Just waking up

Since we got home from camp I’ve been worried about D. It’s nothing he’s done; it’s what I’ve been reading, hearing, of the pain that is visited on adoptees, and particularly transracial adoptees, or TRAs, as they call themselves. From what they say, it seems inevitable that this sunny, bright, wonderful kid of ours will have “issues” that may trouble him all through adulthood, issues related to abandonment and identity. It grieves me awfully to think this.

It is also hard to grasp in his case. We have not had any sign whatsoever of problems. We have not been tested at all by him to this point; on the contrary, he has been an extraordinarily loving, sensitive, good-natured child, a kid whose positive, outgoing personality is remarked on by everyone he meets. Will he be the exception? the one who gets through unscathed?

There’s a lot of rawness in the TRA writing, a lot of woundedness and anger. It can be overwhelming. L is not ready to face it, breaking in on our idyll. I have trouble facing it myself, and can do so only in small doses. I feel drawn to learn all I can, to do all I can, but also frightened by the anger. And a part of me wonders, too, whether some of them are embracing victimhood. Is this just defensiveness? Do I even have the right to think this?

I have also begun to read the writings of adoptive moms who have become activists. I have felt defensive toward some of what they say, too. I have wondered whether they are necessarily “right” about everything—given that their experience does not match my own. Their experience is longer, broader, true. But what they say is hard to accept. Is it possible to push Koreanness too much?

I am myself confused about his identity right now. I have thought: I want for him to know that he is as American as anybody else, an American of Korean descent. But these moms and these adoptees seem to stress Koreanness above all. Certainly part of him is still in Korea.

I need to learn. I need to hear from more adult adoptees, and from adoptive parents farther along the road. And not just, I think, from the most pained, radicalized voices, although from those too.

I can’t yet face the birth mothers. I can’t yet feel them, really. But I will need to do that too. For his sake, but maybe for my own sake first? For their sakes?

There is a wall in me that I need to break down.