Lately I’ve been reading some blogs of transracial adoptees where they discuss their experiences growing up in white families and in white neighborhoods.
Most of them are bitter and are against children raised in transracial families.
I wonder how many adopted people feel the same or is that the angry ones are those who make all the noise. I certainly don’t want my children to feel such pain and I’m doing my best to raise them in an honest and open environment, but sometimes no matter how hard we try, we will still make mistakes.
But putting everything in perspective… how many of us feel that our own parents also made mistakes? How many of us felt at some point in our life that we “didn’t fit” in our school, our family, with our friends? How many of us felt rejected because we were different in one way or another?
Aren’t all these common human experiences? Don’t we all try to fit and please everyone while being a child, only to find that no matter what we do, we are still rejected, or laughed upon, or bullied?
The color of our skin is not the only barrier that keeps us separated from the rest, sometimes it is because you’re fat, or thin, or too tall, or too short, or not good at sports, or because of your clothes, etc, specially in this ever increasing image conscious society.
So, are adopted black kids growing up in black families going to be more happy, more adjusted than adopted black kids growing up in white families? Or worse yet, are black kids growing up in orphanages or foster families more happy as time goes by that those raised in transracial families or white environments?
Hard to know, but I think a lot depends on the family and the personality of the child.
So why nowadays when we have so many wonderful possibilities are we going to avoid adopting kids from another race?
Unfortunately there are not so many opportunities for those kids to grow up in a family of their “own race” and most of the time it all comes down to choosing between hunger and possibly death or a transracial family.
I understand the feelings of many transracial adopted grown ups but as I said before we all have some kind of wound from our childhood that left scars for the rest of our lives. I know I have my own, some very deep that were inflicted inside my own biological family.
And the deepest wound of all is that of the abandonment. It’s more about being an orphan than about being raised in a transracial family what hurts more; it’s about the loss of a family, about felling unwanted.
And that can’t be fixed, it can only heal as time goes by.
I know that love is not enough to cure that wound, but it can help. I can’t change the past of my children, but I can be with them when they need me.

AliciA