All Adoption, All the Time

I was reading an adoption blog yesterday (and to be totally honest, I cannot even remember which one), and the mom was stating something like, “of course my life always has adoption in it, but, sometimes I get tired of endlessly contemplating what that means.” (I’m paraphrasing, that’s not a direct quote.)


Which got me to thinking – does my everyday life have adoption in it?


And I suppose the obvious answer is ‘yes’ – it is patently obvious to anyone walking down the street that I am Lana’s adoptive mom, not her bio mom. It honestly doesn’t strike me very often, but, the photo above is pretty telling. (By the way, I don't actually like this photo of either of us very much. But, I think it does a good job of showing our extreme physical contrasts.) (And, yes, I have gotten her bangs cut since this picture was taken.)

These two people are clearly not biologically related to one another, right? I mean, go ahead, be straight with me - we don't look alike, I know it.

I just don't THINK about it all that much.

I don't think about the fact that it is obvious that we aren't blood relations until I see a photo like that. It kind of reminds me of living in Japan - it rarely occured to me how utterly foreign I looked until I would see another blonde woman (usually a woman named Jane from New Zealand - there just were very few blonde women living in Hitachi City in 1995-96) - and I would see Jane from ACROSS the grocery store or town square and it would smack me in the face, "I look as out of place as she does. Wow, I REALLY don't blend in here."

Perhaps this says something about my personality or the fact that I am kind of oblivious to things that should be stunningly apparent.

I spend whole days not really consciously thinking about the fact that adoption intimately affects my family. Most days, lately, we are just a family - possibly a quirky, eccentric family, but, just a family nonetheless. I don't necessarily think about the fact that we are a blended family. And I guess I kind of thought that was a GOOD sign. I thought it was a positive development, that I wasn't obsessing about adoption and what it means for Lana individually and for us as a family.

I'm not saying that I ignore the fact of Lana's adoption, and I spend quite a bit of time with some girlfriends who I met through my adoptive families group. But, while I enjoy the interaction with the adoptive families group - my close friends from that group - well, I feel like it was adoption that happened to draw us together, but, the adoption no longer defines our friendship. It was a jumping off point.

I know that Michelle wrote an interesting post on a similar subject a while back (well, maybe not a similar subject, but, in the same range of subjects, I guess), and I remember agreeing with her conclusion.

I don't want to stress and obsess about Lana's adoption, especially at a moment in time when Lana is not stressing or obsessing about it. I'm just her mom. She's just my kid. Yes, she is Vietnamese, and yes, she had another mom until she was 4, and yes, we have some unique challenges. But, I'm not spending a big chunk of my life contemplating her adoption. Does this make me a bad mother, or a bad adoptive mother?

LM