How To Love A Transracially-Adopted Person Part 4: A Love Letter

One of the biggest lessons transracial adoption has taught me, is how beautiful and complicated love is and how important and utterly impossible it is to understand.  Being separated from my family of origin, connected to my family of experience, and told that love was the driving force behind it all, meant that my relationship with love was always going to be life-giving and sustaining, while at the same time incredibly fragile, and confusing.  I have come to learn that naming these tensions, holding space for them, and operating with a spirit of transformational love is critical to my healing, personal growth, and power. I have also discovered that each time I express the toughest, most challenging realities surrounding adoption, identity, and race, I am in essence, delivering a love letter. 

These “love letters” are not the super sweet “Hallmark-card” kind of messages containing vague pleasantries.  They are precisely worded, clear, and purposeful and require all parties reading to feel, reflect, and expand.  Sometimes they are actual written letters, sometimes they are presentations, sometimes they are conversations. Fueled by intellectual curiosity and a commitment to finding the humanity and compassion within an experience that disrupted the natural flow of nature, these expressions of love take real emotional labor and sometimes (more often than I care to admit), the recipient sees my interpretation as anything but.  Ultimately, what I share and how I share it is in service to all members of the extended family of adoption, most importantly, the adopted persons of the world so that we might be honored and surrounded with the transformational love that we need and deserve.  

With that in mind, I offer a love letter to all those I may come in contact with; near or far, close-in family, or those within the extended family of adoption. This is for friends, acquaintances, lovers, collaborators, and especially, all of the parents that show up and readily place their fully beating, committed, and sometimes broken and exhausted hearts directly in my hands.  

Dear Ones,

Valentine’s blessings!  You are so loved by me. I am humbly devoted to seeing you, hearing you, and holding you.  I offer you all that transracial adoption has taken from and given to me. I give you all that my life circumstances have taught me about healthy identity development, strong relationships, and navigating differences of race, class, and culture.  The realities I share, the mirror I hold up, and the work I encourage may be too painful, too much, and too scary but don’t worry love, we’re in this together.  

Being here together with love means you are not alone. It also means that I am not here to do the work for you.  Being here together with love means that while we acknowledge and honor the goodness and joy adoption can bring, we also sit in the mess of it and recognize the loss, trauma, and pain.  Being here with love means I want to know about your childhood, your losses, your trauma and I urge you to seek the help and support you need to manage your pain - past and present. Being here together with love means we must be fiercely dedicated to redefining our relationship to adoption and to family.  Being here together with love means that we will hold one another accountable and truly commit to doing the work required to love, protect, and cherish children and ourselves and ultimately, elevate our collective humanity.

On this Valentine’s Day and all the days, my gift to you is love!  

As ever,

JuneinApril 

This letter was made possible by my resilience which was made possible in part by the deep, transformational, and perfectly imperfect love of my family.  Without them, there is no way I can stand in my truth and offer my JuneinApril brand of love to the world!  

P.S.

For all those hoping for an update on romantic love…at the time of this posting I am presently single, hopeful as ever, and accepting resumes (if you think you are a suitable candidate email me at bornjuneraisedapril@gmail.com).

For more on JuneinApril’s thoughts on love and adoption…

How to Love a Transracially-Adopted Person Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Links to podcasts that talk about love: Jan 2020, Feb 2019, Feb 2018, Feb 2017, Feb 2016

Links to youtube highlights that talk about love and adoption