)
Clearly, as an adoptee, I have never known what it is to share a biological connection with someone else. Earlier in our relationship, as my husband and I would discuss whether we wanted to conceive a child, time and time again, my answer was an emphatic, almost desperate, “Yes.”
There was never a doubt as to why I answered, Yes. Having a biological child seemed the only way that I could somehow know and connect with my biological mother and father. It seemed the only way that I might be able to gain insight into what my biological mother experienced as she carried me for nine months and subsequently relinquished me. It also seemed the only way that I would be able to understand what it means to share a biological connection with another human being.
But now, that I have met my biological mother and father, along with uncles, aunts, and cousins, and hence now have opportunity to build relationships with those who share my biology, it would seem plausible that my “need” to have biological children would diminish or at least change as a result.
As of now, surprisingly so, meeting my biological family has actually seemed to have the opposite effect of what would be predicted—it seems to have increased my desire to want biological children.
I can identify several contributing factors.
The first factor I’ll mention is simply that reunion does not “fix it.” There can be a well intentioned but false assumption that once an adoptee reunites with his or her biological family, it fixes everything—all the questions find answers, all the loss and pain find healing, and so forth.
This is not true for more reasons than I have space to elucidate here. But in short, reunion cannot magically redeem all the years, often decades, that have been lost. Although reunion has given me some answers, in many ways it has served to also give me more questions. Although reunion has brought some healing, it has also awakened old pain while stirring new pain. Although reunion has allowed me to meet my biological family, it cannot compensate for the 35 years that have been lost between us.
Even though I now have the hope of building a relationship with my biological mother, she and I will never share the moments when I took my first steps or spoke my first words. She and I will never know the thrill of when I first learned to ride a bike or when I won a soccer game. She and I will never know the tender moments when my first love broke my heart or conversely when my husband and I fell in love and eventually married.
She was not there and will never be able to be there for those crucial moments of my development growing from child to woman. She has missed the first 35 years of my life, and nothing we do can ever retrieve or restore all those moments of growing up that have been lost between us—except in some symbolic, metaphorical way—that is, through conceiving a biological child.
Hence, secondly, having a biological child, at least for me, lures me in as an opportunity for redemption for all of us. My Omma and I could share in the moments of raising my child, her grandchild. She could be there for her grandchild in the way that she could not be there for me, while I could give to my child what I never had—a relationship with a family that is both biological and relational. My Appa would also have, in a way, a second chance to do things differently.
A third reason that I can identify for wanting biological children even more so now that I have met my biological mother and father is that I fear losing them all over again. Some day, I know that they will die. So, I tell myself that if I have a biological child, the trauma of losing them a second time will perhaps be minimized if I can look at my biological child and see them in him or her. Without a child through whom I can maintain a biological connection to the parents that I lost 35 years ago and will lose again some day, I fear that the connection I now have will be lost and severed again, forever, when they die.
So, you see, at least for me, meeting my biological mother and father has not abated my desire to have biological children. Rather it has intensified and amplified it.
Now, of course, I share all this knowing that having a child for these reasons is a dangerous thing. I don’t want to bring a child into this world assigning him or her with the job of redeeming the lost hopes and dreams of his or her mother and grandparents. (Alanis Morissette wrote a very affecting song years ago about parents who do just this entitled, “Perfect.”) If I do ever have a biological child, I am going to have to be hyper aware of my own issues to ensure that I don’t project them onto my child—the aforementioned being only a few of the many issues.
I am simply sharing all of this in an attempt to explain, with sincerity and a somewhat uncomfortable honesty, what goes on in my mind and heart as an adoptee regarding the question that titles this post, “Did meeting my biological family diminish my desire to conceive biological children?”
I am not purporting that my answers to this question are right or wrong—they just are. As adoptees, we face complex psychological issues surrounding identity and relationships and just about everything else in life. The issue of biological children is no different.
I realize the emotional baggage I carry, and the potential that exists that I may strap that baggage onto my children. This is all the more reason for me to be aware of it and to make it apparent to others—not simply for my children’s sake, but for the sake of others who also occupy this vast and complex world of the adoption experience.
Adoption disruption and dissolution has received much attention from the media in recent months due to several high-profile cases. However, disruption and dissolution is nothing new in the world of domestic and international adoption. Amid all the media buzz, thorough examination of the issue has been lacking. Remedying this, Dawn Friedman has written a very important article. The Myth of the Forever Family; When Adoption Falls Apart was published today in Brain Child magazine. Adoption Mosaic’s Executive Director Astrid Dabbeni is quoted in the article. Read the rest of this entry »
