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.
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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.
From Guest BloggerMelissa Konomosvisit her atYoon’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.
This video is from Kevin Hofmann who blogs at My Mind On Paper. Kevin has recently made the leap to video blogging, these are his thoughts on Sandra Bullock’s recent adoption:
From guest blogger Shelise Gieseke. We are grateful to Shelise for contributing “Twice Foreign” to Our Voices and to our blog. Click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
Where I reside in Asian-American society, as a Korean adoptee, has been referred to as the “third space.” It is a place that hovers between who I was raised to be and who I was born to be.
I am a Korean adoptee. I was raised in rural Minnesota by white Lutherans of German and Scandinavian descent. Both my parents are generational farmers. My dad and sister have blond hair and blue eyes, as do many of my cousins and friends. I spent a good piece of my life in envy of that blond hair and, especially, those blue eyes. Even though I do not remember a time when I did not know I was adopted from Korea, I do remember a long period of time when I was raised to forget that I was from Korea; to believe that I was the same as everyone else around me, and that everyone else would treat me as if that were true. It seemed to work. . . for a while.
Being familiar with an entire community’s life stories is an advantage and disadvantage of living in a small town. It was an advantage for me because everyone knew how I came to be in my family. I could claim membership to my family with no questions asked. Small town living was a disadvantage because my family and I didn’t have to deal with my race. I could easily become “just like them,” “just a daughter,” “just a friend,” “just a sister,” “just a cousin.” Just, just, just. Even though I was very comfortable with just being “me,” I can see how my affinity for rooting for the underdog, by being moved every time we learned about civil rights in school, by not wanting to eliminate people based on their surface appearance, was me telling myself that I was more than just; I was something other.
In college, I constructed my world to resemble my childhood world. People who would say they saw me as “just” were happily welcome to be a part of my life. I craved others who would accept me as the person I was on the inside and not be guided by my physical appearance. I went on one date with an Asian man, but couldn’t do another because I was convinced I wasn’t Asian enough for him. I didn’t have Asian parents or Asian friends. The whole time we were on our date I was waiting for him to yell, “Phony!” and make me confess I wasn’t a “real” Asian. With my college friends and colleagues, my ethnicity was discussed only within the framework of comedy, as if being the only person of color in a group of white people was always hilarious. I thought this humor helped me own my ethnicity, but it only created more distance between my identity and my ethnicity. Throughout my young adult life, I carried around this sense of being lonely, even in a crowd of people. However, I couldn’t pinpoint the source of this melancholy feeling.
Later in my college career, I transferred to a much larger university. I had the opportunity to take classes specifically related to race, to explore the idea of white privilege and to understand that I no longer had access to this privilege via my family. I started to accept myself as other. However, my social circle remained very white, as I was too afraid of rejection by communities of color. I feared that the people in this community would discard me because my white upbringing made me unauthentic. I only looked like a Korean women, but I thought, talked and walked like a Caucasian.
When I first heard the term “twinkie” to describe a person who was ethnically Asian, but was culturally white (or strived to “act” white), I was so relieved to finally have a label for myself. Even though the person who was describing this term was referring to twinkie as a pejorative term, I was just so happy to learn there was a group of Asians with whom I could identify. But, I did not know where these twinkies were or how to find them. So, I remained in isolation and alone in my struggles.
Then I discovered the online adoptee community. I devoured a handful of blogs that spoke to my race and adoption experiences. I was astonished and relieved to read that other people had experienced many of the same racist encounters that I had; that the authors found it difficult to feel like a “real” member of their ethnic group. Reading these blog entries and comments was the first time I ever felt validation about my own experience as a transracial adoptee. I could read something and say, “I know!” authentically and with authority. A few years later, with help from my therapist and some new friends in the adoption community, I have fully incorporated adoption into my life experience. Where I once thought of adoption as a finite event and something I should “get over,” I now acknowledge that adoption is a lifelong experience that will always be an influence on my life. I can confidently identify as a Korean adoptee. Something I was raised to be, but something different than my birthright.
My current challenge is about authenticity and authority. Given my upbringing, do I know enough about Asian-Americans to claim membership to the group? I know a lot about the culture of rural Minnesotans, but I have never had an Asian-American role model in my everyday life. Do I have the authority to claim to a part of the Asian-American experience based on my physical appearance and the fact that I was born in an Asian country?
I think a lot about what I now believe to be my birthright and how it was taken away from me by many different forces – social, economic, political, religious and individual. Because I am aware of these forces, I am comfortable laying claim to a heritage that was afforded to me by birth, but denied me in my adoptive family. I have not been raised by Korean parents or even lived in a Korean community, but I am living out a piece of the Asian-American experience; an experience that is unique to the Asian-American community itself. Even though it is often downplayed or ignored, I am an Asian immigrant who was sent as a baby to fend for myself in a land of strangers. A land where I could not be comforted by the sound of my language or filled with food cooked by my grandmother’s hand; where I was raised to become a stranger to my own motherland.
I am part of a people that must find the balance between our white families and our needs as Asian-Americans. We have to find acceptance from our white families that we are in fact Asian-Americans and the courage to seek out other Asian-Americans for guidance and support. I am still building courage to seek what I need, but I have been given confidence by my fellow adoptees and by a welcoming Korean-American community. Their acceptance and guidance has slowly been fusing the gap between the person I was raised to be and the person I want to be. And, always, I will hover in the “third space” with my fellow adoptees. We cling to each other as we each try to find our own balance.
From Guest BloggerMelissa Konomosvisit her atYoon’s Blur, and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
I am a Korean-American adoptee who met my biological parents for the first time (last year in June of 2009) since my relinquishment in 1975. Since then, I have officially entered into what is often referred to as “post-reunion.”
Post reunion often receives less attention, I think, in part, because it is less glamorous and less emotionally climactic than the process of search and reunion. Hearing the story of how I searched for seven long years and the details of the first moments of coming face to face with my Omma and my Appa are much more enthralling and riveting. It is this phase of the adoption experience that brings simultaneous tears to our eyes and smiles to our mouths. But the actual reunion is only the beginning of a long, and often arduous and daunting, process. I find it unfortunate that post-reunion is so grossly neglected, because it can often be the stage in the process that can last the longest, can be the most fragile and complicated, and requires long-term support that is often lacking or underdeveloped. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are a couple videos of an adoptive mother caring for her African American daughter’s hair. “Katelynylyn” has her own channel on YouTube with several step by step videos on hair care and styles. Twists, cornrows, criss-cross cornrows, box braids, yarn extensions, piggy back braids, hair care products and more are included.
From Guest Blogger Kevin D. Hofmann. Visit him at mymindonpaper.wordpress.com and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers
“She couldn’t take care of him, so she gave him up for adoption.”
This was always the reply my older brother would give. It was in response to the question, “What happened to his real mom?”
Like the synchronicity of an expensive Swiss watch, this scenario always played out the same right after meeting someone new when I was an adolescent. The inconsistency of skin colors between my family and me was a dead give away. I was adopted, no question about it.
When I was introduced as their son or brother, there was an artificial acceptance by the children. Then once the adults left my new friends would begin the volley of questions.
“He’s your brother?” They would ask, as if my darker skin had the power to make me invisible or deaf.
“Yep.” My brother would respond.
“How?” The curious and uninhibited kids would ask.
“He’s adopted.” My brother would quickly say. Read the rest of this entry »
A friend of mine sent me this article published in the online magazine The Root. It is definitely worth the short time it takes to read the entire article. There’s much that I agree with, and some that I don’t, but I think all of it is valuable. The author Angie Chuang writes: “Bring up race and adoption, and watch people squirm.” Are we still squirming when it comes to these conversations? Or have we advanced to a place where we are now much more comfortable talking about race and adoption? Do any of the things the author writes about surprise you? What do you think? Read the rest of this entry »
One Tier at a Time: One Adoptive Mother’s Climb to Racial Awareness and Parenting (thoughts originated from postings at Adoptive Families Circle)
I am the mother of a transracial family. I have a five year old black son and a two year old biracial son via donor. I feel like I have reached a new tier in my racial awareness in the last year. I have gone from thinking (about five years ago) something like this; “Oh yeah I get it-because look at my family, I have to get it.” to “WHOA I don’t get it at all. I have so much work to do, where do I begin?” (Actually, I am always going to be in this phase, my reading, connecting, asking questions, reading, connecting phase) to “We have to talk about this, about RACE, about what our children are experiencing all the time.” And I do talk about it all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
I was out to lunch with a friend of mine a couple months ago and she handed me a copy of Hip Mama magazine open to a page with a poem on it. She said “You’ve got to read this.” The poem was Black Enough by Catherine Anderson and when I read it I got chills. I immediately knew that I wanted to include it in Adoption Mosaic’s (then) upcoming newsletter -page 8.
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Blog post written by Astrid Dabbeni
I was out to lunch with a friend of mine a couple months ago and she handed me a copy of Hip Mama magazine open to a page with a poem on it. She said “You’ve got to read this.” The poem was Black Enough by Catherine Anderson and when I read it I got chills. I immediately knew that I wanted to include it in Adoption Mosaic’s (then) upcoming