Adoptive Parents

I think it's really unfortunate that the prevailing winds in the adoption community right now are blowing away from recognizing the "adoption triad" and instead towards reframing discussions of adoption with adoptees as the main players.

This is not me saying that adoptees' experiences aren't valid, or shouldn't be paid attention to. I'm an adoptee and trust me, I want my experience to be heard, and I think it's crucial that my experience be taken as one, valid, honest account amongst a multitude of varied, differing experiences.

But this whole idea that adoptive parents and agencies have "imposed" an idea of adoption on adoptees long enough and now need to be discredited for doing so irritates me. Yes, adoptive parents' experiences are different than adoptee experiences. Yes, adoptive parents and adoptees differ in how they perceive/experience/process things. Yes, adoptive parents may screw up, or make mistakes, or say things they don't mean or don't realize the implications of.

This doesn't mean they as a group should be vilified or discredited for "not telling the truth." Adoptive parents' experiences are one facet of adoption. Adoptees' are another. Birth parents' and birth families' are still another.

Being an adoptee simply means I perceive situations differently than my parents. I hear different implications in news stories. I may feel differently about this aspect or that aspect of adoption. When I was a teenager, yeah, I was 100% sure my parents were trying to impose their will on me, stifle my independence, make me think like them.

When I got older and started actually talking to my parents and listening to what they had to say, as well as being very forthright and honest about my own opinions, all that tension disappeared. So often, one of us will say, "I never thought about it like that."

Just as I think every adoptee's experience is valid and honest, but not any more true or less true than any other adoptee's, so I think adoptive parents' experiences are valid and honest and shouldn't be considered less true than that of adoptees simply because the emotions/thoughts/opinions/reactions they have may be different.

Have a little extra fun

When I went to Los Angeles for college, I had the following conversation countless times:

A: So where are you from?
Me: Minnesota.
A: No, I mean where are you really from?
Me: Minnesota.

I didn't set out with the intention of winding people up with my answer, and at times in the past I found questions like this ignorant, bordering on offensive. These days though, I just have to laugh at their confusion and revel in the fact that I'm challenging their assumptions and expectations without really doing anything except giving them a straight answer. Sometimes I even make a game out of it, to see how long I can continue answering "Minnesota" or "Minneapolis" before they come around to asking what they really mean.

My sister also came back from her study abroad experience in the Galapagos Islands with these gems of responses, especially useful for nosy strangers who, upon finding out you're adopted insist on asking:

A: So do you know your real parents?
My sister: Yeah, you know, I ate breakfast with them this morning

A: So do you know your real parents?
My sister: I don't know about you, but I live with my real parents.

The second one borders on being a retort. Sometimes that's necessary.

Sometimes though, it's nice to just sit back, add a little humor instead of anger, and watch people flounder in their own confusion. :)

Validity

I think it's unfortunate that there is such an inverse relationship between the validity of an adoptee's story and the degree of suffering/trauma/angst he or she discusses in that story. The more an adoptee felt ostracized, looked down on and left out growing up, the more honest and valid his or her experience is deemed. And if an adoptee doesn't express intense feelings of not belonging or strong desires to search for birth family, then he or she simply hasn't dealt with "emotional issues" or engaged in enough self analysis or is simply trying to please adoptive parents and/or adoption agencies by playing into their propaganda.

The only "truth" about adoption is that every adoptee's story is different. My sister and I had the good fortune to be adopted by the same family, to have contact with our birth family from day one, and to have parents who encouraged and supported our identities in all the different directions and iterations they've taken. Our level of suffering/trauma/angst didn't exceed that of the average teenagers growing up, probably didn't even equal it, to be honest.

But that doesn't make our experiences as adoptees any less valid, or any less true, and it doesn't make our views on adoption any less honest.

Adoption and Abortion

I'm a firm believer in the positives of adoption. Baby girls are being drowned in China's rivers. Children with special needs are being abandoned on the streets of Guatemala. An American couple is willing to adopt one of these children. I think the child is likely to be better off with the American couple than in an orphanage or institution in their home country. And yes, I mean better off monetarily and materially, but also better off developmentally, psychologically, emotionally. It has nothing to do with the race or nationality of the parents, simply that the child *has* parents,

But I'm also a firm believer in a woman's right to have an abortion. I suppose that seems like a paradox to some people. Let me explain.

Adoption is not a catch-all solution. I think it is one way to deal with the pandemics of poverty, young mothers, strict cultural and societal norms, rape and poor decision making that lead to children being relinquished. But adoption is not perfect, as numerous cases over the years have shown. Screening of adoptive parents is not perfect. There is child trafficking. Some adoptees face extra obstacles in the form of prejudice, mental illness, or attachment disorders.

To add to this, children who are relinquished are often not immediately adopted, and as they get older, their chances of being adopted decrease. Adoptive parents want infants, which is understandable. But what about the children who languish for years in foster care, eventually aging out at 18 with no family and no support system?

The fact of the matter is, adoption is a much more complex and involved process than simply handing a child over to a new family. People who advocate for adoption as the alternative to abortion need to understand that relinquishing a child for adoption does not guarantee that the child will find another family.

I believe that adoption is one avenue for finding homes and families for children. But I also *know* from work and from personal experience that it's an imperfect system. To assume that adoption is an easy, no-strings-attached alternative to abortion is, quite frankly, ignorant.

Intersections

I love the fact that my soccer teammates and I exist at the intersections of so many different identities. Gay, straight, Mexican, Korean, American, adoptee, immigrant, undocumented, working class, upper class, Catholic, Protestant, Americanista, Chivas loyalist, high school junior, mother of four. At training sessions, Spanish and English fly across the pitch, good-natured banter about hickeys on someone's neck combining with stories about getting pulled over by the police. Some of us cross ourselves after we score a goal; others tattoo our team loyalty into our skin. We are an amalgamation, a mish-mash, a true melting pot. We stand at the crossroads of identity and dare the world to tell us we can't be there.

I think too many adoptees get caught up in looking for one "true" identity in their birth family when the reality is that identity is as much, if not more, created, than inherent. For me, yes, there was a time when meeting my birth family was very important to me. The meeting itself turned out to be a much less profound experience than I had hoped. It wasn't an instant process for me to be able to recognize the opportunity my uncertainty in identity was presenting me.

I guess my point is this: just because I am Korean by birth, does not mean that my "true" identity is Korean. I think too much emphasis is placed on finding "original" or "true" identity by looking for birth family, especially for international adoptees. And I think adoptees shouldn't just be encouraged to seek answers in their past, but to seek identity and opportunity right where they are as well. Because we all stand at intersections of identity, whether we realize and acknowledge it or not.

Meant to be?

I don't know if I'm "meant" to be here in the US as Julia any more than I was "meant" to be in Korea as Jee Sun. Part of me believes in fate, the other part believes we make our own fate.

The fact of the matter is, I'm here now. I'm an American citizen. I speak English. I have a Minnesota accent.

I can look to my past, look to that moment in time when my birth mother signed away her parental rights, to the plane ride that brought me to the US and lament, "What if?"

Or I can look to my future, to the jobs I could have, to the things I could do with the skills and experience I've acquired, and ask, "What next?"

You tell me which one is more productive.

Terminology in adoption

The issue of language in adoption, which words to use/not use, which words are offensive/not offensive, is a big one. I'm not going to try and discuss it all. I'm just going to toss a few words out there that, for one reason or another, rub me the wrong way.

Reunion: As in "search and reunion," or looking for, and finding, one's birth family. I think reunion has a very specific connotation that, in a lot of cases, tries to establish a connection that isn't really there. For children who were older when they were adopted, and who have memories of their birth family, yes, I think reunion is a valid term. But for those of us who were adopted as infants, I think it's silly to say we were "reunited" with our birth family. When I met my birth parents, it was, for all intents and purposes, like meeting strangers. There was no sense, for me, of having lost my birth parents and then having found them again. I'm sure for them, it was very different. For them to say they were reunited with me would seem very appropriate; my birth mother remembers giving birth to me. But I don't remember anything about them, I never felt like they were missing in my life. If I tell people about my birth parents, I tell them, "I met my birth parents."

Forever families: In contrast to the above term, I think "forever families" is offensive to birth families, and I think it was coined out of arrogance, consciously or not, of adoptive families who look down on birth families because they've given up a child. Mostly though, I think it's just a stupid term. My family is my family. I don't think I need to quantify it any more than that. And I don't disparage my birth mother and father as the ones who gave me my life. They're not my family in the sense of raising and caring for me, but they're family in the sense that I carry their genes and their appearance and their ethnic roots.

Natural mother/first mother: A lot of people seem to have taken issue with the term "birth mother" in recent years. They feel that it relegates birth mothers to the status of incubators or breeders. I guess I can see where some adoptees are coming from on this one, but I don't like the terms "natural mother" or "first mother" either. Because what do those make my mom? "Unnatural mother?" "Second mother?" Yeah, those aren't offensive at all. I use the term "birth mother" because it very literally describes who she is. She gave birth to me. My mother, on the other hand, is the person who took care of me when I was sick and picked me up when I fell down and watched me walk at graduation and helped me pay for my education and taught me how to be assertive and never let me sell myself short. Yeah. But she's just a "second mother," not a "natural one." Please. Give me a break.

On gratitude

The only time in my entire life that I was ever told I should be grateful for being adopted, it was my ultra conservative, Roman Catholic, staunchly pro-life aunt who was telling me so, and she didn't so much tell me as much as imply. I think she said something like, "Your parents did such a good thing by adopting you."

My parents themselves never said any such thing, never even implied that I owed them anything for having been adopted by them. At times in my adolescent years and even up through college, I think I imagined those kinds of sentiments into being, tried to find instances of such implications in my parents' past actions. Being resentful of one's parents is hardly an unusual thing, and that was the way my stereotypical teenage angst manifested itself.

But my aunt's comment ultimately just made me angry at her. Not at the institution of adoption.

I think gratitude is a sentiment that gets grossly misrepresented when it comes to adoption. If an adoptive parent expresses gratitude for his or her child, they are seen as objectifying their child. If they express gratitude towards the birth mother for making a tough decision, they're disrespecting birth mothers who didn't have a choice. And god forbid if an adoptee herself is grateful for the life she's lived. The poor thing must be brainwashed beyond belief to actually believe that her life with her adoptive family might possibly be better than the life her birth family could have given her.

I'm not saying that such sentiments are wrong, just that they're one sided. Certainly some parents who say they're grateful for their adopted child see the child as property, or a package of goods. And some who are grateful for the birth mother giving up her child don't have great respect for birth mothers. I still bristle a little when I hear prospective or waiting adoptive parents say how grateful they are to the birth mother because to my ears, it sounds a little bit like they're saying, "I'm grateful there's poverty in the world," or "I'm grateful female babies in China are still killed," or "I'm grateful the earthquake happened in Haiti and orphaned so many children."

But to assume that all adoptive parents think like this is, in a word, offensive. Adoptive parents are parents, period. They're no better and no worse than other parents. If a mother gives birth to a child and says, "I'm so grateful for this child," is she objectifying her child too? Just because parents become parents by adopting, doesn't make it less okay for them to express the sentiments of parents.

And why shouldn't adoptees be grateful? Why shouldn't all people be grateful? Maybe we as a society have just gotten into such a rut of finding everything that's wrong with our lives that we can't pick out the good things hiding in the midst. No one told me to be grateful, I decided to be grateful on my own terms. After living in China without central heating or reliable hot water or the ability to access uncensored information, I came back to the States grateful to have those things again. After spending a year in Taiwan, I came home grateful that I had been turned down for all the other scholarships and fellowships I'd applied for and ended up in Taiwan instead.

After a semester being treated like trash in Spain, I came home grateful beyond belief that I am an American citizen.

I'm not grateful because I think my parents "rescued" me or anything. I'm grateful because I have a good life, because I was able to get an education, because I'm healthy. To not be grateful for these things, when so much of the world has none of them would be, quite frankly, ignorant and offensive.

Tú Eres

You know why I don't go on a wild goose chase to find my "true" home in Korea, to find my "true" Korean family? Why I don't change my name back to my "true" Korean name?

We're leaving the soccer fields yesterday after a hard-fought tie against one of the best teams in the league. Conversation turns towards Mexican Spanish and the differences between it and other regional variants of the language. We start gently teasing an American teammate who knows Spanish but is quite shy about using it because she is more used to the Nicaraguan and Costa Rican accents. I point out that I was quite shy early on.

"Ay, Julia," Sabina says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, "Pero tú eres Mexican."

Chinita

Soccer/football/fútbol has been part of my life for a long time. I started in the in-house city teams when my hometown jumped on the suburban soccer bandwagon, graduated to travelling teams when I was 10, and eventually made my way up the ranks to a select team that played at the state level and participated in tournaments both in the US and abroad.

I also played three years on the varsity team for my high school. High school, though, was not the best of times for me socially, and I was never really comfortable within the team, whether because of other people or just because of my own lack of self-confidence. By the time my senior year rolled around, I was fast falling out of love with the game.

At the time, though, I was also fast falling in love with Spanish. I had an amazing Spanish teacher who really worked to facilitate connections between us Spanish-learning students and our Latino peers. Through an after-school conversation class, I became fast friends with a guy who, after hearing about my ambivalence towards school soccer, informed me that his aunt coached a team that was looking for players.

That was seven years ago, and ever since then, I’ve spent almost every weekend of my summer and winter vacations playing soccer on fields across the metro area with the yellow and blue of Mexico’s famed Club América on my shoulders.

From day one, my teammates took me in, accepted me as a teammate, and talked to me like I was Mexican. It took me awhile to get the hang of their coarse, slang-driven Spanish, and to this day they still tease me about how quiet I was for the first few years, how they thought I was so shy but now they realize I was just watching, listening and learning. I introduced myself as Julia, the J pronounced in Spanish fashion as an H. The mismatch between an ostensibly Spanish name and my clearly Asian features prompted my teammates at first, for convenience, to call me Chinita (literally: little Chinese girl).

It’s funny because, in the past, being called Chinese or Japanese used to offend me. And the willful ignorance of people that continue to mix up China, Japan and Korea still bothers me today. But I realized very early on that, far from trying to offend me, my teammates were instead extending their acceptance of me in a unique way. ‘Chinita’ was both an acknowledgment of my Asian roots, and an acceptance of me into their circle of friends. They probably don’t realize it, but that name, that acknowledgment and acceptance, was a major turning point in my ability to be comfortable and confident in my own identity. They gave me something that was uniquely mine, that wasn’t just another label of ethnicity or race or how I came to be in the States.

And I think what I take away most from the whole experience, looking back on it, is that without that kind of thirst for identity and belonging that adoption had instilled in me, that uncertainty about where I fit in, I might never have had the guts to walk into an all-Mexican team and an all-Mexican league. I think that, far from being a hindrance or a handicap, that uncertainty about and desire for belonging and identity was for me a positive force, something that opened up a door I never would have even looked for otherwise.

Yearning for belonging and identity isn’t unique to adoptees. We all want to feel like we have an identity, like we belong to something. A nation, a region, a state, a sports team. Collective identity is important to us.

For international adoptees, I think we are in a unique position in that we have the opportunity to seek out belonging and identity. Because so many of us are born in one nation/culture/society and raised in another, we don’t feel as intrinsically bonded to one or the other. Many adoptees seek out belonging and acceptance in their birth countries, and I think that’s fine, I think that for some adoptees that’s what works. But I also think that seeking identity in other places, whether it’s an adopted country or something more personal, like a job or a sport or religion, can be equally positive and shouldn’t be disregarded as any less valid.

I’m proud to be a Korean-adopted Spanish-speaking American on a Mexican futbol team in Minnesota. At dinner a few weeks ago, when my teammates and I were talking about how long I had been on the team (almost eight years), Cecy turned to Saby, our captain, who spent a couple years playing for another team, hit her on the shoulder and said, “Mira Julia. Fiel a la América.” (Look at Julia. Loyal to América).

I belong.