Transracial / Transcultural Adoption

Well, soccer season started again in earnest last weekend!  (So far we're 1-1: Daughter's team won, son's team suffered a tragic loss...)  My daughter is playing in an all-girl league--it's more recreational and is pretty laid back. My son is in the more competitive league and he's been with this same group of boys for several seasons now so they have gelled as a team.  But this year there is a new player on the team--a girl who was adopted from Ethiopia about three years ago.  This girl is a sweetie--she's energetic, she's joyful....and most importantly, she's a cracker jack soccer player!  When I heard she was going to be on the team, I decided to hang out at a couple practices… [more]

I’ve been answering tricky questions about race lately. And, for the record, I’ve not been as prepared or eloquent about them as I’d like. With the release of my book, Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter this past week, I’ve been surprised at how often my daughter’s race is what grabs people’s attention. When my husband and I were going through the process of adopting her, we gave careful thought to the fact that her race would be different from ours. We’re Caucasian; she’s Latina. We talked with friends who had “mixed” families themselves about the challenges and issues that difference presented. We read books, examined our own feelings, and looked around the community… [more]

I watched a wonderful movie last night; it won a Sundance Award for Best Documentary in 2002 so you may have heard of it: Daughter from Dananag.  It is about a young woman who had been a part of Operation Babylift, the 1975 removal of thousands of Vietnamese “orphans” from Vietnam to the United States.  Of course, not all of the children were orphans, which was one of the tragedies of the event.  The girl--born Mai Thi Hiep, but who became Heidi Bub--was taken to the orphanage because her mother, like so many Vietnamese mothers at the time, believed that her daughter, born to an American GI, would be burned to death by the North Vietnamese because she is mixed race. Heidi is… [more]

A friend of mine, Susan, recently asked me for my opinion on something that happened at her house.  One of Susan's daughters has a friend who has been adopted from China. This little girl was at their house recently and said she was "so lucky" to have been adopted. Susan said that the comment made her a little uncomfortable and she asked me what I thought of parents who told their adopted kids that they were "lucky."  She wanted to know if I had ever told my kids that they were lucky. Now, I understand that the in today's adoption parlance, most adoptive parents say that when it comes to "luck" it is the parents who are the lucky ones.  But when Susan asked… [more]

Last week a couple of other adoptive  moms and I hosted our second annual heritage camp.  I blogged about last summer's experience with our camp a couple weeks ago, and now that the second one is over I thought I would share some of the activities and insights that the other parents and I got from this year's event. One thing I learned?  Less is more!!   Last Wednesday about twenty kids--campers and their friends--converged on my house to prepare a traditional Indian meal, and I'm STILL eating leftovers!!   We had a LOT of different food and it all tasted good, but it's clear that we prepared too much.  But while the girls were here, it was crazy--girls were making mango fruit… [more]

"Their names will be 'Tabernacle' and 'Georgina,'" my daughter's friend Molly announces. "My children, someday. A boy and a girl." "Is Tabernacle even a name?" my daughter Mia asks, with no small measure of disdain. She's nine and doesn't, as they say, suffer fools. "Anything can be a name," her friend says. I'm glad Molly hasn't backed down. "That's right," I say. "Anything." The names of several celeb-u-tots pop into my head. Jermajesty. Audio Science. Tu Morrow. Pilot Inspektor. Um, yes, those are all real given names. I must admit, though, I've always been fond of Moxie Crimefighter, the name Penn Jillette and his wife gave their daughter. I find it appealing, and empowering somehow. I make a mental note to remind my daughter to be… [more]

In my mid-twenties, it was weddings. Every time I turned around, another friend was marrying. There were gift registries to navigate and parties to plan. The baby showers came next and before I knew it I was chipping in for strollers and collecting birth announcements in my desk drawer. Sadly, a decade or so later, too much news of separations and divorce started slipping in the inbox. Seasons, right? I’m in that last season right now – no, not getting divorced, thankfully – but journeying through divorce and second marriages with others. I see what it takes to create complex child custody plans. I witness the numbing heartache. And then I watch as happiness and relief surrounds friends when they take a… [more]

Several years ago, I hired a college student to babysit my daughters for two hours every weekday. I suggested that she walk them down to the park when the weather was nice or color, do crafts, and read to them when it wasn’t. I planned to use the time to make calls, go out on interviews, and write my newspaper column. The sitter had come with stellar recommendations, was a capable and sunny person, and – as a bonus to me – she was able to walk to our house from her dorm. However, I knew almost from the start that it wasn’t going to work out. When she met four year-old Isabel, my daughter by birth, and Mia, my two year-old daughter… [more]

My friend C. emails me to tell me a story. She’s just returned from a short vacation with her sister-in-law on which they’ve both brought their kids. There’s a strong family resemblance between my friend C. and her daughters.  They have piercing blue eyes and porcelain skin.  (I don’t think I ever really knew what that was – “porcelain skin” – until I met these girls.) C’s niece is three.  I’ve seen pictures of her – a sweet-faced little girl with dreamy eyes. She was adopted as an infant from China. C. and her sister-in-law visited a Civil War battlefield, stopping to read the plaques and talk about what happened there so long ago. The children – three Caucasians, one Asian – trailed… [more]

My kids love their Uncle James. "Jimmy" to most of the world, their Uncle James is neither my brother nor my husband’s. Nor is he married to anyone's sister. But, we’ve chosen him as part of our family and we're grateful that he's chosen us too. A friend with whom my husband had an instant rapport when they met 16 years ago, we couldn’t do without him. When my husband and Jimmy met, I was out of the country, working for the summer in southeast Asia. The two of them were cast in the same shows at a regional theater, lived across the courtyard from one another, and - via what now seems like a laughably ancient system of emails downloaded at one terminal, printed… [more]