My aunt reports that Grandma is usually content, even happy, at the assisted living home where she now lives. She flits from room to room visiting fellow residents, who are also living in their own times and worlds. She does recognize most of her family members when they visit. Sometimes their presence throws her off and seems to cause some distress, because she knows they are important but cannot always remember much about them. At other times, she remembers almost everything and can carry on conversations about the present. But she never stays in the present for long.

I think about her disease and her life in the facility, where she lives with other people suffering from dementia. It is sad that she has come to be there, because, as my husband says, her world has gotten very small. It’s not really her home; even if she comes to think of it that way, I am not sure I can. And yet in some ways, her world is also larger than it has been in years; memories are scattered all around her, but when one takes hold of her, it is so close now, so immediate. She is probably thinking of and remembering people, places, and events that haven’t crossed her mind in years. The basic fact of linear time — linear experience following experience — doesn’t hold true for her any longer.

I don’t mean to gloss over or underestimate the difficulties of the disease she has, for her or for my family watching it progress. I don’t mean to make it sound easy, or whimsical, or more fascinating than it is sad. Still, I can see why it’s harder on my mother and my aunt than it is on my grandmother herself. She can’t lay her hands on all the memories she has accumulated over the course of her life, and she will continue to lose some of them. But for now, according to all reports, she is content with the ones she is still able to call to mind. Perhaps that’s because most of them seem to be good ones. Grandma has had a long life, and not an easy one at all, but somehow the worst times, the hardest times, are not the times she finds herself dwelling in now.

In a way, she is not just having “forgetful spells”; she is having remembering spells. One moment, my mother says, she sits quietly, as if she doesn’t know where she is or what will come to her. The next moment, she finds herself with a person, a place, a memory, that she hasn’t beheld in years. She doesn’t have to try hard or wrack her brain in frustration to recall it, even if it was long-forgotten. The memory just comes to her easily, like an old friend. She greets it, talks of it to whoever happens to be with her, grasps it tight for a moment, or an hour, or a day, and then, just as easily, lets it go.

*  *  *

I wish I could have seen Grandma and spent more time her these past several years. My childhood would have been pretty grim, at times, without her influence. We did so many things together, but without that very conscious, striving, nostalgic, or coddling sort of attitude that marks the approach of so many parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren. Grandma didn’t do these things with me because she was trying to be SuperGrandma, or impart any great wisdom to the younger generation, or forever enshrine precious memories in my impressionable young mind. I think anyone who has, as she had, five children, would not necessarily have the time or the inclination to view time spent with her grandchild in such an ambitious, particularly deliberate way. No, she just took me places and did things with me because she wanted to do them herself, and thought since I was with her so often, maybe I’d better come along and do them, too. Some of the things, after all, might prove useful to me; some might not; either way, I’d be taken care of and well fed while we got on with things.

She would often watch me after school while my parents were at work, and I loved those afternoons with her. She taught me how to plant a vegetable garden, weed flower beds, can green beans and peaches, make kolache, figure out whodunit on Murder, She Wrote. Thanks to her, I can read a tide book, bait a hook, and (theoretically) sweet-talk my way out of a ticket from Fish & Wildlife if, say, my nonexistent fishing license ever expires, or I ever happen to find myself fishing in a part of the river marked for “conservation only,” or I maybe, just maybe catch over my limit of rainbow trout.

She made me take a long bath every night that I stayed at her house, which I hated, but the task was somewhat redeemed when I would emerge to stand on her fuzzy dark green bath mat and cover myself in Johnson’s baby powder till my skin was almost as pale as hers. She held my hand and prayed over every crop of green beans we ever planted, though she was the opposite of religious, and every year we ended up with an enormous green bean harvest — so many beans we couldn’t give them all away. She collected so many things (kites, music boxes, and classic musicals on film were my favorites), and had cabinets filled with beautiful crystal wine glasses and porcelain teacups that she never forbade me from holding and using simply because I was young. She taught me how to play two-, three-, and four-handed pinochle when we were stuck inside on rainy days. When I was a kid, she got all the good channels (all 24 of them!), and she pretended not to hear when I jumped on her guest bed. She once offered to supply me with condoms, which of course embarrassed me to no end, and would have even if I’d had some use for them at the time; but I now look back on it as a very generous, very crazy, very Grandma sort of offer.

She was the only one who really took me on vacations when I was little — mostly to the Oregon coast, where we slept in my grandparents’ RV, rode around on garage-sale vintage bicycles, dug for clams on muddy banks, and caught crabs in pots in the choppy waters of the bay or off the quieter docks at the marina. Once we were walking on the beach together at sunset and saw two teenaged boys chest-deep in the Pacific waves, fishing crabs right out of the crashing high-tide surf. “If they can do it, we can do it, Nicole,” Grandma declared, “let’s just give it a try”; and even though I was scared at first, she grabbed my hand and hauled me into the waves up to my waist, then up to my chest; and I never thought it would work, I thought I would freeze or be swept under first, but the woman was indefatigable and soon we had a plastic grocery sack (where had we gotten it? had we asked the boys to give us one of theirs?) filled with regulation-size Dungeness crabs that we had plucked right out of the ocean.

As we walked back up the beach, shivering and fighting the undertow, she pointed up at the sky and told me, “I knew it would work. You have to know about the phases of the moon, you see? The tides were on our side tonight.”

My interview takes up the first 11 minutes of the program. The rest is much more interesting and well worth a listen, if you have an interest in adoption stories.

“I know you’re in Washington, DC…so, have you heard of the CBC? It’s like your National Public Radio. Our show airs throughout Ontario, which is one of Canada’s largest provinces.” –the show’s producer, a really lovely woman, during our pre-interview. I guess Americans do have a reputation for ignorance, but this made me feel kind of bad!

I try not to judge, but it still seems bizarre to me that now, over three years after we made contact with each other, David is still keeping my existence a secret from even his closest relatives. It’s a reminder to me that we aren’t living some kind of Lifetime movie here. Just because we’ve met now and he likes me and I like him and Cindy and I are very close doesn’t mean that our lives fit together like pretty puzzle pieces. Nor should they, I suppose.

But it bothers me that my birthfather says he cares about me and is proud of me, yet clearly doesn’t want to acknowledge me as his daughter to anyone but me, his wife, and Cindy. It bothers me that he still wants to hide my existence from other people. I know he feels shame over what he did and not who I am. Still, I wonder if he sometimes thinks about how much simpler it would have been if I had remained a secret.

Trickier than how I feel about him or how he feels about me, though, is what place I have, if any, in his family. If he doesn’t claim me as a daughter, can I claim any part of them? This is another issue I wonder about – where do I fit in, among the eighteen generations recorded in the family book? Is there any place for me among those people, if not on the page beside them? It’s an impossible question to answer right now, and reminds me that these are strange and unfamiliar waters we are all attempting to navigate.

Cindy and I often talk about going to Korea together; she wants to introduce me to aunts and uncles and cousins I have never known. But it’s hard to imagine doing that if they have no idea I exist. I can’t very well just show up there with my sister and pretend I’m just a friend of hers – nor would Cindy be interested in that type of deception. Her attitude is that things are out in the open now, where they should have always been, and she doesn’t think she or I have any responsibility to maintain any kind of cover-up or lie. “What Dad thinks or doesn’t want to tell them shouldn’t prevent us from going to Korea together,” she says.

But I’m not so sure. I talk a good game about privacy, and respecting it in adoption – but can I truly be said to respect my birthfather’s privacy if I go knocking on the door of my long-lost Korean relatives, even if Cindy is standing right next to me, ready to introduce me as her sister? I imagine if I ever wanted to meet other members of the family, our father would understand that, and tell them about me himself. But how awkward for him, how embarrassing – is it fair to put him through that so I can make this trip someday?

Yet how can I not go to Korea? How can I not meet these people, when I’ve wondered about and wanted to know my Korean family, where I came from, all my life? Is it fair to have to forgo that journey and that knowledge just because my birthfather told a lie of omission a long time ago, and still wants to maintain it?

The book is available in stores on September 15.

(This is the part where I apologize for my long absence, make some lame excuse(s) for it, and vow to do better from now on.  Except the two or three of you reading this have heard it all before, so we’ll just skip it this time.)

So what’s been going on with me since I last wrote?

(This is the part where I ask a chatty question of myself within the text of my own journal entry, and then give myself a totally unnecessary and painfully long-winded answer.  This part, we’ll keep, because maybe some of you don’t know that…)

I had a baby!  On January 8, to be exact, after two weeks of no sleep due to the worst virus I’d had in years.  I was completely exhausted heading into labor, and couldn’t really breathe through the contractions without coughing.  Somehow — after about 17 hours of labor, 14 of those marked by extremely slow progress and 3 containing the super-fast crazy transition from you-know-where — with the help of my husband, doula, nurse, and two different midwives, I managed to birth my second daughter, Grace Emilia.  Eight pounds, eleven ounces, twenty inches long: she looked exactly like her big sister.  It was uncanny.  Apparently my husband and I only know how to make identical girl children.

Grace was born in the same room at the same birth center where our daughter Abigail made her first appearance in February 2008.  We now have a three-year-old and a nine-week-old.  They make our days quite long, are demanding in entirely different ways, and rarely nap at the same time, but, you know, we love them anyway.

Grace is a sweet, gentle, unassuming sort of baby.  (You know she doesn’t get any of that from me.)  Sure, a few things really piss her off, but for the most part she rarely complains.  She’s already a hugger.  Sometimes whole days go by when I realize, hey, she barely cried at all.  Not that Abigail was this crazy fussy baby, but, you know, she was loud.  And she had opinions.  And she was very particular about the way you had to hold and bounce her (faster bounces! bigger bounces! go up and down the stairs while bouncing! NO NOT LIKE THAT, THAT IS ALL WRONG!).  Grace is far easier than Abby was, and it’s a good thing, since Abigail is still pretty particular, and parenting her still takes up most of our time and energy.

Not that Grace doesn’t get plenty of attention, too; in fact, for several weeks she has been the focus of our parental worry.  After a routine healthy birth and a few good weeks postpartum, she was hospitalized at three weeks for a rare, long-lasting form of jaundice (breastmilk jaundice; it peaks around 3-4 weeks and can last as long as 12), which was dramatic and terrifying.  I had an emotional breakdown in the ER, my husband threw up, my mother-in-law flew in from Connecticut to stay with Abby, and poor Grace had to lay under bili lights and be poked and prodded and tested every which way.  She had to have a catheter (at three weeks old!) so they could get a clean urine sample; she had many tubes of blood drawn; she had an IV line put in her tiny hand.

The hospital stay was brief (but nightmarish), but the medical saga is ongoing.  Even now, nearly two months later, we’re still carting Grace around for doctors’ appointments and neverending lab tests, and her bilirubin level has only very recently begun to drop (technically it is still elevated, but we’ve been assured that at this level, even for this duration, it’s not actually harming her).  Her form of jaundice is one that a lot of doctors, even pediatricians, have little experience with, and so there has been a great deal of testing and talking to determine whether the diagnosis is in fact correct and how it should be treated.  It is not reassuring, as a person with no medical or scientific training, to find yourself looking up articles to send to your child’s doctor so she will actually understand what is happening with your child.  It is also not reassuring to have doctors come into your child’s hospital room and tell you, “We think this is what she has, but we don’t actually know what causes it; it’s a total mystery to us! Oh, and no, we can’t do much about it, because it will take care of itself. At least, we think it will.” When this happens, you find yourself thinking a lot of very sarcastic things such as, Gee, I’m glad you all spent like twelve years becoming doctors so you could tell me you cannot actually help my child and you don’t know what you’re talking about.  (But you don’t actually say those things. If you’re me, and you are three weeks postpartum and very emotional, you just start to cry. Again.)

I now hate heel sticks with a passion, and I am sick of people taking my baby’s blood.  And with all the worry and inconvenience and copays and medical bills has come a new,  if only slight, understanding of what parents of sick kids go through.  I know that we are very fortunate to only be dealing with persistent jaundice, as opposed to the far scarier and harder things that some babies and children have to deal with.  I know that we have little reason to complain; except for her yellow, Grace is a healthy, thriving baby (uhhh 14 pounds; back massage, please, anyone?), and she doesn’t seem bothered by her condition.  I feel terrible about the ongoing blood tests and the doctors’ visits, of course, but I can take comfort in the fact that, in a few weeks, the jaundice should finally resolve itself, and this will all be but an unhappy memory for me and my husband (Grace won’t remember it at all).  Yet I feel as if we’re in some sort of club now, the Club of Parents Who Have Actually, Literally Been Worried Sick, and I wish I could revoke our membership.

Nothing can really prepare you to join this club.  I had two relatively easy pregnancies culminating in two normal, intervention-free births, and Abby was such a robust and obviously healthy child that I just assumed Grace would be the same.  Honestly, it was me I was worried about, since, after Abigail’s birth, I dealt with a host of medical issues for months afterwards — nothing too serious, but all of it quite exhausting and inconvenient and, at times, painful.  In the midst of all this nonsense, I was also laid off from my job.  I thought that was about the worst I could expect from a postpartum experience, barring some kind of truly horrible problem with the birth or my recovery, but I was wrong, of course.

It was so much worse seeing Grace in the hospital, talking to doctors and specialists about possible scary side effects of her jaundice, being processed and admitted and seeing people do awful but mostly necessary things to help my three-week-old, who I knew should not be sick.  It felt all wrong — like it just wasn’t supposed to be this way.  We were not supposed to be there.  We were all supposed to be at home together, safe and healthy and exhausted, watching Abby adjust to big sisterhood, drinking too much coffee, and complaining, as do all parents of newborns, about our sleep deprivation.  We were not supposed to be in a small dark hospital room watching our tiny, vulnerable newborn baby chew helplessly on her IV.

But after that very low point for us, things have gotten better, if too slowly for me.  Grace looks less yellow now.  She seems healthy, other than the jaundice, and she is down to one nighttime feeding most nights.  She was just baptized about a week and a half ago, and it was a wonderful day filled with the blessings of God and family and friends and good food.  Our friends Kathleen and Brian flew all the way from Chicago to stand up with us as godparents.  The baptism and party as well as Grace’s health concerns leading up to it have served to remind me how fortunate we are to have caring family members who helped us through Grace’s medical crisis, as well as good friends who stepped in to bring us food and comfort in the hospital (Victoria), watch Abby (Leslie), pick up Dan’s mother from the airport (Vina), field my annoying emails filled with medical questions (Dr. Lisa, Nicole, Kelli), send thoughtful gifts to ease my stress (Tope and Bekah), and offer sympathy and encouragement as we dealt with weeks of uncertainty and intense worry.  We know some truly excellent and stalwart people, and we are blessed to have them in our lives, and the lives of our children.

Grace has never seemed bothered by the jaundice, and she is beginning to look a bit more pink.  She still looks a lot like Abby, but I can now see far more differences between them (not just in personality, I mean; that’s always been obvious), and I no longer worry that one day I won’t be able to tell their baby photos apart.  Abigail is the best big sister in the world, and tells Grace about a hundred times a day how cute she is and how much she loves her.  My mornings and afternoons alone with both of them can be rather overwhelming, especially since I started trying to work part-time again, but it makes my heart so full and happy to see the the two sisters together; they clearly adore one another.  Grace smiles all the time now — sometimes in response to Abby ordering her, like some crazy stage mother, “Smile for me, Gracie!” — and chatters and coos a lot, too.  She is such a sweet baby, so cuddly and curious and serene.  Plus, sometimes they do actually nap at the same time, and, as my friend Aleks remarked, that is like the double rainbow, work-at-home mom-style.

It’s hard, of course, having a newborn again, but the difference between this time and the first time is that, well, it’s not the first time.  I know that things will eventually get easier, and I know that someday I’ll actually miss this time when they were still really hard.  So, as much as possible, I am trying to enjoy and treasure these moments with both our children.  And now that things are just a tad more stable, I’ll do my best to write more often, too.  Like my girls, I always have something to say.

Today I went out to lunch with a new friend, Jeanne, and her daughter Leah.  Jeanne is Korean, and so Leah is half, just like my daughter Abigail and my niece Carrie.  Leah has lighter brown eyes than my daughter, and very light hair — sort of light brown/dark blond depending on the light.  As we ate, both Jeanne and I noticed two white women at the counter, who were, well, whispering and staring at our girls.  They weren’t very far away, and I could see one of them touch her hair and then nod meaningfully at Leah.  I heard the other one say something, and caught two words, murmured incredulously: “blond hair!”

Jeanne didn’t seem too bothered, but she did tell me, somewhat ruefully, that people comment on Leah’s hair all the time.  People do this about Abby’s hair, too, only in her case they are wondering how I ended up with a curly-haired child.  Whenever someone asks, “Where did she get her hair?” Jeanne is always tempted to reply, “Where do you think she got it?”

I’ve noticed, with my own daughter, that as soon as people meet her they are eager to comment on whether they think she looks more like me or more like my husband.  The truth is, she’s a good mix of both of us.  But many people don’t quite know what to do when confronted with a child who is clearly multiracial — that is, their instinct is to categorize, to classify.  They feel the need to seize upon one side or the other and remark upon it. And whichever is “the other” for them is, perhaps, more immediately noticeable; hence, my niece’s white grandparents see their Korean granddaughter, and her Korean grandparents see their white granddaughter.

(My mother-in-law seems to disprove this theory, as she’s told me more than once, “I don’t see the Korean in Abby at all. If I didn’t know you were Asian, I never would have guessed she wasn’t just white.”)

I see my daughter’s diverse heritage as a blessing, not a curse, but I don’t know how she will see it.  I worry about how she’ll “fit in” at school, at church, throughout her life; how she’ll find her place and come to terms with who she is.  I remember how hard it was to feel as though I’d never fit in with peers because of my Korean features.  I worry that Abigail will feel as if she doesn’t fit in with either group, Asian or white.  I don’t want her to feel forced to choose one over the other, or to experience outright rejection from one or both groups.

I was never caught in between the way I sometimes worry she will be.  White people, of course, look at me and see a Korean.  But over the years, I’ve had more than a few Korean people inform me that I “don’t look very Korean.” In some cases they are just making an observation, stating their opinion based on my facial features; in other cases, they clearly mean it more as a judgment, as if they’re sure there must be other, non-Korean genes I just don’t know about, somewhere back in the family line.  If and when they find out I was adopted at birth and raised by Caucasian parents, they view me as even more of an outsider.  Which, after all, I am.  I am at once like them, and “the other.”

We have yet to pick a name for her, which is just ridiculous (though in our defense, we have put a lot of time into trying to pick a name; it’s just proving rather impossible).  Abby has become very attached to the name Rebecca; as in, she goes around telling people that her little sister’s name is Rebecca, until we remind her yet again that we haven’t made a decision yet, and then she amends the name to “maybe Rebecca.” We have several names we keep coming back to, but so far none of them have moved us to really commit.  I remember how quickly we decided on Abigail’s name — before we were even married, truth be told — and it just makes me feel guilty about how long it’s taking this time.

Usually, if I take the time to think about being pregnant at all, closely on the heels of that thought comes this: Wow, I am so ready to not be pregnant anymore.  I rarely had such thoughts while pregnant with Abigail, even at the very end of my third trimester.  It’s not that I was so in love with being pregnant, but I think I was less stressed overall, less tired and uncomfortable, so I never got to the point where I just wanted pregnancy to be over already.  This time around, I’ve been far more worried about and bothered by weight gain, insomnia, and fatigue, which combined with our too-hot “fall” weather has really made the time crawl.  The only thing I am less worried about is labor and delivery, because I have convinced myself that the first time, with its crazy prolonged labor and eight hours of transition and two hours of pushing out a compound presentation baby, was a flukey one-time thing that God, in his infinite mercy, will not allow to happen to me again.

Yet as eager as I am to get to the birth, meet our baby, and leave pregnancy behind, I know on the other side I will find myself the mother of two, and everything will be a lot harder.  Everything will change.  Most of the time I am not even sure I am capable of parenting more than one child — I suspect this is the doubt of many only children like myself.  I just have to hope that I am.  One to two may not seem like such a big leap to everyone, I suppose, but to me it can seem awfully daunting.  I have to give myself a lot of pep talks these days.

I may not feel totally ready in every respect, but I do feel very blessed.  Last week I read this article about sisters and happiness in the New York Times, and it made me feel so glad that I will soon have two girls, and so grateful that I have a sister of my own now even if we didn’t grow up together.  I’m sure that little boys are wonderful, but I’ll never understand why my birthmother was so unhappy to have daughters instead of sons.  Having just one amazing daughter has always seemed like more than I could ever deserve.  Having two, I think, will be extraordinary.

Because of my adoption, Cindy and I only reconnected as adults, right before my first daughter was born in early 2008. We have a close relationship, but it’s very different from the relationship between traditional sisters who actually grew up together.  We have different sets of parents, as my two-and-a-half-year-old has already noticed and commented on.  We live on opposite sides of the country.  We’ve missed so many of each other’s milestones — high school and college graduations, engagements, weddings.  Her child’s birth is the first major life event I will be able to witness, albeit from thousands of miles away.

As happy and excited as I am for Cindy and her husband, I feel a little pang every time I think about how long it might be before I am able to meet my niece.  We just visited them in July, so I did get to see my sister pregnant, and that was quite exciting; we also saw each other twice in 2009.  Given how many things had to happen for us to meet at all, I feel lucky to know Cindy and be a part of her life now.

At the same time, though, I am pregnant myself, and having that all-too-familiar feeling that my clan, my village, is missing somehow.  I never wanted to put off having kids forever, and I am thrilled to have our girls, but sometimes I wonder if we were crazy to attempt to build a family while my husband is still in grad school, in a place where we have no family and few close friends.  I find myself wishing for more support, someone to call in a panic on those days when I am still adjusting to having two small kids at home, someone who could bring a meal during those hectic newborn days, someone who won’t judge me if I’m overwhelmed (and let’s face it, I will be).  Cindy’s comment last night made me think about, long for, what could be possible if we lived in the same place.

We both hate that we live so apart, and tell each other that it’s temporary.  I don’t know if it will ever be an option for us to live in the same town, but we talk often about how great it would be just to be closer, within an easy day’s drive, so that we could see each other frequently and our kids could actually know each other.  I would really like them to have the chance to be good friends as well as cousins, to have shared memories and grow up together the way Cindy and I didn’t.  I think it’s especially important to cultivate those relationships because Cindy and I have never really relied on most of the people in our respective families, and we haven’t remained terribly close to anyone in our extended families.  I would like something different, something better, for my daughters — not just a real awareness of family, but a strong feeling of security in it, as well as appreciation for it.  I just wish I felt more confident in my ability to provide them with that.

We recently returned from a brief but enjoyable family vacation, our last vacation as a family of three.  We went to the mountains — tiny eastern mountains, which would barely be considered foothills where I’m from, that have a peacefulness and quaint beauty about them I’ve grown to appreciate.  I suppose they must appear rather bare and small in the winter, but in the fall, decked out in red and gold, they are quite lovely.  I always feel better when I’m in the mountains or at the ocean.  That’s partly the native Oregonian in me, I guess, but I really don’t understand how anyone, regardless of where they’re from, could fail to feel better in these places. The ocean is my favorite vacation spot, and mountains? Mountains are home.

I was raised in the biggest city in southern Oregon, which really isn’t saying much — something of a hamlet, too big for its britches.  It was not a fun place to grow up as a Korean girl, and I don’t remember a time, even at a very young age, when it didn’t feel incredibly limiting, lonely, and frustrating for me.  But the town was surrounded on all sides by mountains — three different ranges, some closer, some farther away — and I found the nameless peaks (that is, they had names, but I didn’t know most of them) alternately inspiring and comforting.  I left for college at 18 on the opposite coast, shook the dust of the place from my feet, and yet, whenever I force myself to go back there, the mountains are familiar old friends.  They are always difficult to leave.

Anyway, these small mountains we visited last week were not my mountains, but I still felt better in their shade.  The first time we went there, my husband and I were expecting our first child.  The trip was our “babymoon,” a last chance to get away together before everything changed.  On this most recent trip, we had our two-and-a-half-year-old chatterbox (and her baby sister in utero) along, and it was, of course, quite a different sort of vacation.  Instead of staying in a beautiful old inn, we stayed at a local hotel in a family suite (so that our daughter could sleep in the living room, while we shut the door to the bedroom).  Instead of waking up to hot coffee and tea in a basket just outside our door, followed by a leisurely three-course gourmet breakfast in the dining room with a gaggle of eccentric B&B guests, we rolled out of bed whenever our child decided to wake up, and stumbled bleary-eyed and unshowered to the hotel lobby for our complimentary hot breakfast.

At breakfast on our last morning there, I saw a white mother and father with their two Asian daughters sitting at a nearby table.  I think the girls were Korean.  The eldest turned around in her seat to look at us — me, my husband, our daughter.  Her father told her several times to turn around, sit properly, and “quit staring.”

I’ll admit, most of the time, it freaks me out when children stare at me.  I know that it’s just a normal thing for kids to do, and they don’t mean anything by it.  But I also wonder if some of them do it because they never really see Asian people — because it’s fairly easy to go a while without seeing many Asians where we live, especially if your family lives and works and socializes and worships in certain (all white) circles.  Whatever the case may be, it always makes me feel awkward and not a little annoyed when kids stare at me.

However, it never bothers me when adopted Asian kids look at me (and they always do).  My heart just goes out to them.  Suddenly I’m in their shoes.  I often nod or smile or wave at them, while their parents look on, frowning.  And I realize that I don’t actually know anything about them.  I don’t know why they’re looking.   They might be staring simply because they feel like it, or more likely because I look funny somehow, not because they are hungry for the sight of someone else who looks like them, someone who looks like their birthparents.

I always wonder, when I see young adopted children, if they have any real relationships with anybody from their country or culture of origin.  It’s so important, so much more important than adoptive parents’ attempts to eat the food or celebrate the holidays or appropriate the culture in clumsy if well-meaning ways.  It’s also the hardest thing for adoptive parents to provide for their children, made especially difficult if they live in the sort of town where I grew up, or if they aren’t friends with any people of color to begin with.  Many of them don’t seem to think it’s important at all. What they mean is, it’s not important to them.

I suppose I have been reconsidering transracial adoption, and debating with myself under what circumstances it should — and should not — occur.  I go back and forth on it all the time.  And then I think, well, what does it matter what I think; what I think doesn’t actually change anything.  Even friends of mine who’ve adopted outside their race tend to ignore me or get defensive when I start talking about these issues.  I’m sure they think that my experiences aren’t universal — which is true — and therefore I can’t possibly know anything about what their own adopted children might face.

Maybe I don’t, and I don’t know why kids stare.  I just know why I did.