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
kimkargbo
Really great, albeit hard, reflection, Amy. Having raised my biracial, multicultural children now to adulthood, and watching their racial identity struggles in young adulthood – you are wise to have turned down that invitation. There is SO MUCH we are not privy to, regardless of how close our relationship is with them, even as teens, or how astute we are in observing. As a mom of adult children of a different race than me, I often feel like an outsider to what they are processing and experiencing. It is painful. But I continue to lean into the fact that their Heavenly Father is no outsider to their struggles and pain and identity confusion. And he is with them. And Jesus knows all about being an outsider.
My kids now live in NYC. I can’t stand NYC – it stinks, it’s dirty, it requires way too many steps. I asked them why they love it so much. My daughter, the internally tuned-in one of the bunch, told me, “Mom, I’ve realized – NYC is “the TCK” of America. Everyone here comes from everywhere, and NYC has it’s own culture. It is a blend of all the cultures of those who live here, but it is its own unique culture. It is the first place I have ever felt at home. I don’t look different than everyone else, and I can be whoever I want to be. Because that’s what everyone is doing. And everyone fits.”
I can never be frustrated at how far away they live again. And I will gladly continue to buy my plane tickets to go visit that stinky place. I am glad my kids have found a place to call “home.” (Though THIS TCK is not going to call that home! LOL!)
amy.medina
Really fascinating insight, Kim. I hope my kids find their own NYC too.
Judith Marc
May God watch over your lovely children, Amy! I pray for them every morning when I pray for my children and grandchildren. May you find the right path each day, and may the world be kind to your babies who are growing up. I wish I could fix it for you!
amy.medina
thank you so much, dear Judy.
Mary Lou Bryan
Amy thank you for such an honest and vulnerable post. I’m a mother of four as well not adopted but I raised them in Russia on the mission field and navigating our lives when we came back to the USA was very hard. I wrote a post about it for a life overseas because I wanted these tough subjects to be addressed. My kids are still finding their way with the Lord and in their lives. They are beautiful Young adults and I’m so proud of them but the transitioning was very difficult for some of them.
Your heart of love for yours will go a long way and help them to navigate their journeys. Thank you for sharing your heart with us and I will pray, as many will , for you and your family for wisdom and the Lord’s blessing.
amy.medina
Mary Lou, thank you for taking the time to comment. I’m glad you could resonate with this.
finenets2013
Greetings Amy,
Thank you again for sharing your passion, emotion and vulnerability. I appreciate it, well said too. Thank you for sharing your heart.
Steve
Karen
Amy! You have taken some of our always-beneath-the-surface thoughts and brought them up to give them some light. Thanks for taking the time to think, digest, and write out as you process where you are at today as an adoptive transracial family.
Connie
As always, Thanks for sharing your heart with us Amy. I hope to talk more with you in person when you come to the office.
amy.medina
I would love that, Connie.
Andrea
Your post hit me hard. I am also the parent of three transracially adopted children, now adults. Navigating that has been both a burden and a gift for them, and it has been theirs alone to make sense of as they stepped into adulthood. Such an unfair burden can be devastating; it can also be incredibly enriching. I have not had the added issues of culture and country to incorporate, as you do. But I relate to the pain of not being able to shoulder it for them. It is incredibly hard to form an identity when the culture and people around you are assigning to you a false one based on your race. You don’t fit into any of society’s slots.
I will encourage you, though, that their unique makeup affords them the ability to forge an identity not dependent upon outside factors, if they have the faith and loving support available to them as they process it. My kids have embraced their stories and are thriving not in spite of them, but in large part because of them. It is a painful, precious, fearful, thrilling, and above all holy thing to walk their roads with them. Having you as their mom, who is willing to acknowledge the hard instead of glossing over it, who is humble enough to learn right along with them, who refuses simplistic understandings in order to help them see themselves for who they are becoming, who holds sorrow in one hand and purpose in the other — is the greatest gift they could have right now. Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing your fears with us.
amy.medina
Thank you, Andrea. This is such a beautiful and encouraging response.