Tag: Ethnicity

Identity

We recently watched a Star Trek – The Next Generation episode titled “Family”.  True I had seen it before but not when adoption was such a dominating concept in my imagination.  Immediately, I thought – Worf was adopted.  Of course, in this case it is obvious – Worf is Klingon and these “parents” are clearly Earth born humans.  It is also obvious from their loving expressions that he matters deeply to them as a “son”.

My topic today began with reading an article in the February 2019 Science of Mind magazine titled “Real Radical Inclusion” by Rev Masando Hiraoka, who is Japanese-American according to his own revelation.

He writes – “In oneness, we do not lose our identity, we gain it back.  We are given the beauty that we were born with and are able to see it again.  There is an embrace that happens – not just an acceptance, but a full-on bear hug for ourselves, our skin, our heritage, our style, our height, our gender expression, our sexuality, our religion, our bodies, our abilities – our unique personhood in the world.  We come to include it all.  That’s radical inclusion.”

In finally discovering my original grandparents, I say that I am now whole +, because that personhood includes the adoptive parents for both of my parents, who I knew as childhood grandparents (and of course, the aunts, uncles and cousins I gained that way).

Not knowing our ancestry, robbed my family of some part of our identity.  And while it wasn’t obvious to other people, it was felt by me, my entire life, until I was able to set it right again.  Now when I think of grandparents – there are the “childhood” grandparents and there are the grandparents I now know my genetics came from.

Why Does It Matter ?

Someone once asked me if the adoptive parents are good parents and the life of the child is basically happy, why should they care about where they came from ?  As I tried to explain it to her, she realized she didn’t see an issue because she took the family history that was hers for granted.  It was just there and she knew it.  That not knowing, that uncertainty, didn’t exist for her.  But it does exist, it is the very existence, of adoptees who don’t know anything about their origins.

When I was a school girl, my friends were all bragging about their ethnic backgrounds – I’m French or I’m German, or whatever.  I went home that day and asked my mom, What are we ?  She replied “American”.  Yeah, but all of my friends are American, what else are we – what country did we come from ?  She said we don’t know, both your dad and I were adopted.  I thought they must be orphans without a family “out there” and that wasn’t true either.

When a person is adopted, their name is changed and their birth certificates are altered as though the truth of their very being never existed.  How presumptuous we are with another person’s true origins.  For a long time, I would tell people I was an Albino African.  I actually suspected that my mom’s origins might have been biracial and then the National Genographic project who tested my maternal DNA told me we did come out to Africa but that her people ended up on the British Isles.

Though my parents died knowing next to nothing about their origins, I now know a lot about mine.  Probably, I know as much as most people do who really don’t care.  My dad seemed not to care.  He seemed to have accepted his fate in ways my mother never did, though she tried and could make no headway on the matter.  My dad was a good ole boy – he liked to fish, drink beer and eat Mexican food – heck he liked to eat period.  That’s how he earned the nickname Fat Pat.