On Transracial Adoption

There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.

Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it. 

Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.

For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates. 

I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.

I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into. 

Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.

I had prayed and begged God to bring us to an ethnically diverse school in California, but instead He brought us to a community that’s perfect in all ways except that one. It was a clear choice (basically our only choice), yet today I feel the repercussions of that decision reflected in my children’s eyes. Their differentness is inescapable; it shadows them wherever they go. They absorb the jabs from classmates; they grimace when they see themselves disappearing in dark photographs. The doctor gives them a peach-colored bandaid called “flesh-colored”–but not their flesh. They don’t feel fully American, fully African, fully Black. In a time in their lives when being different is the worst possible thing, they are different in every possible way.

This culture tells young people that they must be their authentic selves, that they have the power to shape their own identities. Yet any adopted child will tell you that you realize biology matters when you’ve been cut off from it. You may not understand how deeply your identity is connected to your biological family, ethnicity, and country until they’ve been taken away from you.

Once in a while, I imagine my children’s lives if they had not come into our family, and I weep at that thought. We took them out of a hopeless situation and brought them into our world, but that meant severing what little ties they had left to their culture and country, and that too makes me weep. It was okay when they were young, but now they are on the precipice of leaving the shelter of the safe space we created, and I feel helpless in knowing how to prepare them for it. My trust in God to protect and hold them is stretched taut, straining under so much uncertainty. 

In 2013, we visited the MLK memorial in Washington, DC on our cross-country trip. I stood in front of it with my children and reminded them that this was the man who opened the way for families like ours to exist. Yet the world he longed to see for his own children still hasn’t found us. I tell my children that in their differentness, I pray that God will use them to be bridges between people. But bridges hold a lot of weight. God help me strengthen their foundation.

Related:

Parents Brought Their Children to John Hartfield’s Lynching

Imagine Your Children Are Black

What Your Grandmother’s Piano Had To Do With Slavery in Zanzibar