Adoptive community, you’re on notice.
I’ve gotta be honest, this is a sad post to write, but it has to be said.
The least supportive people in our lives are those in the adoptive community. While strangers in restaurants and checkers at the grocery store tell us how beautiful our daughter is, the adoptive community warns us that she will struggle as a black child in a white family, that we’re already making mistakes and injuring her self-worth as a person of color. As friends and family ooh and ahh over her, amazed at how she’s growing, how she smiles, how she learns and changes, the adoptive community scolds us about attachment disorders, asserts that she is sure to question whether she is truly loved by us. While our church family gushes over her unique and unbelievable beauty, other adoptive families ask whether or not we know how to do her hair, if we’ve considered moving to a more diverse neighborhood, have we considered that our culture will be ostracizing and cruel to her, have we come to grips with the fact that we will never do the right thing for her because we are the wrong skin color.
This will probably read more like a rant than my usually measured and edited pieces, but I don’t care. I am so tired of the shame in the adoptive community. If you don’t buy enough toys of the right skin tone, if you don’t read enough books, if you haven’t catalogued a long list of diverse acquaintances – you’ve failed as a adoptive parent, before your child ever speaks her first word or gets her first tooth. You have to be a cultural phenomenon, somehow able to see people only as the sum total of their melanin count and yet also celebrate their culture in a completely humble and open way. You have to constantly degrade your own life experience and elevate that of others, subconsciously telling your children to ignore all the wisdom or hope you may offer because it was not born into a person of color’s body. You have to acknowledge that the love and sacrifice you offer will never be enough, because you aren’t the right color to offer it the right way, while still remaining calm, loving and kind to everyone. History, culture, music, art, story-telling – none of this matters because you can never, ever do enough, because you are not enough. It’s not just that parents make mistakes (we all know that) it’s that white parents of non-white children make mistakes simply by existing, that we don’t even get a chance to learn and grow and apologize and try again – that our fate is already sealed in the Big Book of Parenting Failures.
I am a new mom. I am juggling work and family and my daughter’s needs and my own inexperience and then I am told that I can never love her the right way, that I will never know enough, do enough, be enough, because of something I can’t control, the skin color I was born with and the genetic make-up of my ancestors.
So, I’m calling a time-out on adoptive communities. If you can’t love the families in your midst enough to support them as they navigate hard things, get out. If the only way you can give advice about racial issues is to shame and lecture, I’m done. If you see people as tools in your arsenal (I have a black friend! My mom is Japanese! I went to school with Latinos! I love Chinese people!) and not individuals to be loved, you don’t need to be in my life or in my family’s life. Because my daughter is the most joyful thing I’ve ever experienced I will not let you steal that from me. I will not let you shame us because we dared to love this child. Mama Grizzly is coming out, and I will protect my family with everything I have. Adoptive community, you’re on notice – I have barred the door against your assumptions, your fear-mongering and your shame.