How it all began Pt. 2

I'm going to skip a bunch of years here and jump to when we became a family with the birth of our first child, DD1 (dear daughter 1). At the time, we were living just outside of Cambridge, MA, a city that likes to consider itself forward thinking, open-minded and liberal. It is a city where people don't blink twice at mixed race couples or any other kind of non-conventional union, a sort of utopia for idealists I guess. However, even Utopia has its village fools.

When my daughter was just a month old, a visiting relative and I took her to Harvard Square for one of her first big, public space outings. We were having a lovely day strolling around the city. At one point, we sat down and I took my daughter out of her stroller and held her in my lap. A woman walked up to us and started making conversation. For twenty minutes, she entertained us with the story of how her sister had just adopted a baby from China and all the minutia of that experience. 

She didn't stop to take a breath the whole time, and when she was done she just left. I burst out laughing, "That woman was crazy! Why was she telling us all that?" 

My relative looked me square in the eye and asked with a serious tone, "You really don't understand, do you?"

My laughter subsided. "Understand what?"

She looked at the baby and said, "She thinks your daughter is adopted."

I looked down at my dear, dear baby that I had suffered through fourteen hours of labor to bring into this world and thought, "Really?"

Then, through newly enlightened eyes, I looked at my baby. I looked at her shock of black hair that stood so straight up she had been dubbed "Don King" by multiple family members. I looked at her sweet, almond shaped eyes, her button nose, and her ivory skin.

I'm not sure that even now, fifteen years later, I could adequately describe the emotions that I felt at that moment. Sadness. Anger. Confusion. Total Dismay. I wish I could tell you that it was an isolated incident that would never happen again. Sadly that is not the case.

I am a proponent of adoption. I think it is a win-win situation for all parties involved. There are so many children on this planet with no one that I think it is wonderful when a family embraces a child and says, "We are yours. You are ours. We are a family."

However, even when I talk to friends who are adopted themselves, or actually have adopted children, they identify with the same feeling of dismay and sadness when someone makes a point of saying in their own clueless way, "You don't naturally belong together." 

The first year of my daughter's life, I heard countless adoption stories, mostly when I was just minding my own business walking around the mall. Many times, I heard about the heartbreak people experienced when they couldn't conceive a child. I heard way, way too many details about that. I heard about children saved from all over the world. 

It always amazed me how willing people were to unload their stories. Actually, most people were unloading other people's stories. It was always about a daughter, cousin, aunt, friend, or friend of a friend. 

The actual parents of adopted children were in the same boat as I was, the boat of bewilderment. Many people would ask me where my daughter was from, usually after they had unloaded their own diatribe. Usually, I was far too polite and I would kindly explain, "Actually, her father is Korean-American and I am her mother." 

Some of the really clueless people I met would actually reply to this comment with, "Her real mother?" and I would shake my head "yes" and walk away in shock. "Her real mother?” Who says that?"

By the time, my daughter was a year old and becoming more cognizant of her environment, my level of tolerance for stupidity was waning. I remember that one fateful day when a woman came up to me at Sears and started telling me her daughter's adoption story. It was long, and my own child was wiggling, cranky and ready to go home for a nap. When the woman finally came up for air, she asked the inevitable question. "Where is your daughter from?"

This time I was prepared. I had had a year, and many sleepless nights to think of the perfect comeback.

I looked her straight in the eye and answered, "My uterus."

I will never forget the image of her standing slacked jawed in the handbag section of Sears as I walked away with MY daughter.

How it all began Pt. 1

When I first met my husband, I didn't look at him and think "Wow. That Asian guy is really cute." No, I just thought HE was cute. I didn't really think about race at all in the early days of our budding relationship. 

I guess the first time I thought about it was when I brought him to my parents’ house for the first time. I was trying to consciously decide if I was going to tell them that he was Asian.

I mean, I had never introduced any other guys as "Frank the Italian-American" or "Joao the Brazilian-American" (never happened, but a girl can dream) so why should I preface his introduction to my family with a mention of his race? So, I decided not to say anything.

When my mother answered the door, I could see some surprise register on her face. Clearly, she was not expecting him to be of a different race. To her credit, her initial surprise subsided and she was perfectly polite for the rest of the evening. My father reacted the way he reacted to any new person in the house; he ignored him by hiding himself with the newspaper. 

My mother immediately started peppering him with questions about himself, as any mother would, "Where are you from? Do you have any siblings? What do you do?" When my suitor started talking about working towards his Ph.D. my father's newspaper slowly started to unveil his previously hidden face. 

When my suitor mentioned that he was studying biology, the newspaper came down completely. That's when I realized that my Dad was not at all a racist, but an intellectual snob. It did not matter to my dad what race he was, as long as he was a hardworking, intelligent kind of guy. My mother was just pleased that he had manners. He knew how to say "please" and "thank you" and "that dinner was delicious!" and that was all that mattered to her.

After that evening, when they inquired about him, it was always, "How are things with the scientist?"

That was all that mattered