Growing up in a transracial family is complicated.
How do you create an environment where everyone is comfortable? That is the challenge for many TRA families who have adopted children of color and also have bio children who are white. It becomes a balancing act on scales that can be tipped according to personality.
At 43 years old, I am wrestling with the effects of an unbalanced life, according to some of my siblings. I have been strategically cut out of lives of my two brothers. My oldest brother has separated himself from the family in what I feel is an open protest against the way he was forced to grow up.
My other brother is in contact with the family but fails to recognize me as more than an acquaintance. When I stroll through his living room his walls are filled with family pictures which chronicle a life growing up in the 70’s and 80’s. Picture by picture you can easily tell about what year it is simply by looking at the style of clothes worn in each picture. My eyes scan the pictures and one by one I look for my presence in this life. I find one small picture that can be easily missed by the scanning eye. It is a portrait picture of my brother and me but my skin is so light that if my hair were straight I could pass for a dark tanned white child. The pictures that I have given to him as Christmas gifts of me and my family fail to pass the strict guidelines and are absent from his display.
Our family doesn’t talk about deep issues like this so I am left to piece together this painful puzzle and no matter how I arrange it, the answer and picture is always the same. I represent the cause of what my brothers feel was an unequal life. Early on in my life my parents made the decision to move from a white suburb of Detroit to the inner city of Detroit for my benefit. Because of this, it is my assumption that my brothers resent the fact that they had to grow up being the minority is so many situations. In their minds, if you take me away their existence gets better. Deny my presence on the wall of pictures and maybe their lives can now be normal. Cut off all ties to the family and you can walk away from a life you resent. If you are away from your brother of color no one will ever know you are a transracial sibling.
There were great sacrifices that were made to allow me to grow up with some connection to the black community. Those sacrifices meant I would grow up with pride in who I am as a black man with a connection to a community I love. In an effort to connect me with my color, did we create an instance where the celebration of my color stole color from my brothers and made them invisible?
Can TRA families get so obsessed with meeting the needs of the child of color that they create the invisible children?
This is a danger and a reality that I am presently trying to sort it all out. I think my brothers would say that too much attention was given to my needs and not enough attention was given to theirs. Although, I enjoyed the way I was raised I wonder what could have been done to prevent this split and actually the answer is surprisingly simple.
Our family should have communicated more. The invisible boys should have been given a place to talk and sort out what they were feeling and thinking. When we were growing up the effects of transracial adoption on the entire family was not known so no one told us what to do or how to do it or what to address and what not to address. In the era we grew up many agencies were tell adoptive parents to go home and ignore the fact that their child was adopted, so you can imagine the misinformation that was given to transracial families.
Indirectly, I feel responsible for the Grand Canyon-sized crack in our family. I too follow my brother’s logic; without me this doesn’t happen. The turmoil doesn’t occur and no one is estranged. But I also know I have a choice as to how I respond to things in my past. I can see them as weights that keep me down or they can be step stools I use to get to the next level.
Thankfully, my sister saw this experience as one that allowed her to see the world from a different perspective which added color to her life and did not take it away. She chose to see it as an advantage and not a disadvantage. She used her experience as a stool and not a weight.
Part of my purpose as a voice of a transracial adoptee is to share not only the good but especially the bad. It is important that I show what could potentially happen so transracial families can avoid the mistakes our family made and be aware of potential issues. That way families can have conversations to address what we didn’t which creates stools that allow for a better perspective instead of invisible children that never reach their potential because they are connected to weight they refuse to release.
Originally posted to: http://transracial.adoptionblogs.com/weblogs/avoid-creating-an-invisible-child-in-transracial-families
Really thoughtful as always. thanks Kev
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Thanks for this post, Kevin. I heard you speak recently and the experience was invaluable to me. We are parenting a biological child as well as our youngest son who is African American and who joined our family through adoption. We talk all the time with our kids about race and about adoption and I hope that our openness will help our boys to be as close when they grow up as they are now. I am sorry that you and your brothers don’t share that closeness, but am glad for your strong relationship with your sister and your willingness to use your experience to help families like ours.
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What a great post! I needed to hear this today. We are in danger of having invisible kids. May I link to this at my blog? I think everyone who adopts needs to read this. Thank you.
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I now see how incredibly blessed we were that our “TRA” family was so balanced that I loved my brothers equally and without notice of skin tones. So much so, that I now have many varying tones with my own family and children…and they, too, love each other blindly. What a gift and heritage my parents passed down!
Being blind to skin tones allows a person’s character (heart influencing actions and words) to be the weight with which we measure a man.
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I guess the idea is that the White children are being raised by White parents and have the advantage of White power in this world, so odds are they are going to be just fine…it is the Black kids who have no Black influence around them and have no idea how to develope their identity, so you have to make special efforts there to bridge the gap. YOu don’t do it a the expense of the other kids, but you do it for the health of the family as a whole. This enriches the whole tribe.
I am a White woman raised with a mixed race family, and I find joy and wealth and a richness from my life experience being so unique and beautiful. My Black brother is the pride and joy of my life, as are my White brothers.
If you’ll excuse me, it is hair day here…back to the ‘fro management! *grin*
Meri
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Kevin,
I’ve been re-reading this and letting it roll around in my brain a few days. One thing that comes to mind: I hope you don’t have false guilt about the “crack” in your family. It’s probably true that everything changed for your brothers when you entered the family. But any time we have a life-changing event (trauma), we can choose to be healed and grow stronger, or we can use it to become bitter and hardened.
God is responsible for the fact of your adoption. I’m sure your parents did the best they knew how. They are responsible for that. Each of your brothers is responsible for his own heart. The only responsibility that should be on your shoulders is the reactions and responses of your own heart.
Please don’t carry around this sense of guilt that you are somehow inherently responsible. Adoption can be hard for everyone involved, but it is not your fault that it’s hard. I t just is what it is. I sincerely pray your brothers explore their hearts and find true healing so that you may all have healthy relationships.
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I’m just guessing, but maybe your brothers feel like all the efforts your parents went through, and they went through, wasn’t worth it since you are questioning the way you were raised. Obviously you have the right to do so, but it may make them feel resentful.
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But I am not questioning the way I was raised. I understand why certain things were done. I am pointing out to others for their benefit that although it made sense why we did what we did, today’s families need to be aware of the potential consequences that could occur and make intentional steps to avoid them.
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This is giving me a lot of food for thought. I noticed recently that I do a whole lot of affirming of my adopted children’s cultures, and not much of my bio kids’ culture. It’s a hard balance.
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I often , OFTEN have thoughts along this line when I see pictures of white families with older biological children and younger non-white children. There is a heck of a lot of communication that would have to happen within the family to bring older kids on board with losing the ease and privilege being an all-white family in North America brings. Kids will not recognize the privilege they had before was unearned and existed at the expense of non-white “others”. They will only notice that it is now missing. Experiencing what being a minority feels like is not fun and it feels wrong and unjust if you never had to experience it before. Obviously it would be easy to blame the newcomer who changed your social status with their presence.
Really great topic for potential adoptive parents to consider!
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The bravery in crafting, digging, and posting this is mind bending to me.
I have had questions like these around the raising of my two boys, one who is TRA (6) and the other who is bio and biracial (3). So the issues are different, and similar. Related not mirrors.
Like Kristen above I feel as if there is an imbalance. I wonder if I place a much greater weight on #1 son’s story of origin, being an adoptee (vs. being a donor child) being Black vs. being mixed. Where do I come up with my value system?? So dramatically thought provoking.
Thank you.
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Thanks for sharing this. My eldest daughter recently has begun asking for more balance in this area (one of the two children who were born to us – we have three others who joined our family through adoption). We truly were surprised at the intensity of her desire to have her own culture celebrated. It was eye opening, but we are so glad that she has begun sharing her true feelings about things. We are beginning to dialogue about ideas on how to make it all work, but the best part has been her honesty. We are just so glad she told us! It can only help the family as a whole. Thanks again.
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Kevin, Thank you for this post. I have heard you speak and have read your book and am happily becoming caught up with your blog! I have an older bio child (11years) and a 2 1/2 year old African American child adopted through foster care in Chicago. I so glad that we have individuals with your experience to help us guide our family to grow together in our journey! I have posted your blog on my blog and list your book as a resource for transracial families seeking guidance!
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