Happy adoptee

I feel like there is a fairly well-established sentiment within the adoptee community that "happy" adoptees are simply repressing their true emotions and aren't acknowledging that they're grieving the loss of their birth family/country/culture. We just don't feel comfortable opening up, or we feel like we have to conform/fit in so that we don't step on our adoptive parents' toes.

Sorry, but in my case, no. I'm not happy and content with who I am because I simply pretend my Korean roots and birth mother don't exist. I traveled to Korea twice. I met my birth family. I clashed mightily with my adoptive parents over both adoption-related and non-adoption related issues. I lived abroad for a combined total of two years, including stints in China, Taiwan and Spain. I faced head-on what the mismatch between my Asian face and my unaccented, American English got me in Asia, both good and bad. I endured the reactions my Asian features provoked in small-town Spain.

I was not particularly happy for much of high school and college, because I was struggling very openly with issues like identity and independence, issues that many adoptees (and, let's not forget ALL teenagers) struggle with. Ask my parents, and they'll tell you I stepped on their toes plenty and that I was NEVER the type to hide my opinions about things. My dad still maintains I would make a good trial lawyer because I'm a grade A arguer.

But I'm happy now, and not happy in the sense that I've simply shut away any of the issues I faced over the years. When the pharmacist in Spain sneered at me to "get myself cleaned up before I came back," I was reminded yet again that as a child, I enjoyed by extension my parents' white privilege, but once I leave home, I am always going to be judged by my outward appearance.

I guess it's just that I've learned to accept some very tough realizations. It started with accepting that my birth mother made a mistake, and then accepting that she didn't keep me. From there it was accepting things like being Asian on the outside but "white" on the inside, accepting that I would never be one hundred percent Korean, and accepting my American identity (a very, very recent occurrence, to be honest).

Acceptance doesn't mean resignation. I was furious at that pharmacist in Spain. I told my mother point blank that the sense of entitlement expressed by waiting adoptive parents after the Haiti earthquake infuriated me. I'll have a go at anyone who uses adoption as a catch-all solution to abortion.

But I'm not looking back at my past for whatever sense of completion I think we all feel at some level or another. I've been through my own struggles and my own identity crisis, if you want to call it that. Maybe the fact that some of us are happy doesn't mean that we're repressing our emotions or that we've somehow been brainwashed by the adoption agencies and our adoptive parents into accepting some rosy picture of adoption. Maybe it just means that some of us have worked through it, made a conscious decision to be okay with who we are and are looking forward now, rather than back.