Ok, how about some controversy for this fine Monday morning??

If you haven’t read it yet, the “buzz” in the world of transracial adoption is this article titled "A Mother Adopts and Discovers her Own Racism” by Lisa Lerner, the adoptive mother of a baby girl from India.

The article provokes discussion and heated ones at that (just check out all of the comments after the article for proof of that).

On one hand, Lisa is an adoptive mom who wrote a very open and honest article about her feelings during her transracial adoption. I believe that she admitted things that most people would not have admitted to close friends and relatives, never mind the entire Internet. It is good that she was honest with herself and others on how she was feeling, because it made it possible for her to address those things and try to make them better, instead of living in denial. Many things that she says “ring true” and serve as good advice for other parents adopting transracially.

I have no desire to rip apart Lisa, call her names or judge her as a mother.

And yet…I have to admit the reading this article made my stomach turn. The two big things that stood out to me are that one, NO CHILD should ever be something that a parent is ashamed of. A parent adopting transracially for the first time may very well feel a variety of things as they first care for their child and become “familiar” with different hair textures and skin color. But shame is a nasty word, and shame has no place in a mother’s heart, or the relationship between mother and child. Every child needs and deserves unconditional love, and skin color and physical appearance should not be qualifiers for that.

I think about the gorgeous dark skin, the fabulous curly hair and the divine full lips that my black children have, and it saddens me that these are physical attributes that others find undesirable. Even though they are so very different from the pale white skin, bone-straight brown hair and other features that I have, my children are gorgeous and perfect and very, very mine.

The other thing that struck me, (and this one serves as a big reminder and caution to other adoptive parents) is the complete lack of preparedness that Lisa seemed to have before her adoption. Deciding how you feel about people with different skin color than yourself, examining your own racist feelings, deciding if adopting transracially is the right thing for you, soul-searching to see if you could truly love a child that doesn’t look like you the very same “my heart is going to explode I love this child so much” way that you would a child you gave birth to, preparing yourself for being a transracial family…these are things that must be done BEFORE the child is brought home, not after. If Lisa had truly been prepared, I believe that her experience would have been much different when she was united with Vaishali, or she would have chosen to adopt a child that looked like her. Either way, this situation would have been avoided.

If this article is not proof of the need for pre-adoption education, especially for transracial adoptions, I don’t know what is.

So what do you think? Do you applaud her honesty? Think her feelings are normal? Cringe? Feel she is a racist?

Give it a read, browse the comments and let me know what you think.