"I would like her near me on the bus."

I've been blogging for a few months, and this will be my first post related to the fact that we have a transracial adoption. Lily is multi-racial. Both of her first parents are bi-racial. Lily is black, white, and Filipino, among others. G, Ferb, and I are white.

I've read extensively about transracial adoption. I've gained the most insight from adult adoptees who grew up in transracial families -- particularly those who grew up in "Whitesville." We live in an extremely diverse area. On an average day, we may see more people of color than white people. We have a diverse group of friends, and my great-uncle was black (he passed away a couple of years ago), so some of my extended family members are black. We have a collection of black dolls that rivals the doll collection at any store. We have a large book collection that includes stories about transracial families, famous people of color, folk tales from around the world, different skin colors, hair types ... the list goes on. And we have a very open adoption, so Lily knows and regularly visits with her first mother, father, and maternal grandmother.

I'm not naive - I know that despite our best efforts, Lily will deal with issues related to the fact that she is a different race than her immediate family members. I think I'm as prepared for that as one can be before actually being in the situation in which those difficulties present themselves.

We've had very few comments made to us about our transracial status. One surprising comment was made when Lily was only a couple of months old -- I was caught off-guard. After that, I prepared myself with an slew of possible responses; only no one has commented to us about it ever since.

We talk to Lily about race, about the fact that we have different skin colors. One day she picked up my hand and said, "Mama's hand white. My hand brown." I smiled, I told her she was right, and I told her that I love the color of her skin.

Some of Ferb's friends have been curious. When I've picked him up after school, I've heard kids ask him how his sister "came out" black. He explains that she is adopted. One night Ferb had a group of kids over to our house for a club meeting. Lily came into the room wearing her pajamas. One boy asked, "Is that your sister?" Ferb replied: "Of course that's my sister! Why would she be in my house wearing her pajamas if she wasn't my sister?" He understands that people wonder, and I see in him an effort to make sure everyone knows that Lily is just as much his sister as any sister would be. Lily and Ferb have a very special relationship that is far deeper and close than anything I could have imagined before I had children. More on this point --

I found a worksheet in Ferb's school folder the other day. (Ferb is in second grade.) It was a worksheet asking the student to answer a series of questions about Martin Luther King, Jr.  - when he was born, where he was born, etc. Here's the last question and Ferb's response:

Why do you admire this person?
I admire this person in my very own way since my sister is black. I would like her near me on the bus and I want her to go to my school.

What Could Have Been ...

About a year and a half into our adoption, I decided to schedule a session with one of the counselors at C.A.S.E. (Center for Adoption Support and Education). We had zero support from our agency when it came to open adoption -- they essentially told us we were on our own, and when we pressed them for help, the "help" was so counterproductive that we quickly ran. When I made the appointment, I think I was seeking input from a professional because I wanted to know if I was doing things right when it came to our open adoption. I had learned so much from reading blogs and books and talking to friends of friends, but I yearned for a face-to-face conversation with a professional.

I spent the first part of the meeting telling the counselor our story, how we had applied to adopt from China, withdrew after several years of waiting, and then updated our homestudy for a domestic adoption on the off chance that our agency got a call from a local hospital, which happened (according to them) once every few years. We never thought it would actually happen, but then it did, and we were quickly thrust into a situation without any guidance from our agency. The counselor agreed that the agency was inept at best, but thought that everything that had transpired once we (G and I and Fiona and Nate) were on our own sounded very positive. Our adoption would definitely be described as very open, and while we've definitely hit some rough patches, we've built a solid relationship with one another that has helped us navigate through the tough times. We're family.

After I finished my story and she validated that things seemed to be going as well as could be expected, I suddenly broke down in tears, surprising even myself. It took me a while to compose myself and then, perhaps, I finally talked about what I think was really bothering me. I explained that every time we get together with Fiona and Nate, or even when we communicate, I'm fine during the visit and/or communication, but after it's over, I fall apart ... feeling very sad and depressed and sometimes crying for quite a while when I had time alone. The counselor asked me why. And then I said it out loud for the first time.

I see the three of them together -- Fiona, Nate, and Lily -- and I see the family that could have been. And it's heart-breaking. I feel the loss at such a deep level. And then I feel confused. If that loss didn't exist, then Lily wouldn't be my daughter ... so by feeling sad about their family that could have been, am I essentially feeling sad about the family that is -- my family. My daughter that wouldn't be my daughter if Fiona and Nate hadn't lost their daughter. It made my head hurt just saying the words.

The counselor then told me two things:

First, the fact that I feel, see, and recognize the loss is a quality that will make me a good adoptive mother as Lily gets older. She told me that most of the people she sees regularly are teenage adoptees who are struggling. And one of the main reasons they struggle is because their adoptive parents either don't get it -- they don't understand WHY their child feels a sense of loss -- and/or they take the child's feelings of loss as a sign of betrayal -- a sign that they, the adoptive parents, aren't good enough. The counselor pointed out that the feelings of confusion that I was having -- the deep sense of loss over the family that could have been juxtaposed with the pure joy I feel that Lily is my daughter -- is the same kind of conflicted emotions that adoptees have. I get it.

Secondly, she told me, just like adoptive parents who don't give their children room to grieve their loss, I need to be careful that I give Lily to space to feel whatever she feels. Certainly her adoption will affect her in some way -- that's a given -- but how it affects her, how she processes and views it (which could change at various points in her life) ... I need to be sure that I give her the space to feel what SHE feels, and it may not be the same way I feel. I understood what she said, and reading the writing of adult adoptees has definitely helped me understand that no two people will ever feel the same way, and I need to support Lily wherever she is with her feelings at any given time. As with everything, I will always do my best to do right by Lily, but it struck me right then and there that if she doesn't end up having a good relationship with Fiona and Nate (or if she feels angry with them or even neutral/nothing toward them) ... it will be hard for me.

Nate and Fiona came over last month and I took what I think is the most amazing picture of the three of them. It's adorable and perfect and I love looking at it. Sometimes I look at it and start to cry. And then out of nowhere Lily jumps into my arms and we roll around and tickle and laugh ... her laugh is so happy and pure and I just want to bottle it up. And I feel myself smiling from ear to ear with the teardrops still sitting in my eyes.

Remembering a Great Man

A few days ago I ran into one of my neighbors at a local Starbucks. I met her in 2008 when she and her husband Don volunteered with me on our neighborhood team working to elect Barack Obama. Don was a soft-spoken man, but he had so many important things to say. I was always impressed with his calm demeanor and his way of diffusing difficult situations. He had an adult son with special needs, and my heart melted when I watched the two of them together. He was an amazing father; he was a good person with a special soul. He was very Zen. He was the type of person you felt lucky to know. While I didn't keep in close touch with Don and his wife after the election was over, I frequently ran into them in the neighborhood and we'd stop to have coffee or chat with one another whenever we had the chance.

So I was absolutely floored a few days ago when I ran into Don's wife at Starbucks and she told me that he had passed away. He had been diagnosed with the late stages of pancreatic cancer and there wasn't much that could be done. I still am having a hard time believing that he's gone.

There was something else very special about Don. After we adopted Lily, it was normal for us to run into friends and acquaintances in the neighborhood and get some surprised looks when they saw us with a baby. I clearly hadn't been pregnant and I wasn't at all offended by people's interest in how Lily came into our lives. In my 60-seconds-or-less version, I always mentioned the fact that we have an open adoption, that Lily's birth parents live locally, and that we would be having an ongoing relationship with them. I did this in part because I wanted the rest of the world to know that open adoption is happening and it's not something that should be shocking or something that we should be afraid of.

The response to the fact that we have an open adoption has often been "that's so nice of you," which of course sets off all sorts of alarms inside of me. I would explain that we are the beneficiaries of Lily's adoption, and having an ongoing relationship with her wonderful first parents is the natural thing to do. (After all, no one tells me how nice we are to facilitate a relationship between our children and my sisters and parents.) But when I told Don about our open adoption ... for some reason, I don't remember exactly what he said, but I do remember thinking that his reaction to our open adoption was different. He also complimented us, but in a different way. It wasn't until the third of fourth time I saw him after we had adopted Lily that he told me that he had been adopted as a baby, too. And so had his sister. He told me that his sister had searched and searched for her birth parents but never found them. He gave me the impression that it had somewhat broken her. He also told me that he never had the motivation to search for his birth parents, but I could see in his eyes how happy he felt for Lily that she wouldn't ever have to search, or think about whether or not to search.

The world lost such a wonderful person when Don passed, and at the risk of sounding childish, it's just not fair that he had to leave so soon. Adding to the heartbreak is the fact that his birth family never got to know what an amazing person he was. What a tremendous loss for them.

I will think of Don often. I will remember his smile, his witty remarks, his fighting spirit. His passing reminds me how thankful I am for all the people in my life, for my family that grew in such unexpected ways. It's a bittersweet new year. I'm ready for 2012.

Reflecting: A Strange Paradox

My parents married when they were 21 years old and my mother got pregnant with me on their honeymoon. When I was born, I had four grandparents and seven great-grandparents, all of whom lived nearby and were a big part of my life. Two more girls followed -- one three years later, and one seven years later -- and outward appearances showed a perfect little family. But the inside story was much different. My mother was depressed. When she wasn't angry at me or my sisters, she was by herself in her room with the door closed. My father was sweet to us but passive aggressive toward my mother, and the two of them fought constantly. I often turned up my music to drown out the yelling. I was relieved when my father finally left my mother when I was 16 years old. I wanted to escape, too.

What I didn't realize at the time was that my father had found another family to join, and there wasn't room in that family for me. My parents were only in their late 30s at the time, and each decided to start a new life. My sisters and I couldn't find a place in either one. Our large extended family split in half -- there was anger and resentment on both sides -- and the people who I always believed loved each other suddenly hated each other, and they let me know about it. I couldn't spent time with either side of the family without someone trying to convince me that the other parent was a monster. I don't think my brain knew how to process this sudden rip in my world, so I turned to food to get me through it. As long as I was eating, I wasn't feeling. It wasn't until my mid-20s when I finally dealt with my grief and began the process of forgiving my parents for what I now see as their own shortcomings. The little me thought it was all about me. The grown-up me learned it was all about them. I stopped turning to food for comfort. I found healthy ways to deal with stress.

I was in my early 30s when I first learned about our major fertility problem and first started exploring adoption. Open adoption wasn't as widespread as it is today, but it was becoming more and more the norm. When I first heard about open adoption, I was brought back to my own childhood. I imagined an adopted child that would feel torn between two families, each family resenting the other, each family looking for more loyalty, each family finding new reasons to feel betrayed. That was my life, and there was no way I was going to put a child through that. No way at all.

Then, when I was 38, I unexpectedly found myself in an open adoption a week after Lily was born and placed with us. That probably sounds weird, but the circumstances that led to our adoption and then our open adoption were unusual and unexpected. At the beginning, the 16-year-old inside of was begging me to stop. Don't do it. We can't go through this again. But I was a different person with more resources, more experience, more insight, more determination. I would find a way to make this work. When I couldn't find anyone in my real life to give me guidance, I turned to the Internet and found the people I had been looking for. Heather at Production Not Reproduction wrote about the concept of family integration -- the idea that birth families and adoptive families could become intertwined, a different but equally important kind of extended family. I believed I could make that work, and I started at it. We're two and a half years into the journey, and while it hasn't been easy, it's been the most rewarding experience of my life. It's a work in progress, but we do make progress, and I see it.

We saw Fiona and Nate, Lily's first parents, last Saturday. They came to our house for a visit, and I'd have to say it was our best visit yet. It was comfortable and fun. We played, we ate, we talked about silly things and important things. We found more areas we have in common. We watched Lily in amazement. We listened to her contagious laugh. We watched Ferb and Lily go from playing to fighting to playing again. It felt like family, only better. The bond I feel with Fiona and Nate - in some ways - is even stronger than the bond I feel with my immediate family. Their hugs and the things they said made me believe that their love for me is real, too.  I was filled with happiness when they left.

A few days later, I found one of my all-time favorite movies on HBO -- "Crimes and Misdemeanors." It's a story of questions about morality with no finite answers. Interspersed throughout the movie are a series of interviews with a fictitious professor who is based on a real person, and something he said really caught my attention. I was able to find the exact quote online:

“You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that when we fall in love we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand we ask of our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted on us. So that love contains in it a contradiction, the attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”

I've written before about my intense desire to keep our adoption open and healthy. I believe that is what will make Lily feel most whole and complete. However, after hearing this, I started to wonder -- is my desire to sew together so tightly Lily's adoptive family and birth family also an effort to undo the hurt I felt as a child?

I know I want the best for Lily. I know I would walk across hot coals for her. I know my love for Fiona and Nate is real. And I know that - like many parents - I don't want to repeat the mistakes my parents made. I want to protect Lily from the pain that I felt as a child. But we are the sum of our experiences, and perhaps I also need to make sure I don't project my own past into the situation. It's different, and I need to remember that.

Attachment

In the adoption world, attachment usually refers to the attachment between a child and a parent, but I'm actually thinking today about my attachment to Fiona and Nate, my daughter's first parents. Early on, I was fairly open with my friends and family about how much I cared about Fiona and Nate. My feelings were met with resistance, and comments I received ranged from "don't let them get too close" to "everyone needs to move on." I pushed back when I got those kinds of comments, but I also stopped talking about Fiona and Nate as much as I had at the beginning. When I do talk about them now, people know better than to try to convince me my relationship with them is wrong; instead, I receive nods and lots of "uh-huh"s.

The truth is, I think about Fiona and Nate every day. I worry about them. I wonder how they're doing. I have an intense need -- and it is my own need -- to know they are okay. They are struggling right now, and I really want to help them. But there's no real way for me to help them. I can continue to show them my love, but somehow that falls short in my mind. Theoretically, there may be ways I could help them, but when I think intellectually and not emotionally, I know that kind of helping wouldn't be appropriate or good for any of us in the long run. So I just stew in my head.

I've come to understand that until someone relinquishes their child to you, there's just no way to understand the bond that can exist between a birth parent and an adoptive parent. I have two younger sisters who I feel very maternal toward, and if I had to compare the way I feel toward Fiona and Nate, it would be closest to the way I feel about my younger sisters with a dash of the way I feel about my kids. It's a complicated feeling that even I don't fully understand despite my constant reflection on it.

I've read blog comments that theorize that sometimes adoptive parents are more "comfortable" if the first parents maintain an unstable life that would make it difficult for them to raise a child. That, the theory continues, would further validate the need for the adoption and therefore validate the need for the adoptive parents. When I read that, I wondered if in some deep part of my subconscious I felt that way. But as I watch Fiona and Nate struggle and feel helpless in helping them, I'm pretty sure that I receive no reassurance from their instability. It just makes me sad and frustrated.

G doesn't have the same attachment to Fiona and Nate as I do. He likes them, he's very friendly with them when we all get together, but I don't think they really cross his mind unless I bring them up -- which I don't do very often even though I'm thinking about them constantly. Part of that is G's personality. He's very social and loves being around family and friends, but he rarely initiates plans or picks up the phone to call anyone.

I do wonder if I will ever "move on" - meaning I wonder if there will be a time when I don't think about them constantly. Sometimes, I worry that my attachment to them is unhealthy, and that it could impact Lily as she gets older. Will she worry about them too? Will she worry about me worrying about them? Just more for me to worry about, I suppose.

Last Night

Last night Ferb and Lily were playing together, basically chasing each other around the house and laughing. When they stopped, Ferb said this: "Even though Lily was adopted, when I look at her, it's like looking in the mirror."

G and I were stunned. How does Ferb come up with these things? I can't quite figure it out, but I'm not going to complain. We are two very lucky parents.

Open Adoption Roundtable #32

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It's designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community.

Open Adoption Roundtable #32: Share a holiday memory that involves open adoption.

This will be Lily's third Christmas, and our third Christmas in an open adoption. While we never created a formal open adoption plan with Fiona and Nate, we did at some point agree that we always wanted to get together on or around Lily's birthday and on or around Christmas. Our first visit outside of the adoption agency was in December 2009 when Lily was around six months old. I wrote about that visit and how Ferb's conversation with Nate was a turning point in our open adoption.

There's another holiday memory that stands out to me, too. It was last Christmas; Fiona and Nate came over to our house a few days after Christmas. We exchanged gifts (as we had the year before), only this year Fiona and Nate also brought gifts for Ferb, which I thought was incredibly sweet. Ferb LOVES animals, and Fiona and Nate got him two animal-themed gifts, including a Smithsonian animal book that became Ferb's absolute favorite. He went through a phase where he refused to leave the house without the book -- and it's a BIG book!

But what really stands out about this visit was one of the gifts they gave to Lily. It was a pink, heart-shaped jewelry box, and when you open it up, it plays music and a little ballerina figure spins around inside. I remember when Lily opened the box. The music was kind of melancholy, so I got a little choked up as soon as I heard it. Lily was really mesmerized by it, and we all sat in silence watching her watch the ballerina. While we were all looking at Lily, Fiona said that she had one just like it when she was a little girl. And suddenly I could picture little girl Fiona looking at her own ballerina twirl around inside the pink, heart-shaped jewelry box. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I didn't let them come out. Now, I'm not feeling quite as strong.