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Subtitle: Dead ant (repeat)

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He’s pulling the legs off ants!

I should not be allowing this.

Who cares? Ants are a pest.

I should be teaching compassion.

He seems to zen-like in his focus.

This is the first step towards serial killing.

He’s so happy down there on the ground ‘playing with ants.’

He needs to know it’s not okay to kill sentient beings.

We eat meat for God’s sake!

But we don’t eat meat for fun; we eat it to nourish ourselves.

What will the other parents think?

There’s no one around.

He’ll make a great exterminator.

Somewhere Between (directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton), which I saw on Netflix, follows four teenaged girls adopted from China into white families (one is mixed-race) in the US as babies or young children. On the surface it looks like a niche documentary that would ring true for Chinese adoptees and their families but it’s so much more.

It stands on its own as a fascinating journey that dips and veers in all kinds of unexpected directions. There is mystery, plenty of poignant moments, a thrilling ride, a good dose of heartbreak as well as growth and transformation.

Along the way, we  learn about what it’s like to be adopted from China (there are 80,000+ Chinese adoptees in the US) as well as a few universal truths about adoption.

I watch all adoption movies through a personal lens now and try to translate what I see to how it affects my life as an adoptive parent. Here are a few things I learned from the movie.

Transracial adoptees need a sense of cultural belonging

All four of the featured adoptees grew up in white communities where there were few if any visible minorities. All of them mentioned this as a major hurdle citing examples of racism, stereotyping and feelings of isolation at school and in the community. One adoptee seemed to overly adore her tall, blond beauty pageant-winning sister, another didn’t really feel complete until she met her Asian boyfriend at university, and another overcompensated through extreme A-type competence to cope with not fitting in.

One adoptee pointed out that racial difference becomes a huge factor as kids hit the identity formation years. Little kids are happy to be loved by their parents. Then one day, when all they want to do it fit in, they realize everyone is staring at them. This made a lot of sense. I find Theo is very comfortable and secure right now but he also doesn’t have a strong sense of racial identity yet.

Adoptees want to know their birthstories

Another point that came up repeatedly was that the young women all wondered about their birthfamilies and why they were ‘abandoned.’  A small part of them felt unwanted despite being deeply loved by their adoptive families. I had a light bulb moment when I realized that I need to be aware that our love as adoptive parents does not negate 1) a feeling of being unwanted and 2) the dual state of loving your adoptive parents/family but still wanting to know your biological family.

The truth is out there 

All of the girls were told they would never find their biological parents or any information on their history. But in the most unlikely and myth-busting scene, one of the adoptees meets her entire birthfamily in China. The upshot is that after meeting her ‘Chinese family,’ she stands a little taller and seems confident and secure in her ethnicity and in herself. There are many surprises in this storyline, which I won’t reveal. It’s documentary gold: exciting, heart-wrenching, revelatory. Side-learning, which I already knew: birthfathers care (but my lips are sealed).

Meeting other adoptees can be hugely healing

A world conference of Chinese adoptees spurs on huge changes in the adoptees including the aforementioned reunion. The overachiever also appears to undergo a transformation after meeting others like her. Suddenly able to express her feelings though moving poetry, she starts speaking to groups of adoptive parents about how she feels. Achieving a calmer state, she exchanges her type-A activities for quieter more introspective pursuits.

Meeting others like you is incredibly powerful. There is a sense of belonging that family and friends who weren’t adopted simply can’t provide. I’m glad that Theo has his posse of little adoptee friends, and I hope they will still be friends when they hit the teen years when their friendships will really count.

 

Joy

joyJoy is:

white wine on the front balcony; unexpected May long weekend sunshine; late-night trampolining; a tire swing in the evening light; mastering the monkey bars; riding downhill;  little friends with butterflies, a kaleidoscopic array of rhododendrons; a new Canucks’ hat.

What Theo said

badwords

Bad words 

“Mom! “I not saying Stupidhead!” (repeat)

“Mom! “You say Idiot; Idiot not nice.” (repeat)

“Mom! He say, Shut up! Shut up not nice.” (repeat)

“Mom I can say acker?” Me: “Um … OK.” [Starts banging his plastic superheroes together like they are fighting].” “You acker! No! You acker!”

Relationship confusion

Me: “Hey Theo. Who’s your mama?”

Theo: “Daddy is.”

* * *

Me: “Theo, who’s my baby?”

Theo: “Mommy.”

Life and death

“Mom… I want to go outside to  kill ants.”

“Mom … it’s a snail … I can kill it?”

“Mom. That man [points at severely disabled man at the pool], he ALIVE! “
(The man’s careworker says hello to us every week, which spurs Theo on to stare, point and comment despite our conversations about pointing and feelings.)

Concepts

“Mom? You bring a Popsicle to the pool so I can eat it after swimming?”

Two Sikh men on a bench

The two seated men have identical turbans, grey beards and immaculate curled moustaches.

Theo starting at them and excitedly pointing back and forth: “THEY THE SAME!”

Above comic by Adi

What weird/awkward/silly things have your kids said recently?

 

 

Hands off his hair.

Hands off his hair.

I see her approach. She’s jogging. We recognize each other. We chat about running. I introduce Theo. She looks at him smiling, and then the gushing starts:

“Oh I love your hair! My hair is so straight. Look at it! Yours is so curly. You are so lucky! Can I put your hair on my head?”

Theo looks at her perplexed and slightly anxious.

Then it comes. So fast.

The hand moves in like a jetliner looking for a landing strip.

While in motion, her goal mere fingertips away, she asks him rhetorically, “Can I touch your hair?”

Theo recoils ducking, moving sideways and then backwards as her hand nimbly reaches its target.

Getting a grip

Or rather, off the bookshelf and in my hand.

I’m in the middle of reading Lori Holden’s book: The Open Hearted Way to Open Adoption, which I open up every chance I get.

openhearted

What makes Lori’s book so interesting is her perspective on openness, which she sees as a way to heal the split between biography (our upbringing) and biology.

One point that she makes that resonated with me is that all adopted kids need their parents to behave in an “open way” towards their children’s birthparents, whether known or not. It doesn’t matter if your kids have no knowledge of their birth-history, a closed adoption, limited contact, an occasional in-person relationship, a touch-and-go relationship, or a roast beef on Sundays kind of relationship, as adoptive parents, we need to keep the story of our children’s origins alive in our children’s hearts and minds.

Lori gives a great example of a mom who writes to her son’s birthmother despite the fact that she hasn’t heard anything back for many years. She’s doing it for her son. And her son in an overheard moment tells a friend how his mom always writes to his birthmom anyway, and it’s clear that it means a lot to him. The mother keeps all the letters and photos tucked away as a journal of her son’s life.

This all digs into another deep (and rather obvious) fact about adoption: our kids came from someone else, and that’s where their story begins  – whether we know the details or not. So if a child was adopted from an orphange or a hospital or through foster care, prior to that “first meeting point” was a woman and a man and a baby. This part of the story may be a mystery, and the facts may never be known but it’s still something we need to acknowledge and honour.

Even for us, in a situation where the birthfamily is known –but only really seen online for now– I need to constantly remind Theo of who they are and why they’re important.

I know an adoptive mom whose kids, adopted from Africa, write notes to their birthmoms and tie them to helium balloons and let them go on Mother’s Day. That pretty much says it all.

Do you talk to your kids about their birthparents regularly regardless of your situation? Is this just all a bit much? 

PS: I’m trying to blog daily as a creative undertaking so feel free to unsubscribe me! I won’t be insulted.

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