How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person Part 8: She Cried
How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person is an intimate series of essays on love and adoption. I began writing this series 2016 in an effort to share the most vulnerable aspects of my journey in an effort to understand the impact early life loss, family separation, and differences of race and culture had on my ability to love and be loved. As I reflect back on the series and my journey, I realize that for me, adoption will forever be linked to the most excruciating, expansive, and empowering manifestations of love.
When I began writing the series, about love, racial identity, and relationships would be cathartic but I underestimated just how much. Opening up about this journey of love and self-discovery has opened up pathways for growth and healing – not only for me but for the folks that have read and reacted to different installments in the series. I thought last year would be the last year for this series but something happened this last year that inspired me to keep it going. What I have realized is that I will never tire of digging into the foundational elements of love and how love can grow even under the most extreme of circumstances. I also know that there will always be big work for us humans to do on a path from transactional to transformational love and my experiences of adoption allow me to pinpoint practical pieces of our collective humanity and abilities to love that go far beyond adoption. And with that, here is installment #8 of How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person. I am entitling this one “She Cried”.
In this part of the series, I recount stumbling upon a letter I had originally sent my mother of origin that she had sent back to me during the brief exchanges before she decided a connection was not possible. When I opened the letter, it prompted it conjured up a new and different sense of love and loss that I had not felt yet.
I was searching for one of the loveliest and most meaningful letters I’d ever received. An unexpected gift in the midst of reunion with family of origin on my mother’s side, a note from cousin Sean. I was recording a podcast with him and I wanted to reference the letter with more detail than I could recall. I leafed through the many papers and letters in my ‘reunion’ binder and I was crushed as I got to the last few layers and still had not found it. As I was trying to negotiate my emotions and possibility that the letter Sean wrote was gone, there was a white envelope with my name on it that I did not recognize right away.
As I opened the letter, I remembered…
My bio sister, Debbie handed me a white envelope with my name handwritten on the front. She had found the letter tucked in between stacks of my mother of origin Helen’s clothes. She had carried it from Hawaii because she thought I might want to have it. I peeked into the envelope and immediately recognized the paper and the handwriting. It was the paper and the words I had painstakingly chosen to communicate Helen. Years earlier that letter had been part of the communications sent from me to Helen along with pictures and other artifacts from my life to give her a window into my world.
While Helen did not deny me as her daughter, she was tentative at best in welcoming me into her life and the family. When I asked in a letter about my father of origin, in a note back to me she shared that my conception was due to sexual violence and she did not know my “sperm donor” – her words, not mine. With that, she sent back everything I had sent to her – the photos, the articles, the life memories, everything I had curated and shared with her. She also expressed how hearing from me had made her very depressed and that being in touch further was not an option. I was devastated.
When I saw that big envelope, I was so thrilled, thinking I would get a window into her life with all of the things she was sending to me. I am not sure I had ever cried so hard as I held all she sent back to me literally and materially - as I held the heartache of a second rejection, and as I held her pain, my pain, our collective pain! I was too consumed with processing the emotions to notice that there was one letter I had sent that was not there.
Fast forward back to the letter I found last year when I was looking for a different one. I pulled out the letter and immediately noticed something I had not noticed before. Directly down the center of the page of the letter she kept tucked away were three tear drops evenly spaced down the page. I had to sit down and catch my breath. Not only had she saved the letter, but she also cried. For me the tear drops on the page were evidence of emotion and the emotion was evidence caring and maybe even of love.
I had always wondered about my mother of origin’s love for me. Could she have loved me even if she did not hold on to me? Over time and I have learned that I am lovable. People had stuck around and not left – family, friends, partners and yet, there was still a desire to know whether she loved me. Those tears represented a release of love from her to me in the only way she was capable and I felt it.
These days it does not matter who does and does not validate my journey of love however, if you’re interested in how you can show love for a transracially adopted person or any adopted person my recommendation is twofold – first, understand that so often the center of our humanness is anchored to the love of our families specifically the love and connection to the humans that bring us into the world. Second, loving those of us that have been disconnected from family of origin requires you as our loved ones to do your own deeply personal work of understanding your relationship to love from your beginnings. Just imagine if everyone got closer to deeply loving ourselves and making space for understanding love in the most extreme circumstances.
Find the podcast version on apple podcasts. And check out my new podcast called Calendar Conversations, a guide for adoptive parents.