Off and Running - a letter to Avery

(This documentary aired again on PBS’s P.O.V. on September 7, 2010. You may watch it online until December 7, 2010)

Dear Avery,

Thank you for letting Nicole Opper tell your story. As a fellow adult adoptee, I appreciate your bravery and willingness to share your life with me. I’m especially glad that your family is featured in the film to show the world that “family” has a new definition nowadays. I hope that your mothers and brothers are well.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I’m an adult adoptee, born and raised in Philadelphia. I’m Japanese-American, meaning my bio-mom had Japanese heritage and my bio-dad was a mixture of Welsh, Irish, German, et al. My adoptive family is white: Norwegian on my mother’s side and German on my father’s side. When I was growing up, my mother always took great pride in her Norwegian heritage, so I grew up with some of their food, phrases and customs. I learned about my birth culture (Japan) after I left home and went to college. I have an older brother and a younger sister – both born of my parents. We grew up in a great neighborhood in Philadelphia called Mount Airy. It’s still a wonderfully diverse neighborhood to this day.

My adoption was closed and my birth records sealed. However, my mother is a great researcher and a librarian by trade, so she did a lot of detective work to obtain my original birth certificate, which has my name and my birth parents names on it. That’s really rare for someone who was born in the late 60’s like me. I have made attempts to contact my birth parents, but have not had any luck so far. I’ve made a few attempts, and I’m not sure if I feel the strong need to make contact. I’d like to know my medical history, but I’m also resolved if I never make contact or have a reunion with them.

I am glad that you have made contact with your birth mother. I know that it was difficult for you to hear from her once, and then not have an ongoing relationship with her. I hope you have made peace with that.

Seeing Rafi go off to college and then witnessing your struggles really spoke to my experiences. When my father (adoptive) died, I was in Japan. It was a difficult time in my life to be separated from him. But in the end, it helped me to learn about feelings of abandonment, separation and loss. I saw some of the same separation struggles happen when Rafi went off to Princeton. For me, knowing that I have trouble with separation from those I’m close to helps me to weather those tough times.

Watching your mothers’ reactions to your struggles was hard for me to watch. They seem like loving, and understanding parents, but as you went through your stages of racial identity, I wished that they could have reached out for help. Perhaps they did and it was not captured on film. Oh, and if you haven’t read Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum yet, I highly recommend it. Get your moms to read it, too. It’s great at explaining the stages of racial identity (William Cross's model).

Thank you again for working with Nicole to tell your story. I know that it will help a lot of transracially adoptive families.

Mother and Child

Anyone else seen the ads for this movie? It's been in the theaters since May 7. Here's the synopsis:

Three women's lives share a common core: they have all been profoundly affected by adoption. KAREN (Annette Bening) had a baby at 14, gave her up at birth, and has been haunted ever since by the daughter she never knew. ELIZABETH (Naomi Watts) grew up as an adopted child; she's a bright and ambitious lawyer, but a flinty loner in her personal life. LUCY (Kerry Washington) is just embarking with her husband on the adoption odyssey, looking for a baby to become their own.

I think it's interesting how this drama has slipped into the "artsy" theaters in my town (Ritz 5) with big stars (in addition to those listed above) Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson plus screenings at the Toronto Film Festival 2009 and Sundance Film Festival 2010. No promos (save one I saw with Samuel L. Jackson) on Jay Leno or David Letterman. No barrage of TV ads. Interesting.

I applaud Director Rodrigo Garcia for taking on this topic. And it looks like he has done his research: I can already see the separation trauma issues he addresses in the film. But after watching the trailer, I'm not sure if I have the courage to actually go see it. I may have to wait to buy the DVD, so I can stop it and walk away if I have the need.

My walk-aways would not be because of frustration, however. From the trailer, it looks like Garcia has captured these so well that I'm afraid this movie would hit too close to home. It would show me too much of myself or it might stir up emotions and thoughts about what my biological mother might be thinking.

Like I said, courage. I need courage to see this film.

And at the same time, I am curious to see this film. I must see if Garcia does justice to the adoption triad. Or will I see it and say, "Oh, no. Is everybody going to make assumptions about adoption based on this film?"  From the trailer, I have a feeling that it is the former, not the latter because Garcia is allowed to take the feature length film to go deeper that a 1 hour TV drama (see my post on Glee earlier this month).

If any of my readers has seen this movie, I would love to hear your impressions.

I have a feeling it's going to be a long time before you read my full review on this blog. The curiosity and courage will have to outweigh the fear.

The Ultimate Separation

My good friend at the Meltingpot blog wrote a recent post titled "Death be not proud..." in which she addressed our customs/traditions around death and mourning. She posed the questions, "How do the people in your family and/or culture deal with death? What are your rituals and do they help you process your grief?"

I posted my brief response on her blog - because for an adoptee (or is it just for me personally?), death is a extremely difficult thing to process. She asked me to elaborate - so here it is: death is the ultimate separation.

Let me take you into the world of an adopted baby. Imagine spending forty weeks in a warm, comfortable womb (if you are lucky) and then having to come into the world in an indescribably intense birth (whether it's natural or c-section...). That birth is an experience that you must process: from one whole unit into two individuals. Quite a heady thing for an infant. Now add the separation that comes as you are handed into another person's arms - somehow, instinctively, you know that this is not your mother. You realize that this is not the same heartbeat you heard every day for forty weeks. The voice, too, is different. Where is that familiar voice and those familiar sounds that you grew used to in your first weeks of life? Where's my mother? As an infant, you must grapple to overcome this feeling of loss and separation. You somehow deal with this grief by "picking yourself up by your emotional bootstraps." In that "fight or flight" instinct, you decide to flee the emotional pain and a part of your emotional self shuts down...even dies.

Now fast forward about twenty years. Or thirty. Or forty. Whenever you experience the first death of someone close to you. All of those latent, subconscious coping mechanisms are awakened: you experience the same separation, pain and grief all over again. That's what it can be like for an adoptee to experience death. It's that profound. The closer the relationship with the adoptee, the greater the separation and grief.

I fully understood this when my father passed away about ten years ago. What made this separation even more shocking was the fact that I had just seen him a few days before his passing. Yet I was half way around the world when he died. The months following his death were incredibly surreal. I was in a daze. I don't think that I even truly registered the DATE of his death until about six months later, when I called my mother on his birthday. She noted that he passed on Groundhog Day. It was an extremely challenging grieving process - one that took at least a full year or more. I constantly questioned myself, "Why is this so hard? Am I the only one who's feeling this way? Is this a normal way to grieve?" What made it especially difficult is that I was also physically separated from my family, as we all lived in different countries at that time.

The good news is once I realized that death forces me to relive my primal adoption separation, I was able to process grief in a more "normal" way. Or at least I understand better what's going on for me emotionally, and I don't have to shut down or shut people out. My father's death brought a lot of self-awareness into my life and for that, I thank him.

With my job, I actually attend memorial services often. Perhaps it's an alum of the school or a former teacher. But one thing is for sure: whether it's someone I knew personally or not, I will always feel the pain of separation as I contemplate how the individual is no longer with us in this world. It brings a tear to my eye every time.