Someone to look like you

On the Adoption Parenting Yahoo list right now, the discussion involves Teaching Culture and partially revolves around having your child of another race interact as much as possible with other people of their race. A side discussion came up remarking that an African American woman adopted into a same race family still had issues with feeling that she did not see people who looked like her. Here are my remarks, slightly edited for this blog:

I'm the mother in a cross race/cultural adoption but I’m also "the child" in a same-race Caucasian adoptive family and from what I’ve read (and experienced) the most common feeling within adoption is the curiosity about others who look like oneself. This is not a unique feeling to adoptive children of another race although it is certainly obvious that, as a minority, my daughter will have many fewer people to look at to compare herself too.

However, for myself, having many people who were "like me" to compare myself to did not dim my curiosity or desire to see someone who really did look like me. Not just someone with my hair color and skin color but with my features. And in spite of the many Caucasians in this country I did NOT see that until my birthmother found me at age 32. Seeing your own features on other people's faces (birthmother and half siblings) is a very strange thing for someone who grew up not ever seeing that. So I expect my daughter will feel the same way no matter how many or how few Asians or Chinese people she meets in her lifetime. I expect that she will look for herself in their faces and find them wanting just as I did.

So as my daughter grows up I hope she can learn about the culture of China and can meet and be friends with other Chinese and Asian people as much as possible but I want this to 1) give her back a tiny bit of her background/history (adoption is a very history-less thing), 2) so that as an adult she will be as comfortable as possible in interacting with others of her race and 3) be as comfortable in her own self as possible. Seeing others of her race is an important part of this because she is surrounded mostly by Caucasians, so she needs to see that there are many who look more like her than that, not because I expect her to fulfill that need to see her own features in another’s face. A subtle but distinct difference.

Then I posted a second time to clarify:

I felt that I fit into my family even though I was always curious about others who looked like me. And throughout my life people have said I looked like my Mom or Dad or one of my brothers, although most people's comment about the other brother was "wow, you look nothing alike" (we were all adopted separately) . But I've also been asked many times when out with different friends "are you two sisters?" so I think people don't really look for a real resemblance but go on stuff like hair color etc. and of course with family, there's mannerisms too.

What it comes down to is that I believe that adoption is like any other life changing event (divorce, death, marriage, birth, etc) in that it affects each person differently. Some people bounce right back to equilibrium, some people never do, most people are somewhere in between. If you bounce back immediately the event is still there and a part of you, but it's not the bad experience that someone who didn't bounce back had. I think it's important for us as adoptive parents to remember that as we look at all the issues that may or may not affect our children. I believe I ended up high on the bounce back side, I hope my daughter does too - I actually worry a lot more about the effect of the year in the orphanage than I do about adoption per se - but I keep in mind that her experience is her own and hope I will react accordingly