We're moving. Rather, we're hoping and dreaming of moving. We are under contract to buy a house in Glens Falls, a grand old Victorian lady with beautiful woodwork, huge old pocket doors, a kitchen with great workable potential, a deep front porch overlooking fruit trees, and a staircase with lovely carvings and a window seat. The house has solid bones, mostly updated bathrooms, and a finished attic room that can replace the space we'll lose by leaving our finished basement. The yard is big enough, with an in-ground pool and a Rainbow Systems playground set, plus enough extra room for some landscaping and a vegetable garden. The street has old trees, interesting architecture, and is within walking distance to the newly remodeled library, the post office, dozens of restaurants, a brewery, and Crandall Park.
We're moving, but the lovely house is not the reason we're moving.
We still have to sell our house, the one we finished building (it was an unfinished spec house) and then put in the landscaping, paved the driveway, put in the stamped concrete sidewalks, finished the basement, built a deck, cleared 40+ tress form the backyard, fenced 1/2 acre of our 1.85 acre lot, installed a swimming pool, and added an enameled woodstove to the living room. We have worked hard these last five years and we don't regret anyof it, not the money spent nor the time spent nor the elbow grease spent. We love this house. It is our home, the sacred place where our babies took their first steps. We love our neighborhood, a mixture of couples and singles, young and old. There are good people here, friends we've known a lifetime and friends we've known for only a season.
We're moving, but it is not because we're running away.
We could easily stay here, stay put in this house we know and enjoy surrounded by people we like. It would be easy for us to stay put, to watch our children board the school bus, go to the prom, and graduate in this safe community. It would be easy to stay here where our friends are mere houses away. But if we stay here, our children will likely be the only children of color in their class, perhaps in their entire school.
We're moving, not because of our children, but for our children.
When we bought this house diversity was not one of our major concerns. We didn't know then that our life path would lead us to building our family through adoption. We didn't know that the two people we love most in the world would look nothing like us, that they would not, in fact, share our race. And even once we started our adoption, we didn't always think about race as mattering very much. We knew it mattered, of course, but once we knew our children and fell in love with their personalities and the amazing little beings that they are we didn't always see their differences. To us they looked to us exactly the way our kids should look, and so it was easy to forget for a little while that race matters. It does matter. In fact, it matters a lot, especially to children who join their families through transracial adoption.
From what we have learned, when children join their families through transracial adoption and are raised in nearly entirely caucasian communities, they feel as though they are, themselves, caucasian. The problem is the world will not see our children as caucasian and they will not be treated as such once they leave our cozy little nest in this nice, white community. We, their caucasian parents, cannot teach them how to be people of color because we have no point of reference. We don't know what it feels like to be called a racial slur, to have someone pull slant eyes on us (hello, Miley Cyrus). Yes, we can educate ourselves and we can try to understand how awful it must feel, but we will never be able to commiserate with them on this. We can't offer any firsthand insight on how to deal with racism. While we don't believe our current community will hurt our children, and maybe they will never have a problem with racism here (although I doubt that very much), we also know that the real world is not 99.9% white. Once our children leave our cozy nest and nice community the world will not see them as Sara and Brendan's kids who were adopted as babies, they will see them as Asian men and women and many of them will assume racial stereotypes based solely on their looks.
In adoption, the child (along with the family of origin) is the one who gives things up and most often it is without their choice. Our children didn't choose to have an adoption plan made for themselves. They didn't ask to be taken away from their country and culture of birth, from their genetic background, from all of the people who look like them. It is a lot to ask a little kid to make all of the sacrifices in a relationship, to ask them to grow up in a place where they are The Asian Kids, easily spotted and easily targeted. Like I said, it would be easy, for us adults, to stay put and watch our children grow, enjoying our friends and our own feelings of safeness and comfort.
We are moving, not because we are running away, but because we are running toward Something Else.
