In my last post, I wrote about an article in a recent series by the Salt Lake Tribune on international and transracial adoption. In this post, I am going to discuss another one of these articles.

This article is titled “I realized I was a permanent outsider”, and was written by Salt Lake Tribune reporter Sheena McFarland. It starts off by telling her story… of being adopted from India by a family living in Utah when she was very young, and just recently taking a trip back to India in an attempt to help her feel connected to her birth country and culture.

She discusses feeling like an outsider in both places. In India, she felt completely American, as that is where she grew up and what was familiar to her now. But when her plane landed back in the U.S. and she emerged wearing traditional Indian clothing, she noticed that the people around her treated her like a foreigner, despite the fact that she had lived almost all of her life in Utah. She felt like she didn't belong in either place.

McFarland says,

I may have been born in India, but as an international adoptee, I'm all American, at least mentally.
People don't see personality, though. They see skin. They see exotic clothes.
That moment at JFK, I realized I'm a permanent outsider. I won't ever completely fit in either in the U.S. or in India.
I inhabit what many adoptees refer to as the "third space" - somewhere between our internal identities as members of the white majority and external identities as members of a nonwhite ethnic group.

If you’ve done much reading on transracial and international adoptions, you know that this a common feeling among adult adoptees.

The article goes on to discuss the many different ways that adult adoptees feel about their birth country, birth culture, birth family and their desires (or lack there of) to connect with their country, culture and family of birth. Some have a strong desire to reconnect with their roots, while others have very little desire to do so.

McFarland also discusses the International Adoptee Congress (IAC), and how it is an opportunity for adult adoptees to come together and share their feelings about transracial adoption, no matter what they may be. She talks about adoptees creating a third culture, other than their birth culture and the culture they grew up in…an “adoptee culture”.

She describes it as,

“A culture where wearing a sari while eating a hamburger is not an affront to either of my cultures, one where I wear my Indian garb when I travel because it's more comfortable than my American clothes - both physically and mentally.”

I enjoyed this article quite a bit and I always appreciate hearing things from an adoptee’s point of view. The author seems to have had a happy child hood and to have a loving relationship with her adoptive family, and yet at the same time she does not sugarcoat the difficult aspects of transracial adoption either.

Reading articles like this is important for adoptive parents, because it gives us invaluable insight into the ways that our children may (or may not) end up feeling as they grow older, and can help us do all that we can to be prepared and support them in determining “who they are” and “where they belong.”

For more writings by adult adoptees and lots of info you can check out the Adoptee Blog on Adoption.com.