We may have polished off our Thanskgiving feast, but it is still November, still National Adoption Month, and there is still a need to hear all sides of the story. Nicole Soojung Callahan wrote a piece over at The Toast that I really wanted to share.
My mother would say years later that she never knew I had been “teased” for being Korean, so I must not have told my parents about the education I was receiving in racial slurs at my little parochial school. My teachers had no idea what was going on. It might not have occurred to any of them that kids so young would know, let alone fling such words around. Nor did my parents know how to begin the conversation—no one, from the social worker to the adoption attorney to the judge who finalized my adoption, had ever warned them about raising a child of color in a very white town. At seven and eight years old, I didn’t have the capacity or the vocabulary to explain what was happening or how I felt; the words were locked inside. I was supposed to be fine, I was supposed to be happy, I was supposed to feel special for having been adopted. There wasn’t room in that picture to explain what was happening at school.
Please read it. All of it, every word. This sort of story is the reason that even after we move into December, and into 2015, I want to strive to continue adding other voices to this blog so that others can understand that adoption and this process we are going through isn’t just about growing our family or the paperwork involved.
Adopting Abroad 