In Writing Motherhood

2012-02-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

Within this collection of essays and feature articles author Terra Trevor explores themes of motherhood, race, culture, community, transracial adoption, raising a child with a life threatening illness and the process of healing from the death of a child. Written from the perspective of a woman who straddles acomplex ethnic and racial heritage her writing is by turns defiant, provocativeand courageously honest.

This Mother

2012-02-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

My mom was barely sixteen when I was born, my dad was seventeen. I grew up within a wide circle of grandparents and great grandparents in Compton, Paramount and Downey, inner suburbs of Los Angeles.

For us the year was divided into two seasons; winter and camping. Each summer my family packed up the car, and headed for the mountains. Which is why even though I'm city-born, home to me means mountain air that smells of pine.

Today I'm the mother of adults, and my son and oldest daughter were adopted from Korea. Often infertility prompts adoption, but I have never walked the infertility treadmill. My first glimpse of motherhood occurred when I was nineteen years-old, unmarried, and pregnancy caught me unprepared to become someone's mother, but that is a whole other story.

Eight years later when I wanted to become a mother, I got pregnant, then gave birth to a daughter. The pregnancy and birth were trouble free and easy, yet when we decided to add more children to our family we chose adoption. We were positive we wanted to adopt, not to serve a social cause, but simply to raise another child. Because of our strong ethnic and cultural roots it was important for us to feel a heartfelt connection to Korean lifeways.

Talk to me and I'll tell you that fusing Korean ethnicity into an adoptive family does not happen with a few social outings; it's a life process, a series of small steps gained over years. It is challenging at times, and requires us to use the same perseverance we needed in the adoption process that brought our children to us, and it taught me a sensitivity wider than I ever imagined possible because adoption means embracing my son and daughter's first family, their first mother; the mothers who gave up their children and suffered in grief, and whose loss was my gain.

The Korean community absorbed and supported us when at age seven our son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and then died in 1999 when he was fifteen. This experience proved to be my greatest teacher.

I don't have any pictures of my dad's side of the family. The film was overexposed the day we all lined up according to our generation. My great-aunties and uncles were grouped together. These are my grandfather's brothers and sisters and the line didn't hold a white face.

The next group was my dad and his sister and cousins, the first half-blood generation in the family. Being half Indian gave eyes of hazel, wavy or straight brown hair.

My brother and sister and I stood with the largest group of cousins. We are more racially mixed than our parents. We are not full blood or even half, and yet we are not white and never will be. Our core Indian values define our lives. Yet on the outside, only our tiny deep-set eyes and high-cheeked faces tell of our Western Band Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca ancestry – yet soon enough we will become the elders.

Indians

2012-02-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

On a June morning I stood with Juanita Centeno. She was an integral part of Chumash cultural revival; a culture many people thought was lost forever. Born in 1918 and raised by her grandfather in the Indian way, she learned early that her calling and life’s course was to teach the traditional Chumash way. Materials were the ones Mother Earth provided. She made certain nothing was misused and care was taken to teach even the youngest child to take from the earth only what was needed.

We stood near the creek in a place lightly touched, almost rural, under a sky so clear it had no end. Juanita turned to me and said, “My cousin is teaching with me today. It’s time, and he is ready.”

Tables were set up near a sedimentary sand stonewall; the stone masonry brought by father Junipero Serra’s Franciscans. The beige-pink stone stood the same as it did a hundred years ago. It talked to you, told you its stories. You could feel it more than hear it.

On this day our project was to make the musical instrument called wansak', made from a partly split stick of elderberry wood. Juanita’s skilled knowledge did not take the upper hand. You worked side by side with her as an equal. I watched her look each elderberry tree branch over carefully to make sure she got the right one to start with. Then she took a knife out of its sheath, and handed it to my eleven-year-old daughter.

It was a lot of work scraping the bark off, getting it all smooth and down to the same thickness. The smell and the taste of Elderberry worked itself into the palms of our hands. It took a long time to saw the tree branch down the middle, leaving a handle-sized piece at one end, just the way it ought to be.

Things were going along fine, and then the branch began to split. Someone offered to finish the cut, but Juanita said, “No. The child must learn to do for herself.” Awkwardly my daughter finished at a wider angle.

As we gathered weekly I came to feel like a granddaughter to this wizened woman in the summer of 1992, the last summer of Juanita’s life.

Recently while in the midst of packing up and moving into a home of her own, my daughter pulled the wansak' out of the box where our hand-made things are kept. My daughter is an adult now, and her skill with a sharpened knife is exact. Gingerly she slid her fingers across the smooth wood of the Elderberry. Then she slapped the wansak at her thigh and beat out a rhythm. The misguided cut sent out a snapping sound instead of the traditional hollow clap. There was a flicker of childhood past in her eyes,“Remember.” She said, “I cut this whole branch by myself.”

Considering A Transracial Adoption?

2012-02-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

You are waiting to adopt a child and your heart is soaring like an eagle. The moment you make the decision to adopt transracially it's time to build a multi ethnic family lifestyle.

While I feel it’s important to till a love of the ethnicity, the people and land our children are born from, we don’t always have local access, and a lot of living gets postponed. Any ethnic community you feel drawn towards is the right place to begin.

Get off your beaten path. Become the minority. Locate the ethnic neighborhood you most want to absorb. Find the city library. Go back week after week. Keep an eye on the bulletin boards. Attend community events in the area on a regular basis, and allow yourself to soak up images and impressions. Is there a barber, and a market nearby you could begin to frequent? If the shopkeeper gives your child a special treat return the kindness. If you are ignored, show kindness. Being ignored is sometimes what it feels like to be a person of color.

How then do we go deeper? By participating regularly and steadily. The difference between embracing and exploiting a culture is when we are authentic we feel ethnicity in our bones; it feels calm, safe, centering. It’s listening process, more about seeing and feeling, than it is about thinking. Let the changes take place inside of you. Don’t look for success and don’t quit. That’s how a multiethnic lifestyle is built. Some of the best things in life take a long time to achieve.

You might: begin attending a racially mixed church. Or observe a Sunday Intertribal Powwow. Surround yourself with Native families as they exchange news, ideas, song and dance, and reflect on traditions.

How do I know? My earliest memories encircle me; watching Grandma sew beads on Uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings. Realizing I’m white and Indian and what that meant. Listen to my mother and you’ll hear stories about me in diapers moving to the heartbeat of the drum.

Talk to me and I’ll tell you that fusing a multiracial way of feeling and being does not happen with a few social outings; it’s a life process, a series of small steps gained over years. It is challenging at times, and requires us to use the same perseverance we needed in the adoption process that brought our children to us.

We built friendships around a campfire, maintained them by hosting gatherings in our home. These relationships grew over late night bowls of naengmyon noodles and were strengthened when we let down our guard and allowed ourselves to be absorbed, supported when our teenaged son was diagnosed, then died from a brain tumor. Anglers of every race, in every culture, will always find each other, thus my husband continues to find his connecting point on the ocean, fishing, grieving, and making friends in the process.

We had three kids, two adopted transracially. Our children’s childhood ran through our fingers like water as we lifted our hand to capture a moment with the camera. Turn around; they are adults, miles and miles on their own. Will the foundation we built support them on their journey in an integrated world?

Our culture comes first from the family and community we are raised in. It is not our children’s job to piece it together. We must begin the process. And while those of us who are white cannot ever know what it feels like to be a person of color, we can choose to live diversely, give ourselves the freedom to ingest the beliefs that shape the perceptions of groups of people whose racial heritage is not the same as our own.

But is ethnicity important only for people of color, or for those who have adopted transracially?

I believe ALL families benefit from a wide scope of ethnic diversity. When we spend most of our time in wholly white enclaves with little or no access to mingle within ethnic communities, or are too threatened by its values to explore it further, we are coached to feel safest within the confines of a Caucasian boundary, and then we develop all sorts of silly notions that will keep us locked even further away.

Life is not orderly. It’s a bit scary at first to traverse into unexplored racially diverse territory, but it’s not impossible. Wherever we are is a good place to begin, starting in this moment— stretch.

First published in the March 2004 issue of Adoption Today Magazine
Reprinted by Tapestry Books. Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Race and Adoption: Who Do We Think We Are

2012-01-31T05:00:00.000-08:00

My parents were worried about my future. My dad said I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into by adopting Asian children. My mother said Korean kids needed to be raised around Korean adults. I knew they were right, and concerns simmered in the back of my mind. I’m Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca. My Native ethnicity is important to me, race and culture matter. But I didn’t have a plan, and I wasn’t sure exactly how to blend Korean ethnicity into our lives.

Soon after adopting our son in 1984, my husband and I began to make friends with other parents in our town who had also adopted children from Korea, and some of these families were our closest friends.

We had wonderful fun with this group of adoptive parent friends, but it also felt odd to be socializing with a group of all white parents, all with Asian children who were raising their kids as white-alike, in white enclaves with little or no access to other Asians or to anyone of color. It was a constant reminder that my parents had good reason to worry about us.

Some of the adoptive parents we knew bought into the line of thinking that it wasn’t all that important to raise their kids around other Asians. They believed the alternative, of not being adopted and living in an orphanage was far worse than being raised outside one’s racial group. I did not share their views. In my mind the problem with this rationale was the price the kids would pay was their racial identity. I was concerned about the harm I might be doing to my kids since we had few Asian friends, and I wondered why the others weren’t worried as well. But this was my very first experience socializing within a group of all white people. It was also my very first experience socializing with adoptive parents. I was too intimidated to disagree with the opinions dominating. I would stir up controversy today, but I didn’t have the confidence to do it then. Some were outspoken and clung tightly to their own opinions. Whereas I was lacking the assuredness to tell others that my gut level intuition, and my mom and dad’s common sense, went against the dogma claiming it was OK for white parents to raise Asian children isolated in white neighborhoods.

My husband who is white felt equally as intimidated as I did. He didn’t want to stir up conflict either. I loved our adoptive parent friends, and I craved diversity. So you can imagine my delight when my friend Kathy introduced me to her friends who were also Korean American, and they begin attending our gatherings. Hamburger and potato chip potluck dinners were fused when kimchi and bulgogi appeared side by side with coleslaw and potato salad. I enjoyed the blend of people, but it didn’t turn out as I expected because the majority of adoptive parents managed to always center conversations around the topic of Korean culture.

I looked forward to these new friendships eventually carving deeper than just providing adoption support. Except some of the adoptive parents did not have much interest in mixing and mingling. Rather than getting to know these new families in the usual way of talking about various topics and finding common bonds, some only quizzed them about Korean culture. It would have been OK if a few questions were asked, and then the conversation was allowed to drift into other areas. Perhaps we could have discovered mutual interests. It wasn’t like that. It was more like they were grilling them, and a few of the questions asked seemed too personal.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some of the parents said they saw no need for their children to be exposed to Korean culture, and then an embarrassing silence filled the room. While I would have loved to know more about Korean culture, I would have preferred to let those new friendships evolve slowly, and learn a little bit at a time. After all, culture is not a thing a person could learn from a conversation. Culture had to be experienced.

The idea of having only a cultural slanted curiosity instead of a desire to build a relationship that would eventually evolve into genuine friendships, struck me as odd. The tone of the whole situation bothered me. It must have bothered the Korean American families too, because soon they stopped attending our gathering. Disappointed, we continued friendships with the Asian families on our own.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I would discover a feeling almost like a code that sent a clear message that it was not acceptable to disturb the racial and cultural comfort level for most of those in this group of adoptive parents. For some the comfort zone included occasional Korean cultural activities, and those were the families we continued to form closer friendships with. But for many of the parents, since they didn’t know how to normalize culture worries about finding a balance prevailed, and participation would always be kept at a careful distance.

I was grateful my kids were growing up with plenty of other children who were adopted from Korea. It was a bonus my children were rooted within a cluster where Korean adoptees were the majority. But I had to let go of my idea of this adoptive parent group being racially diverse.

Even though most of our friends wanted to keep interactions with Korean Americans set aside for special occasions and not as a part of everyday life, everyone was curious to learn more about Korean food. Back then our nearest Korean restaurant was 100 miles away. We reserved a banquet room at an elegant establishment in Koreatown. Three separate tables were set with white tablecloths. We were seated, and menus were passed around. The room was silent. I wasn’t familiar with anything listed on the menu. Neither was anyone else at our table, so we guessed and did the best we could. When the waitress took our order there was much confusion. A few minutes later she brought us little dishes of spinach with sesame seeds, bean sprouts and kimchi. Bowls of roasted garlic slivers; pan-fried green onions, and lots of dishes of things I didn’t recognize were placed before us.

We sat for a long time, and the waitress did not return. The kids were hungry and began to complain. One of my friends at my table decided perhaps these were the appetizers. Someone else guessed it was the food we ordered. We thought we had also ordered meat dishes, yet none of us knew exactly what we had ordered.

We began to sample each dish. My four-year old son picked up his chopsticks and tasted the bean sprouts. “Good.” he said. He reached for a second helping. I watched his thumb and index finger toying across the bowl. My youngest daughter who was six at the time, sat at the far end of the table with a group of girls, powering down piece after piece of toasted seaweed.

My oldest daughter, then age ten, and newly adopted into our family, grinned. Her dimples deepened. She beamed at me, and dipped her chopsticks into the green onions. My husband tried the cucumber kimchi and took to it like it was second nature. He poured me more tea, and passed me the roasted garlic. I bit into a clove. Its creamy tang burst open in my mouth and it was wonderful. I took another bite.

“Don’t Koreans eat rice?” someone asked. A person at my table expressed the notion of rice being a food of lesser status, probably a food eaten only at home, not a dish that would be served at a fancy luncheon. All right. I’ll admit it. I actually believed the rice theory might be correct. Remember, it was 1987 and I was a newbie adoptive parent. I'm an American Indian woman; I know about fry bread, posole, roasted poblano chiles and Indian tacos, and I was wholly unfamiliar with Korean foods.

As soon as we finished eating, the waitress brought bowls of soup and rice for each of us. Platter after platter of meat arrived. We had ordered four times as much food as we needed. The waitress looked at the empty bowls on the table. A rush of red came to her cheeks. Her eyes moved up and down the table. Every bowl was empty.

The next day I called my friend Kathy. “We made a terrible mistake at the Korean restaurant,” I confided. “We ate all of the kimchi and side-dishes first; we thought they were the appetizers.”

Kathy, who had lived in Korea, and her husband who was Korean-American and had grown up in Korea, invited our family to their house for a home-cooked Korean dinner. They had us sit in the kitchen while they cooked so we could watch the meal unfold. We learned in Korean dining there aren’t any sequential courses served as in a western banquet. All of the dishes are supposed to be eaten at the same time, that the side dishes are called panchan, and that it's not a meal without soup and rice, and that Korean food dishes are served to the entire group, meaning that each dish is meant to be shared by all. They also loaned us a stack of Korean cookbooks, and my formal education into Korean cooking began.

And in the process, within the safe confines of learning to cook Korean food, I discovered that many white adoptive parents use the word culture when what they are really attempting to talk about is race.

Copyright © Terra Trevor, author of Pushing up the Sky, from which this story is excerpted and was reprinted in the August 2007 issue of Adoption Today.

Journey of a Thousand Miles: Adoption Parenting

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Just being a parent is enough to send anyone on a thousand mile journey searching for answers. Add the dynamic of transracial braided in, coupled with the dynamics adoption brings.

While riding on a bus in Korea, my friend Mark bent his face close to mine and said, “Adopting children transracially is a journey of a thousand miles.” My friend Mark is 45, he was adopted from Korea, he is a father, and he is one of the most endearing and wisest people I know. It took me about ten minutes to realize that he was talking about “my journey” and not the one my children are walking.

Just being a parent is enough to send anyone on a thousand mile journey searching for answers. Add the dynamic of transracial braided in, coupled with the dynamics adoption brings. But those are things I have plentiful hands-on experience and much book-read knowledge of. Except these things came to me packaged with an emphasis on how I can produce a well-balanced child. But not on how my identity as an adoptive parent might grow and change over the years.

The more I learn about being an adoptive parent the more I discover the need to let myself feel vulnerable, ambivalent, and admit that sometimes my behaviors in the area of adoptive motherhood are of thwarted self-interest. And sometimes I just plain don’t know how to move in those areas where the line between being mom to children who were adopted, and being mom to children who were not adopted, becomes blurry.

I thought I’d learned all of this when my kids reached adulthood, and I was willing to listen, and really hear what their peer group of adopted adults had to say about the throng of us who are known as adoptive parents. Lately it’s occurred to me to renew my vows to pay attention, for the times they are a changing—as the song goes. After pulling wool out of my ears, what I’m hearing from my adult friends who were adopted is that our children must own the rights to their adoption information and story. This is not a new concept. It’s a line of thinking that has held fast for years. I’m just slow at catching on, delayed in understanding the harm we bragging adoptive parents sometimes unintentionally cause.

Now I know plenty of parents who claim their young children have given them permission to tell or write their story. I made this mistake when my kids were young. And when they reached adulthood, when the time came to publish my memoir 'Pushing up the Sky' we sat nose-to-nose agreeing on which version of the book manuscript to place in the public domain. Some of the things they had given me permission to publish when they were eleven or twelve were no longer up for grabs.

We need to remember that children are still children, and they do not yet have the maturity to give up custody of their history and grant us permission to become their voice. Therefore as responsible parents we hold our children’s adoption story in trust. That’s when the real work began, when I had to stop hiding behind my kids and find my own voice, and meet the side of myself that is separate from my children. Since my daughters live on their own, and my son joined his ancestors in Heaven a decade ago, I’m alone more often, and I continue to meet myself each day in surprising situations that force me to do more growing up and confront my changing adoptive parent identity.

Something else I stumbled across on the bus ride through Korea is that some of us (myself included) spend a great deal of time thinking adoptive parent thoughts. Those words—adoptive parent. It has a joyous ring to us some of us, though not to everyone. At a meeting in Seoul a man who happens to have been adopted and appeared confident, admitted to me that he often found it difficult to believe he was viewed as an adult, and seen as a contemporary around some adoptive parents. He said he feels he has to prove himself as an adult when at adoption conferences or in adoption-related business situations, and that much of the time he feels he is treated like a boy instead of a man.

Maybe its something about the term adoptive parent that keeps some of us stuck. After all, we worked hard to become parents and we want it to sick. Still the word parent is an identifier best describing those who are still parenting children under the age of 18 or 19. Or 20 and 21, for those of us who are late bloomers and slow at letting go.

Who ARE we when we aren’t busy being an adoptive parent?

Parental, fatherly, fatherlike; maternal, motherly, motherlike. Thankfully we will always be a father or a mother. But if we will always be viewed within the adoption community only as adoptive parents, even when our sons and daughters reach adulthood and are living independent lives, will it allow us to stretch, to climb beyond the boundary and further grow as people? Is there a point where we can perhaps graduate to alumni adoptive parent, and move eventually to retired adoptive parent status? If we took a step back would it be easier for our sons and daughters to feel the clout to move into adulthood without feeling a need to fight for the right to grow up? Or maybe growing up is hard to do no matter what. I’m plenty old and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.

Meanwhile, while I’m falling back into an active adoptive parent thinking mode, and momentarily voicing the opinion of others—something else I became aware of in Korea after walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is that all of the adopted adults I know find it difficult to be seen as a charity case. It wore on their spirit while growing up. It is time adoptive parents tossed the rescue model. Parenting is a selfish act. We didn’t become parents because we wanted to save an orphan we become parents because we desperately want a child. It’s unhealthy to allow any kid to live with the pressure of believing their parents saved them. Much the same as it’s not necessary or helpful to promote the fact that a child with a brain tumor is lucky to be alive. I'm allowed to use this analogy because my kid did have a brain tumor.

My mind raced as the bus rolled along in Korea, across the motherland of my son and oldest daughter. And it continued to race when I got home to California. I was scheduled to present a workshop at Colorado Heritage Camp, and by the time I reached Denver, the land of my ancestors and the city where my grandfather’s 95-year-old twin sister still lives, I could feel something settling inside me.

Truth to tell, early in our friendship I made the comment to my friend Mark that I was old enough to be his mother. I’m not of course, and he nailed me on it. Few eight year olds give birth and eight year olds don’t adopt children. Yet being a parent is how I’ve learned recognize myself. My parenthood status stands sacred and cherished above all else. When a needy child who is not my own cries, I want to help and I’ve caught myself saying, “once a parent always a parent.”

Now I realize there is another way I can enrich my life as a mother, and that is to step out of my parenting mode whenever I’m in the presence of anyone over the age of 18 and meet them women to women, friend to friend, colleague to colleague. Mother to daughter instead of parent to child. I can even offer to help; yet I’ll have to ditch that adoption-parental thing of seeming befuddled without my all-wise child to guide me, or be all-knowing with a take-charge attitude. Because it was the thing that drove me batty on our 12-day trip throughout Korea; all those parents, parenting day after day. They even parented each other, and they tried to parent me, when their kid/teen/adult sons and daughters were off doing kid/teen/adult things.

And I’m not sure how, but I figured out the best way to become a better mother is to give myself the gift of sometimes not looking at the world through my parenting lenses. And I made this discovery while walking gently on the good Colorado land my grandfather calls home.

First published in the May 2007 issue of Adoption Today.
Copyright © Terra Trevor, All rights reserved.

Learning Adoption Culture, Learning to be a Transracial Adoptive Family

2012-01-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

We are sitting on the back porch watching a Red Tail hawk circle up from the bottom of the canyon and glide past. Then Gracie eases out of her chair, runs into the house and returns with her new doll. She drapes one arm around me, and with the other strokes the dolls forearm. “She’s a Russian doll, Aunt Terry, did you know that?" Now that my three kids are grown, I’m lucky to have gained two nieces and two nephews. Three were adopted, like two of my kids were, so now in addition to being an adoptive mother; I’m also an adoptive aunt to children who were adopted from Russia.

Beside me my niece spreads her blue silk shawl open on the grass and places the doll on top. I glance up at the sky and see another hawk glide past, wings spread wide to catch wind. “Gracie?” I said, but she was already gone, off running around the backyard with her baseball glove, playing ball with her sister and brothers.

It is a warm night. I linger with my sister-in-law after the kids are tucked into their beds.

Driving home it occurs to me I’ve lived my entire life within an adoptive family because I also grew up with four cousins who were adopted. Eyes centered on the highway ahead my thoughts turn to my Aunt Vina and Aunt Jeanette both in their eighties now, and I made a mental note to ask them to tell me more about what adoptive parenting was like for them in the 1950s. I know they liked to hike and always took their babies with them. Since baby backpack carriers were not yet invented they carried their babies on their back American Indian style, in a cradleboard. And since adoption culture was not yet invented when my aunts were parenting fortunately they had each other.

I became an adoptive parent in 1984 at age 30, when my husband and I adopted a one-year-old boy from Korea. At the time we also had a two and a half year old daughter. Three years later I became the mom of a ten-year old through adoption. Since I never glossed over the factor that two of my children were first born to another mother, an open dialog has guided me on an alternating smooth and bumpy path of doing my best job of holding on tight enough so that my kids knew their life brought me great happiness, and slacking my grip enough so they could explore all of their feelings, even dark ones.

First, however, we needed to learn how to be a transracial adoptive family. The path we chose, which turned out to benefit me tenfold, was to befriend and form close-knit friendships with other parents whose kids were also adopted. The 30-year success of our friendship group must be the fact that we sincerely liked each other, and we gathered often, camping together at the beach, backyard swim parties and barbeques, and winter dinners by the fire. While our kids played, the parents told parenting stories. So whatever kinds of adoptee issues, or racial and cultural identity questions, and multiracial family dynamics and complexities that were swimming around in my children’s head, they had plenty of time to be with others who may have shared similar feelings.

Our adoption community friendships were the element that gave a neighborhood feeling to our big city life. Although my oldest daughter, who arrived into our family at age 10, preferred to stay on the fringe, often appearing withdrawn, twenty years later I discovered that she was indeed gaining from being surrounded by other children, teens and parents who were all members of families built by adoption. It gave her belonging in those tender first years, a safe harbor to rest in while she searched for her own path.

I’m Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca, and I grew up bicultural, so naturally at first I tried to foster more racial diversity and acceptance within the group. But most of the other families could not identify with my need. They were content raising children of color in an all-white environment, and did not wish to change.

Initially it bothered me that so many of our adoption community friends didn’t have an interest in diversity. But now I’m thankful we had the opportunity to chart our own course into our local Korean American community. I learned to value our adoptive family friendships for what they could provide us in terms of mainstream white society adoption culture and family life.

While my kids explored what it meant to be Korean American, my husband and I sank in roots and worked to build lasting relationships and to let our new friends in the Korean American community know that our interest in doing so was heartfelt. We also had the daughter I’d given birth to blended into the mix, and we raised her pretty much equal to her brother and sister, which meant she spent her entire childhood and teen years attending a Korean church and growing up surrounded with adoption community cultural values. As a child her closest friends were adopted, the majority Korean-born, and these friendships continued throughout her college years and remain in place today.

In 1998 I had the good fortune to meet Chris Winston and participated in the Friends of Korea Family Exchange Program. Chris and her family valued ethnicity and Korean identity as much as I did, and for the first time in my parenting life I felt connected to an adoptive mother who shared my racial and adoption parenting values. Soon our family developed a wide circle of friendships with other adoptive families who were also living racially diverse.

Then in 1999 KAAN was born, and the first conference on Korean adoption took place. Because of my long history with KAAN, Colorado Heritage Camps and Adoption Today, my band of adoption community friends has grown large, and now includes comrades of adopted adults, adoptive mothers, fathers and first parents, scattered across the US that I’ve come to know, love, and depend on. We need each other to grow, laugh, cope, deal and celebrate. We lead adoption conference workshops together, team up to write adoption magazine articles, and bounce ideas and resources off each other. Over the years a number of us have become extended family to each other.

When I drove into my driveway and got out of my car I looked up at the stars, and thought about the way the connectedness we have to each other is apparent in the e-mails we send each other full of the schedules we make, and the routine of the phone messages we leave each other. My heart fills when we gather knowing it will permeate my body and cling to my soul as a reminder once I leave the gatherings, of what I can feel so clearly when we are all together.

It was still early, so I called my Aunt Vina and ask her if she had of adopted her kids now, instead of fifty years ago, how did she think her life might have been different if the kind of adoption community culture I have available to me had existed when she was raising my cousins. After I queried her there was a beat of silence.

“Maybe I’d be writing a log about adoption parenting.” She chuckled.
“Blog.” I corrected.

Then my aunt's tone grew serious. “Even though adoption was kept in the quiet back then, we adoptive mothers found each other.” She said. “It’s the way of the mother to find her kind to gather with while raising up kids, so my guess is I probably wouldn’t have lived so different.” I could say,” she went on, “It’s important to remember the standards of adoption we now take for granted arose from within a society with uncompassionate attitudes toward birth mothers and branded their babies as illegitimate. If I’d been surrounded with the kind of open adoption community culture that exists today my sons and their first mothers - birth mothers, are the ones whose lives would be greatly changed.”

First published in the July 2010 issue of Adoption Today
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Coming To Terms With Adoption Loss: A Mother Reflects

2012-01-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

I used to believe there wasn’t much difference between being a mother to my adopted children and the one I gave birth to.

Because I’d given birth in 1981 to a daughter, then adopted my son in 1984 when he was a year old, and treasured my kids equally, in my mind, it was the same. And then, in 1987 when our third child, a ten-year-old daughter, joined our family through adoption, I thought all adoptions, even an older child adoption, offered the same opportunity for parenting. An older child adoption required gaining knowledge beyond having a sense of humor, a flexible lifestyle, and being able to handle negative feelings from kids. I would need these skills anyway when my kids became teenagers, so I was glad to get a jump on learning, and worked hard to let go of my expectations.

In my early adoptive parenting years I thought my daughter had more losses to endure than my son, because she was adopted at an older age, and came with so much baggage. Only now I know better. Long before my tiny one-year-old son arrived, my heart and mind was filled to the brim with how I wanted things to be, and I endowed him with my hopes and longings. Truth to tell, back then I was the one with all the baggage.

Being an adoptive mother turned out to be completely different than I had expected. Yet before I dig into the recesses of my mind where my losses are stored like clothes in the back of my closet that I’ve outgrown but haven’t tossed out, first I want to recall a wonderful weekend. My oldest daughter— the live wire pixie I adopted at age ten, who is now thirty three, and I were in Las Vegas, where she treated us to a night at the Bellagio, and I treated us with tickets to a show.

Although our relationship does not meet the stereotypical standards most adoptive parents have set for us, we have found our rhythm and our joy outweighs our sorrow. Except all the good fortune in the world cannot change the fact that I am her adoptive mother, and the only reason I am her mother at all is because her first mother, her flesh and blood mother—had to let go.

Given that she lost the opportunity to grow up with her first family - mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, I lost my hopes and dreams to fill up her emptiness, to make up for her early wounds. What was taken from her can’t be replaced. My son lost everything my daughter lost. Only that’s a separate story, abridged not by the fact that he was adopted as a baby, but because he died from cancer when he was fifteen.

Since I never glossed over the factor that two of my kids were first born to another, an open dialog has guided me on an alternating smooth and bumpy path of doing my best job of holding on tight enough so that my kids knew their life brought me great happiness, and slacking my grip enough so they could explore all of their feelings, even dark ones.

In our family adoption loss and grief is not now, nor has it ever been something the casual observer can witness. My daughter does not dwell on it, nor did my son. We reap the benefits of a good life, yet loss and grief is there. We are like ducks gliding on a pond. Under the smooth surface of the water we paddle to get ourselves to where we need to go.

No matter how wide I stretched to wholeheartedly provide that all-important sense of being truly wanted and loved, I will never be able to ease the pain my son and daughter feels. It is a sadness I cannot mend or make better. What I can do is allow it to exist, without feeling the need to fix it.

In quiet moments alone late at night sometimes I can admit to myself that not only is adoption a searing loss for my children; it is also a loss for me. My oldest daughter took an instant dislike to her new younger sister on the very first day they met. Her feelings softened over the years, yet somewhere along the way I lost my ability to be with both of my daughters at the same moment and have us feel relaxed with each other, instead of them feeling obligated to be together for my sake. It was my cross to bear.

All right, I’ll admit plenty of biologically related sisters have no interest in friendship with each other. But since one of my daughters is adopted, the loss and grief I feel is without a doubt an adoption related sorrow. Or did I make too many non-adoption related mothering mistakes? I’ve wasted too much time wondering if I had given birth to both or neither, would they go out to dinner together, talk on the phone and give each other goodnight hugs?

I longed to be one of those mothers whose children were emotionally committed to each other and could provide unconditional love. And I got my wish; both of my daughters adored their brother, and he cherished them. But I also wished for daughters who could be angry one week, and friends the next, with a relationship that would outlast me. Yet when the dust settled and my youngest daughter, the child I gave birth to, reached adulthood, she emerged with as many adoption-related fragile emotions as her older sister purely from growing up in our adoptive family. If her brother and sister’s first mother could disappear, then it could happen to her too. In some ways when her older sister joined our family she did loose me.

Then my heart folded over like a candle melting in on itself when I first discovered some in my son and daughter’s peer group of adopted adults, found me irksome not simply because I am an over the hill, half Indian, half white mother, with a quirky personality. Instead so many found me irksome without even knowing me, because I have this tag title of adoptive parent shadowing me. And it saddened me and rocked my world when l discovered why. Too many adoptive parents deliver disrespect to adopted adults in the form of insensitive blog comments and rude forum dialogue, and I must reap what they sow, and my heart aches.

It used to be easy to slip into my pain groove, and take inventory of all the ways I hoped adoptive family life would be, and isn’t. Then my friend, Eyoungsoo, said something that sent me on a far better journey. He said, "Our beliefs make up our reality." Every day since I've reshuffled my beliefs and found new ones. Now I’m allowing myself to be open to new ideas of family, and ways of thinking and being. My new reality is wider than the sky, filled with so much more possibility, and more friends. Today some of my closest friends are adopted adults who are growing and changing — just like I am.

Giving up my silly notions of how I used to think things needed to be in order for me to feel fulfilled is having a glorious trickling down effect on my daughters. When their mother isn’t disappointed, and adores them just as they are in the moment, it sets them free.

First published in the March 2007 issue of Adoption Today Magazine
http://www.adoptinfo.net
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Six Things Your Adopted Child Might Be Thinking, But Will Never Tell You

2012-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Mark Hagland, Margie Perscheid and Terra Trevor

What kinds of issues around adoptee racial and cultural identity, racism, multiracial family dynamics, cultural interactions and complexities, are swimming around in your child's head? Mark Hagland, Margie Perscheid and Terra Trevor talk honestly about six emotionally charged adoption topics, and what they've learned by living through them.

MARK HAGLAND: The reality is that virtually every adult adoptee I have ever known has at least to some extent avoided broaching these tougher, more challenging, more complicated topics with their family members, especially their parents. Below are several subjects that I've brought up, with Terra's and Margie's comments following each opening statement.

#1: Your transracially adopted child will have racial identity issues but will be generally reluctant to talk with you, particularly if you are a white person, about what he/she feels in that area.

TERRA TREVOR: Adopting transracially meant our family no longer fit standard racial categories. After adopting Korean children, we had a third race blended into our mix, a race we were initially unfamiliar with. From my own experience growing up half white and half Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca, I was familiar with calling two cultures home and acting as the solder between communities. I'd discovered early on the reality of America's neuroses with race and skin color. In fact, I learned that having light skin meant that, even though I didn't try to pass, society automatically granted me white privilege, something denied to my darker skinned cousins and friends who were never mistaken for white. Since I've stumbled across racial lines, straddling cultural expectations in my own development, naturally, I wanted better opportunity for my kids. I did my best to keep an open dialogue with my kids, but of course, like most children, mine were hesitant to mention the subject of race unless I brought it up first. On those occasions when they did want to talk, they wanted me to be a quiet listener. I also made sure my children were around other Korean adoptees, and we brought Korean ethnicity into our lives so they would have other Asian children, teens and adults around them whose experiences might be similar to theirs. My kids also grew up in the Native community and with my family and friends who are racial mixes.

MARGIE PERSCHEID: Let me tell you about this exchange I had in the car with my children one afternoon awhile ago:
Son: What's for dinner?
Me: Meat loaf.
Son: What else?
Me: I don't know, what do you want?
Son: Rice.
Me: Rice with meatloaf?
Son & Daughter: Mom, we're Asian! We eat rice with everything!
There was something in their tone of voice that spoke volumes. And it had nothing to do with side dishes. With those words I heard my children claim their Korean identities - not easy for two Korean kids with white parents who were virtually ignorant of Korea when they arrived. My husband and I had to learn fast, so we did the only thing we could - we jumped feet first into our children's culture and community, taking them with us. And somehow (the "how" is another story), with the help of the many friends we've made along the way, we've managed to get here, to two confident kids who know they are Asian, Korean, Korean American. This journey has been its own reward. For my husband and me, it has been an enriching, enlightening experience that has taken us out of our world into a culture that we would otherwise never have known. And for our children, it has been a journey to themselves.

I am a white woman from Cleveland and my husband is white man from Dsseldorf. We both grew up in areas that were overwhelmingly white, and both had our first real interactions with people of other races in college. We had had no personal experiences of racism to enlighten our parenting. The only thing we had was an understanding of the importance of our children's racial and ethnic heritage, which motivated us to learn as much as we could about Korea and the Korean people, and to reach out to their community, which in our area has given us many opportunities to make lasting connections. We are fortunate, too, that we have been able to develop friendships with other adoptive families. Within our family, our children talk openly and easily about their Korean identities and the fact that we don't share the same race. Although it's impossible for me to know if they speak with the same confidence about being Korean and adopted to their friends, but I believe that my husband and I have done all we can to make that confidence possible.

#2: Your adopted child will assume that you can't understand what she/he is going through.

TT: Being adopted transracially is huge, as are the feelings it carries. I don't believe I fully grasped this in my beginning parenting years. But I've always been open to hearing what my children had to say, and sometimes this meant accepting their feelings and remaining calm while they expressed opinions I was uncomfortable hearing. I've also learned to welcome the opportunity to listen to the variety of experiences of their peer group of adopted adults; giving them the same respect I've shown my son and daughters. Now that my oldest daughter is in her early thirties we have begun to have conversations about our common experience of being racially compartmentalized. However, although I'm mixed race, since I look white, I'm generally bracketed as Caucasian, so I've never had to deal with the what-are-you grilling as she has.

MP: The fact is that I, a non-adopted white person, can't understand what my children are going through. Although as a fellow human being I can extrapolate my own experiences in an effort to gain understanding and to sympathize, at the end of the day I can't really empathize. I openly acknowledge this with my children, and at the same time I make sure they know I'm always ready to listen. I think this has given them the confidence to own their feelings about adoption, and also to make their own decisions about how much or little to share with my husband and me. When they do choose to talk about adoption, I try hard to listen actively, and to validate their feelings and experiences.

#3: Your child will generally not tell you about bullying or discrimination incidents at school or at play, unless you learn about them independently anyway.

TT: When it comes to race, white society tends to believe there is little discrimination in America today, and white people think of it in terms of incidents that happen now and then; whereas people of color know that, while it plays out in ways sometimes blatant and intentional, sometimes in ways more subtle, it's always present. From experience, I also know the worst thing that can happen to a kid over the age of six is to have their mother call the school and make a big deal over the fact that their child was teased. I know, because I attended a racially mixed elementary school where kids were teased and tested, and I know because once I almost broke the rule and called my son's teacher. Fortunately I had three kids, and the older two reminded me it would make it worse for him not better. Instead, I spent the evening rebuilding my son's confidence, letting him blow off steam, talking about some of his newfound strengths, allowing him to take charge of the situation, showing my confidence in his judgment.

MP: Because my husband and I made a conscious decision to live in a diverse area, we thought that it was unlikely that our children would experience racially-motivated teasing in their schools or in our neighborhood. But when our son came home from kindergarten one day chanting a racial slur that had previously been aimed at him, we were quickly awakened to reality. The fact is that racial divisions are a part of American life. Since that first experience, we've made a point of asking our children from time to time if they've been the targets of any teasing or bullying because they are Asian. They've both shared several incidents, the majority occurring during their junior high years. Although it's hard to accept that this has happened to my children, I'm glad that they were able to tell my husband and me about it. It has given us the opportunity to talk about how they reacted to the situations, their feelings at the time, and their feelings looking back. It has also given me an opportunity to talk to our daughter about the sad prevalence of fascination that some men have with Asian women. This is something that I believe she will be better able to handle if she is prepared for it.

#4: Your child will spend some years trying on different identities and aspects of identities. But again, she/he will feel it difficult to communicate how/what/why he/she is doing in the moment.

TT: I know what it feels like to be caught between two worlds, and I've explored my own racial identity. Though I'm half white, I seldom refer to myself as Swedish and German American, because I don't feel connected to those cultures. Culturally, I'm Cherokee. It sounds absurd, since I look more white than Indian, but I don't feel white, even though I went through a stage when I dyed my hair blond. While I never deliberately passed or tried to cross over, I also didn't go out of my way to let it be known I was Indian, hoping it would make my life less complicated. I was playing with the idea of what it might be like to actually be an all-white person. I've also gone through periods when I've embraced only my Native side. I think being adopted transracially might be similar to being mixed race, because neither is a singular experience, and both dynamics often carry an internal brokenness from our experience of being between. Often, it takes years of trying on different identities to find our balance.

MP: Although my own search for identity didn't focus on my race, it is still fresh enough in my memory to remind me how difficult it can be for a teen or young adult to struggle with figuring out who they are. I remember, too, how painful it was when I allowed a facet of my identity to become visible, only to have it be brushed aside by my parents. And so my husband and I have tried above all to let our children know that they are whoever they believe they are or want to be. This means we've occasionally had to let go of our images of their identities, and to trust their ability to develop their own. This process is hard enough for any teen, but is that much more complicated for a teen missing his or her genetic connections, and living with a family of a different race. This is an area in which gentle guidance is needed, not intolerant demand.

#5: Your child will, as he/she moves into adolescence and early adulthood, be silently evaluating you whenever you discuss current-events issues with him/her, especially any that touch on race, ethnicity, and his/her country of birth.

TT: Recently, while leading a roundtable discussion, I encountered adoptive parents who had negative feelings about the country their children were adopted from. They were willing to embrace the culture from an Americanized standpoint, yet harbored resentment toward the country, and spoke only poorly of their children's orphanage caregivers and birthparents. I shudder at the message this sends. No matter how desolate a child's life prior to adoption, some good things were also present. Find the good and praise it. I often ask parents to picture themselves 20 years from now. What kind of relationship do you hope to have with your child? Because I can guarantee our children are evaluating us now, and it will have a direct effect on the kind of relationship we have with them when they reach adulthood.

MP: I'm a 1.5-generation Slovenian-/Croatian-American. Although I don't strongly identify with Slovenia and Croatia, I remember how little I wanted to acknowledge my heritage during the Balkan war, when so many atrocities were being committed by my people. It was a powerful reminder of how difficult it must be for our children to hear judgmental statements about their countries of birth. Although I can't control what comes out of the mouths of politicians, newscasters, and insensitive people, I can ensure that what my children hear about Korea and the Korean people is balanced and honest. This doesn't mean avoiding every negative topic, but it does mean putting negatives into perspective. And it means that I must become an advocate for my children's ethnic community, here in the U.S. and in Korea. Respect for that community is really synonymous with respect for my children themselves.

#6: When issues do emerge, they will often "erupt," seemingly out of nowhere.

TT: Back when I hadn't yet fully recovered from the reactive state of having parented three teenagers, meaning that I was still into preventive parenting, still curbing the war, this was a big problem for me, because most of our serious issues caught me by surprise. Joan McNamara once said, If adolescence can be described as a roller coaster of emotions for teenagers experiencing it, the same can be said for their parents. Even though both of my daughters are now adults, the only thing that keeps me sane as a mother is remembering to keep my sense of humor, being open to new ideas, and remaining flexible.

MP: Parenting a teen is like parenting on quicksand. Without a doubt, it's a challenge, and adoption adds another layer. I now parent with the expectation that something's going to blow from time to time, and I find I'm far less surprised when it does. It's still not easy when it happens, but taking it in stride changes my approach to it. And my reactions are far less emotional now that my children are in their mid and late teens than they were when they were younger. A sense of humor is definitely needed, but also lots and lots of love and affection. And spontaneity - in my family, anyway, making sure that we're able to do something fun on the spur of the moment from time to time reminds us all that we're family, in spite of the friction that may come between us from time to time.

First published in Adoption Today Magazine

Reprinted in Love Isn't Enough

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Mark Hagland was born in South Korea in 1960 and adopted in 1961 by American parents of Norwegian and German descent. He grew up in Milwaukee, WI, and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his BA, and Northwestern University, where he received his master's degree in journalism. He has lived in Chicago since 1981, and has been a working journalist for nearly thirty years. He has been actively involved in KAAN for several years, in the adult Korean adoptee mini-gatherings, and in writing for Korean Quarterly.

Terra Trevor is an author of Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca and white ancestry, whose work is shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed blood in both white and American Indian societies. With her husband she raised three children, two of whom were adopted from Korea; a one-year old, and an older child adopted at age ten. Terra is a contributing author of 10 books, including Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press). She volunteers with at risk and foster youth in transition, and is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers mentoring core. Her memoir, Pushing up the Sky (KAAN) is widely anthologized.

Margie Perscheid is the adoptive parent of two young adults, both of whom were adopted from Korea as infants. In 1996, Margie co-founded Korean Focus, an organization for families with children from Korea with chapters in Metro DC, Maryland, Ohio, Washington, and Indiana. She speaks regularly at local adoption programs and events, writes at the award-winning Third Mom blog and for adoption and Korean American publications, and is an active supporter of KAAN, currently serving as its registrar.

Race and Identity: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

2012-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

When asked, my friend Julie will say she is Chinese. People ask her what she is all the time. You can’t guess by her outward appearance because she is Mexican, Chinese and white. Yet she feels closest to her Chinese ancestry and it is how she identifies herself. I’m mixed blood Native American, like my friend Leslie, who was adopted by a Japanese American father and a Caucasian mother who valued her racial make-up, and understood that she needed to see herself reflected in community throughout her growing-up years. Many of my close friends are mixed race like I am, and their children, like mine, grew up surrounded and influenced by people of color.

My group of women friends also include adoptive mothers who are white women with Asian children, like mine are. They also understand their children need to see themselves reflected in community, and to be with people of color on a frequent basis in settings where dark skin is the majority and Asian eyes are the norm, and to have plenty of opportunity to be in places where people of Caucasian ancestry are the minority. Actions speak louder than words. We participate in our children's racial/ethnic community because we value the diversity, and recognize how we live shapes our children’s identity and their relationships with people of color. We don’t have racial/ethnic community involvement just for our children’s sake; we take interest because we are a multiracial family.

“And just when I thought I had it all figured out,” my friend Terri said, “We adopted two more kids.” Terri had a son and daughter who were both teenagers adopted from Korea, and when she decided to add more children to her family she chose domestic adoption within the United States and became the mother of a sibling pair who are white.

It didn’t take long for my friend to figure out her new children had been raised in environments that did not respect people of color. She was faced with teaching them about her own racial values beginning immediately. But she also discovered that while her newly adopted kids were making good progress at home with their Asian siblings, they were fearful when away from home, afraid to venture with their family into the Asian community or to go anywhere that was not predominately white.

What my friend experienced is similar to what I often find when I’m invited to speak at adoption conferences or participate in round table discussions on the topic of transracial adoption. Usually I meet white adoptive parents, who have children of color, and the family is living in a predominately white area of town, and they want to begin making changes to bring racial mixing into their lives, but their children are dragging their feet. However, recently an adoptive mom and dad who are raising a family of all white children sat in on our session and wanted ideas on how they could begin to embrace a more racially diverse lifestyle.

When kids have been coached to feel safest within the confines of white culture, within Caucasian boundaries, they can be afraid of change, just like we adults sometimes are. What can we do to increase their comfort level and expand their mindset? Normalizing race and culture happens best when there is an inheritance of ideas and attitudes conveyed from family or the people we choose to become friends with, and invite into our home. Usually I tell those who ask for my advice to begin with baby steps. First become a tourist in your own town. View your surroundings with new eyes. If you suddenly realize that you live in an all-white area, begin to look for ways to step out of your comfort zone, and add one new thing you can do each week that will bring changes so that your family will have the likelihood of being around people of color. Children learn about life from watching their parents interact with people, it has a direct impact on how they view themselves, and where and how they find their identity and racial comfort zone level.

Kids also need to see people of color working as professionals on a regular basis, instead of only in service jobs. Yet make sure they understand that blue collar and white collar jobs deserve equal respect, and are not defined by a person’s race.

If someone makes racist statements in your presence disrupt the offensive joke. If your child is present and you stay silent you are teaching your child it’s okay to make fun of people of color. How we respond will shape our children’s values.

How do I know? My earliest memories encircle me; watching Grandma sew beads on Uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings. Realizing that I’m white and American Indian and what that meant. By observing that I am treated differently depending on if I was with a group of all white, or with all Native people. Figuring out that it was important for me to know who I am, and not to let my skin color define me. Not to let it define the way other people perceive me when they don’t know my story. Yet I can only speak from my own experience.

If you are a white person understand that you receive white privileges that people of color do not have. Help other white people understand their privileges. While I never deliberately try to pass or cross over, having light skin means that white society automatically grants me white privilege, something denied to my darker skinned family members and friends who are never mistaken for white.

It takes years to begin to understand a racial group of people that we were not born into. Don't buy into racial stereotypes. Accept that others may stereotype you. Do your best to acknowledge your own prejudices and work towards loosing them.

If you live in an area without racial diversity and can’t consider moving, then travel and spend vacation time in ethnic locations. Teach children not to judge others. Help them learn to value difference. Let them see there are many ways of living and being and to appreciate a multiplicity of unique ethnic characteristics. If money does not permit you to travel, then travel from your armchair. Watch films with your children that will bring racial diversity into your lives. Subscribe to magazines that offer photographs and articles with an ethnic point of view. Eat ethnic foods regularly. Let your kitchen be filled with a variety of scents and flavors, and allow those flavors to influence the music you listen to.

Talk with your older children frequently about world current events and what’s happening outside your hometown. Give your children permission and the freedom to think about someday going away to college in the city of their choice, and let them know that it’s OK to outgrow the racial limitations currently imposed on them. Consider the idea that your child might some day date or marry or partner with a person of color.

ALL families benefit from racial diversity. Yet some people minimize the importance of race and therefore fail to reduce racism in their own communities or within their own family. Allowing children to grow up ignorant of ethnic groups is also a form of racism. Living racially diverse is as important as a good education, because it is an education, yet fusing a multiracial way of feeling and being does not happen with a few social outings; it’s a life process, a series of small steps gained over years and requires us to use the same perseverance we needed in the adoption process that brought our children to us. It’s a false notion to believe our children will ask us to lead them into matters of racial concern. We parents must provide direction.

First published in the March 2009 issue of Adoption Today.

Reprinted July 2011 at Love Isn't Enough.

A First Mother Glimpse. My Story

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

Fall, 1972. “I want to cancel my appointment,” I told the woman at the front desk. “Instead of birth control counseling I need a pregnancy test.” The doctor at the Free Clinic rubbed his beard. “If you are pregnant and don’t have any money you’ll have to apply for welfare.” He scribbled an address and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

The next morning I phoned social welfare to make an appointment and was told they didn’t give out appointments. Interviews were on a first come first served basis. At the reception counter, under bad fluorescent lighting, I filled out the forms. The clerk took my paperwork and motioned for me to sit down.

“Number thirty-two,” the social worker called out. I was number fifty-six. My shorts were soaked with sweat, and my bare legs stuck to the orange plastic chair. The room was filled with women and crying babies. I thought of my mother at age fifteen, pregnant with me. Finally my number was called. I was led into a windowless office. The social worker lit a cigarette, and smoke poured from her nose like a dragon.

“Are you giving the baby up for adoption?” She asked. The question unnerved me. She eyeballed me up and down and hissed, “You’ve written down that you’re Indian—if it was going to be a white baby it would be easier to find a family to adopt it.”

I clenched my jaw to stay calm. Brown haired and green eyed, most strangers didn’t place me as Indian. I'm a mixed blood and the baby I hadn’t meant to create was more Indian than white; the father of my child-to-be was a full blood. This was my first glimpse at the way race and culture collided in adoption. For the first time I realized I'd been passing as white whenever it suited me, and that my baby was not white, and that I'd never be white again.

The social worker looked at my stunned face and shook her head. I was a nineteen-year-old, unmarried college student, and pregnancy caught me unprepared to become someone’s mother.

Though we spoke occasionally on the telephone, my relationship with R. was over. It had ended weeks before on a windy night in Arizona under a climbing moon. The next day I headed home to California. Underneath my embarrassment about repeating the family cycle of unplanned teenage pregnancy, especially when I’d been so determined not to, there were moments when I smiled as the baby swelled within me. But I was certain I was not ready to be a mother. Or was I? Before I made a decision, however, I miscarried. At least I did not have to surrender my child to another. Or so I’ve always proclaimed to protect myself. But what I know for sure is that there is no way I would have attempted to keep the baby. If that baby had been born to me, then I would have made an adoption plan in an effort to offer my child a better life than the one I was born into as the result of an unplanned teenage pregnancy.

Afterward, I went back to school and tried to pretend my pregnancy never happened. Instead, I switched my major to early childhood education, and did an internship at a preschool. This was during “Operation Babylift” and I grew close to an adoptive family whose child was airlifted out of Vietnam.

Twelve winters later, in 1984, I sat in the lobby of Holt International Adoption Services. The room was decorated in pastel wallpaper, with a nubby textured sofa. This time I was married and on the receiving end of adoption. Within the next twenty-four hours my husband and I were due to become the parents of a one-year-old Korean boy. As our son grew up I knew he would wonder about his Korean mother. I might never get the chance to meet her, yet I know she must be generous, patient, joyful, and loving because our son turned out to be all those things. I like to think his mother is a lot like me, but was forced to make a decision that I did not have to make.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Initially, after my poor judgment, which ended in unplanned pregnancy I decided not to have children, and I vowed never to get pregnant again. How could I keep my second child when I wanted to give away my first? While I didn’t go out of my way to remember, I also didn’t keep the fact that I had been pregnant a secret. I also did my best not to fall in love with anyone. Instead three years later I met the man I would eventually marry and my resolve melted away. A year before we married I told him I didn’t want to have children. He said that having kids was not a big deal to him. We agreed to lead professional lives, travel and raise dogs.

But shortly before turning thirty I changed my mind; I wanted a chance to be a mother. Just one child, and either by birth or adoption, I was open to the possibility of a child coming into my life in whatever way providence chose. When I shared this with my husband to my surprise and relief he was delighted. He too had changed his mind and wanted a chance to be a father. Once we began talking about a baby, somehow the conversation moved right over to adoption, but within a month I was once again instantly pregnant, resulting in the birth of our daughter. Three and a half years later we adopted our son as a one-year-old with special medical needs, adopted from Korea.

Having a family was so wonderful that we decided to adopt for a second time and added a third child to our family. In 1987, when our daughter was six, and our son four, we adopted a ten-year-old girl, and that is a whole other story.

Since my mother was now an adoptive grandmother, and deeply in love with my kids, I dared ask the question— I asked her if back when she was fifteen and pregnant with me if she had considered letting me be adopted. She blinked in surprise and avoiding my eyes said, yes, but her parents forbid it. “Don’t feel guilty," I said. “It would have been OK if you had.”

Jump cut to 2005, when I attended an adoption conference and found myself surrounded with birth/first mothers and adoptees. Their discussions, their generosity and willingness to include me allowed me to view my life as a whole and explore parts of myself that aren’t usually encouraged to surface within the adoption parenting community. But the flip side is that my mother did keep me, and the child I would have surrendered for adoption was never born. Truth is I don’t know what it is like to be an adoptee, or a birthmother and to call to life the lost past that is so wanted. That’s when the sky crashes open for me and I feel the yin and yang of what it means to have become an adoptive parent.

Copyright © Terra Trevor, author of Pushing up the Sky, of which a portion of this story is excerpted. All rights reserved.

Pushing up the Sky

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Full Circle: Journal Writing and Talking Circles with Kids and Teens

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

I never say we’re going to learn our culture, but the kids learn it because they’re living it. In our journal writing circles I don’t necessarily say, we’re going to explore our identity, yet most of the time this is what we do.

Our classes are held outdoors under a bead-blue sky. We stretch out on the grass, a breeze blowing. I remind the group of middle school kids gathered not to worry about spelling or punctuation, the goal is to write as fast as they can, and produce a page or two or three of rough draft uncensored thoughts. To jump start the kids into writing I lead with a question.
“What are a few things about yourself that you think other people don’t understand?”

Then I add, as I do every time I work with students young or old, “Don’t worry if you veer off the topic. Just write anything that comes into your mind.”

After each person has had time to write down thoughts, we go around the circle and anyone who wants to, reads what they have written. Confidentially is always a moot point. So, sometimes there are those who want to crumple up the paper after they have written, before or after reading aloud. That’s OK. The purpose is to tap into our minds, and see what might be lurking in our subconscious. We don’t need to save what we have jotted down or turn it into a monument.

Writers are visionaries.“We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance,” author Julia Cameron reminds us. As a mother, a writer, and an instructor of journaling and creative writing, everyday I practice this form of faith. As parents with the goal of supporting our children's developing sense of identity of who they are, and where they come from, we also routinely practice faith by trusting that we are doing our best job of helping our kids find avenues to explore and launch their feelings. And silence is silence, and nothing about it is golden if we allow ourselves to believe that children who don’t talk about race, adoption, or racial teasing or racial stereotyping, aren’t dealing with these issues.

The goal therefore, in addition to providing occasions for open dialogue with parents, is to offer a safe harbor where our kids can air their feelings within a peer group of kindred spirit friends. Only another eleven-year-old who is adopted knows what it feels like to be eleven and be adopted. And only another person who is American Indian, or is adopted from China or Korea knows what it is like to have that dynamic of adoption braided in.

The most effective journaling sessions are when the rules are firm. With kids and teens it’s generally best to set a “no parents allowed” rule. (Generally it is best to set a no parents allowed rule for anybody writing down their private thoughts, even for those of us who are over 50.) No criticizing, no making fun of anything anyone writes, with a focus on compassionate listening offers the best chance for kids to peel back the layers of their personalities, and figure out what they really want to say, and what questions they want to ask.

The success of a journaling circle is that members of the circle have common bonds and emotional links with each other such as growing up Native American or Korean American or having been adopted transracially. I keep the majority of the writing topics open and flexible and not centered on adoption, ethnicity and identity. Slants specific to those topic areas spring up automatically and will present themselves in a far more creative light than if I’d forced the subject. Yet usually I add one or maybe two writing topics in specific areas common to the group experience. Recently with a group of daughters adopted from China I opened by saying, “Name three ways in which you think of yourself as being typically Asian, and three ways in which you don’t.” I had a second specific theme to suggest they write on later on, except the group bent over their note pads and wrote fast, like the wind, and they spent the rest of the hour talking about a spin off comment, namely “If you could tell the kids at school exactly what you are thinking when they ask—but where are you really from?”

Since our purpose of journaling together is born of friendship, and not a therapy session where the focus is on identifying problems and finding solutions, so I find it is best to let the writing flow naturally. Letting go of expectations is a must. As a lover of the written word, I want everyone to fall passionately into writing. But sometimes after a few minutes of writing everyone gets looped into a conversation. Which is why I follow journaling sessions with kids with a “Talking Circle” from my own American Indian oral tradition.

The traditional way, which is observed when Native people gather for the purpose of a “Talking Circle” is for everyone to sit in a circle, of course. One person begins talking from their heart, and they hold the “talking stick” while speaking, and have the opportunity to talk uninterrupted. When the person is finished speaking they pass the “talking stick” to the person next to them, and we go around the circle until everyone who wants to talk has had a chance to speak. We are supportive listeners and refrain from offering suggestions or finding fixes because this cuts off the flow of conversation, respect and trust.

When necessary I begin the dialogue but I don’t ride herd, my role is to act as guide, get the group going, and then let them drive. Even those kids who stay at the fringe of the group, or appear withdrawn or quiet, are still observing and learning from the group dynamics.

I’ve never facilitated or sat in any of the circles my son and daughters have participated in because I wanted them to have a chance to figure out whom they might be without me breathing down their neck or trying to sneak a peek into their minds. Yet I’ve found when I gave my kids the free space they needed to explore, we effortlessly communicated on a deeper level, often when I least expected it. For example my son liked to tell me his deepest thoughts while I sat in five o’clock traffic, waiting to make a left turn. Looking back I know by timing it perfectly he was guaranteed I would listen, and not interrupt what he had to say.

As hard as it was to let my children go off alone to teen adoptee groups, at heritage camp and at KAAN conferences (and for my kids this also included cancer survivor, and siblings of cancer survivor camp intimate discussions) and not have any idea what they were thinking and experiencing— it was good practice for me because I felt those exact same pangs of longing and feeling left out when I dropped my daughter off at college and she moved into the dorm. And I felt that way again four years later when she graduated and got her first job, and moved into her own apartment.

Parenthood is about loving and being able to let go, and if we do the growing up right, our children will be blessed with opportunities to think and speak candidly about their feelings, and will walk away from us, one baby step at a time, towards rich and full lives of their own making. Ånd chances are, I’ve discovered, they will call home often, providing sweet, intimate details of their newfound independence, returning the faith and trust, we gave them so freely.

First published in February 2007 issue of Adoption Today magazine.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Giving My Children Custody of Their Own Lives

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

One afternoon, when my youngest daughter, then age 20, was in a talkative mood she began sharing details of her life with me, a stream of conscience that ran from what she’d done over the weekend and trailing into future plans she might expand on that in her mind were sound and logical.

I was still in the reactive state otherwise known as the—mother of three teenagers; meaning that I was still into preventative parenting, still curbing the war. If the teen years can be described as a see saw of emotions for teenagers experiencing it, the same must be said for their parents. So naturally I began giving my daughter the low down on how I felt about what she’d just told me. We almost began a heated argument, and we would have except that she said. “Stop it Mom, you have to be willing to listen to my ideas without always giving me advice.”

I took a deep breath, and all at once realized that no matter how much I wanted to guide her and protect her from ever having to experience any of the dangers that exist in adult life as she walked towards independence— I couldn’t.

“OK,” I said, “I guess it’s time for me to give you to yourself. “

She rolled her eyes and replied, “Yes, you’d better, because I have friends whose parents refuse to do it, and their kids won’t talk about everything the way I do; they just tell their parents what they think they want to hear.”

Then without missing a beat she continued on talking, telling me things.
At one point I slipped back into advice giving, and she said. “Mom, stop it.
Because, when you have too many opinions about my life you create a wall between us, and you’ve just put up another brick.”

That day we coined the family joke about the “Wall” and whenever I become overly involved in her life, it reminds me to stop.

Today my daughters are grown, and have been for many years. They lead independent lives. Yet those last few years when they were still living with me and had begun to reach adulthood, like most parents I began to take inventory of all the things I forgot to teach them. I often found there was something I wanted to say that I didn’t quite get to say while they were growing up. Why? Because I wanted my kids to fare better than I did.

But my children can’t learn from my mistakes. They have to make their own mistakes. It’s important for them to make mistakes, “So they can grow to be more courageous in facing themselves and their lives, more confident of what they want to do, and more efficient in carrying through their aims. But, above all so they will become more aware.” Anne Morrow Lindberg’s words reminds me.

In quiet moments when I doubt my children have learned all that I’m capable of teaching them, just when a tiny repeat lecture, or a warning begins to slip from my mouth. I remind myself to stop, take a deep breath and allow them to walk forward into adult lives of their own making.

They say that the oldest child has the worst of it in most families, suffering from all the mistakes his or her parents don’t have enough experience to avoid.

It struck me in later years when the mission was completed, that my oldest daughter had two rookie mothers to contend with; the mom she had for the first ten years of her life in Korea, and then she had to start out all over again with me.

You’ve heard the term that doctors practice medicine. I like to think of parents as practicing parenting. Nobody has it figured out. But the other day I came across the best quote.

When you come to the edge of all you’ve known and are about to step into the darkness, one of two things will happen. Either there will be something solid for you to stand on or you will be taught to fly.

Author's Note:

This story was first presented as a session introduction at the National KAAN Conference and was reprinted under the title Another Brick In The Wall, as a parent guide to accompany the book Pieces of Me: Who Do You Want To Be published by EMK Press.

Listening To Adult Adoptees: A Lesson For Adoptive Parents

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

Adoptive parents are familiar with the difficulties of fielding intrusive comments, so why have they begun challenging adopted adults?

Lydia sits down next to me and begins talking with an adoptive mother. Both Lydia and the woman’s eleven-year-old daughter are adopted from Korea. “What about the guys you date?” The mother asks, looking over the tops of her reading glasses. She raises her eyebrows. “Do you go out with Asians?” Lydia freezes. Then she sighs and shrugs her shoulders, her expression so dramatic changes across her face like sunlight slipping behind a cloud.

The carpet beneath my feet seems to press upward, and I wish I could become part of the wall. It’s unintentional, of course, this mother thinks she is only asking appropriate questions, and that it’s OK to expect an adult adoptee to open up her life for her examination.

I'm older than dirt and over the years, as a parent of Korean born-children, I’ve met my share of noisy questions, but now the tables are turned. Instead of the insensitive comments from strangers that trailed me when my kids were growing up, today the rude remarks and probing questions I hear asked, slip from the mouths of adoptive parents, and are directed towards adopted adults.

Adoptive parents both create and reflect adoptive parenting attitudes and social values. We are familiar with the difficulties of fielding intrusive comments, so why have so many begun to criticize and challenge adopted adults?

We can shrug it off. After all, those parents mean well. Their children are the center of their lives, desperately important to them, deeply loved, and they are only wanting to talk with someone who has walked the adoptee path, to shed a little light on the adult journey their kids will someday embark on.

We may have good intentions, but we aren’t doing our best job of remembering.

From experience we know the burden of educating others is oppressive. When my children first joined our family the job of educating the world about adoption fell largely to us, their parents. I'm from the generation of adoptive parents who twenty years ago worked towards setting the bounds of privacy while empowering our children to face bothersome questions. We formed an adoption community committed to teaching our kids to insist on the right of privacy early on, to know that what feels private can legitimately be kept private.

An interracial adoptive family attracts a certain amount of attention. When our kids are babies there are days when we can’t get through the supermarket without being stopped by a stranger or two, being chased down the isle by someone who wants to ask us nosy adoption questions. If we are wise we take cues from our kids. At first we might enjoy the notice, but usually our children do not. From practice we learn that fielding too many questions, criticism, and too much attention — wears on our spirit.

In parenting we worry about doing our best to help our children deal with the expectations others may have of them as they get older. So by the time most adult adoptees begin facing nosy questions on their own, they’ve had years of watching their parents model empowering answers, with a mind set that lets them know they have the right to choose whether and how to respond to intrusive questions.

“In the best interest of the child” is a concept that consistently is embraced as a core principle of adoption. Those children whose best interest we want to protect grow up to be adults who hold their own rights to privacy. We’re fortunate in today’s paradigm we have transracially adopted adults who are willing to be interpreters of the adult adoptee perspective and are prepared to share personal information. Yet it’s important to remember that not all adoptees enjoy being the object of curiosity. While being open all along with our children is key, we do not have the right to expect that same level of openness with adults we barely know, just because they happen to have been adopted.

Adopted adults should not be singled out and queried unless they have volunteered themselves as a bridge — and even then there are boundaries that must be respected. There are hundreds of studies showing that how parents talk with their children, whether with an empathic understanding, or with criticism and indifference, has deep and lasting consequences on a child’s emotional life, and that effect shapes their adulthood.

If you are the parent of a child, picture yourself 20 years from now. What kind of relationship do you hope to have with your kids? As your children reach adulthood, you will need to keep some of your comments to yourself. Begin practicing now. When adopted adults offer to answer your questions, listen with a benevolent ear, empower them with security, and self-confidence. Be kind. Showing respect to another adoptive parent’s adult son or daughter is probably the most important thing we can do.

This article was first published in the July 2004 issue of Adoption Today and it has been reprinted by Tapestry Books, RainbowKids.com, Informed Adoption Advocates and in numerous other venues.

International Transracial Adoption: Then and Now

2012-01-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

In 1984 I received a long-awaited phone call from my social worker. “It’s a boy.” He said. I was outside watering sprouting morning glories, and before I answered the phone I had one of those knowing-feelings and knew it would be the adoption agency telling me about my soon-to-be child.

Four months later on a crisp December morning in Seoul, Korea, a wide-eyed baby was readied to leave his homeland. Dressed in a pink bunting to keep out the winter chill, one-year-old Kook Yung was carried aboard Korean Airlines, and he set off for a new life; adoption in the United States.

When the plane landed in California, Kook Yung was placed in my arms, and I felt an awareness deeper than the ocean, grasping the loss his first mother endured. That boy became my son, Jay. The one who would later pick purple and yellow wild flowers for me, and bestowed me with the title of adoptive parent and the pleasure of being his mother.

It was before e-mail was widely available, in an era prior to the common use of FAX machines and computers. My kitchen telephone and the family calendar was the nerve center of our household. Adoption documents were hand-carried overseas whenever possible. Jays’ referral photo and my monthly subscription to OURS magazine arrived by surface mail. My mailbox, located near the curb and surrounded by tangle of magenta geraniums, was my lifeline. The group of adoptive parents my husband and I had befriended gathered on a regular basis to tell stories and share information, meeting face to face.

Where are all those mothers and fathers who gathered at the kitchen table and told stories around the stove? We are sitting at our computers, of course. It makes things faster going in terms of getting information and meeting new friends, and without computers you wouldn't be reading this right now. And yet we’ve gained and lost. Without cell phones and computers we had the luxury of time. Yet the Internet has without a question of a doubt enriched my life. Without e-mail I certainly would not be able to stay in contact with the Korean adoptive parents
(yes, the Korean people do adopt) I met when I was invited to speak on a panel comprised of four American adoptive mothers and four Korean adoptive mothers at the 2006 KAAN Conference held in Seoul.

And the other day while I was writing the first draft of this story, sitting at my desk on the west coast staring at the screen, I decided to query Carrie in New Jersey via e-mail, and ask her opinion. She wrote to me saying that she feels there have been many positive changes since the first generation of International adoptees arrived. But the pendulum has begun to swing too far the other way, and that does a disservice. When I questioned her further she said adoptive parents today want to be given a checklist of things they should do, or not do, in order for their child to turn out all right; meaning whatever OK is for that parent in order to meet their own parenting expectations. She added, “Five years ago I was working my way thorough the checklist and today I am trying leave it behind and listen to the needs my kids have and respond to each of them with what they need.”

I can breath a sigh of relief because my kids are already grown and have been for years and years, and I didn’t even know there was a checklist. We had talked with our kids about adoption early on. My husband and I were open to having contact with birth parents. We acknowledged loss and grief. Our children grew up within a circle of friends who were also adopted. And we lived a racially diverse lifestyle. Was there more I needed to know?

I asked my friend Mark because it is always good to get a second opinion. Especially since he was adopted transracially and is a father, and he has great parenting sense. “Even if you are the best parent in the world, children will still need to explore until they find an identity fit that feels right for them.” He explained. “It goes with the territory, all transracial adoptees will have varying degrees of identity issues.” I chuckled. “And so will their parents.” I added. “And that includes me.”

The biggest change that has taken place is the fact that today we have adult adoptees who came home to their families as babies and toddlers, and are now grown up. They are parents and grandparents, mature adults who have been informed by their life experience. Funnily the tables are turned. Instead of the quizzical stares and oddball comments from strangers that trailed me when my kids were young, today the insensitive comments I hear asked slip from the mouths of adoptive parents, and are directed toward adopted adults.

Adoptive parents both create and reflect adoptive parenting attitudes and social values—and yet so do adopted adults. However, too many adoptive parents are slow to grant adopted adults the custody of their own lives and voice. The result is a metamorphosis of adopted people often viewed as a dependent group. Yet we must realize that some of those who came in the first wave of adoption from Korea will soon be nearing retirement age, and because we need to respect and learn from them, and bridge it with the strong community of young adopted adults speaking out, which now includes those born in China giving voice, I take heart in knowing much change is on the horizon.

Thankfully families created in the last twenty-five years through transracial adoption have benefited from what was learned during those twenty-five years: that acknowledging race and ethnicity is important. However, when I think of transracial adoption today, pictures of segregated groups of people float into my consciousness as I watch it fast becoming too polarized. We've broken ourselves down into enclaves of Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Latin American and many other adoption groups. I believe that while ethnicity and heritage is important, and is core to me as a Native American woman, our strength is also in coming together as a blended community of voices including people of all ages and backgrounds, banding together and bridging our experiences, instead of segregating.

“We had come so far from where we started, and weren’t nearly approaching where we had to be, but we’re on the road to becoming better.” Maya Angelou wrote, and from my perspective her words also speak to transracial adoption.

First published in the October 2009 issue of Adoption Today Magazine. http://www.adoptinfo.net/

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Race and Ethnicity: Preparing for Culture Camp, Language Lessons, and Homeland Journeys

2012-01-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

The moment we decided to become parents we began working towards building the kind of multiracial lifestyle we wanted our children to be surrounded with. This along with the prep work and preparing we began the moment we realized that it wasn’t going to be easy.

It happened every spring. We made our summer wish list. We were only wishing of course, so the sky was the limit. “I want to go to Disneyworld.” My oldest daughter shrieked. She was twelve and had joined our family through adoption only two years prior, and amusement parks were number one on her to-do list.

“If I could wish for anything, I would learn to drive a train.” My six-year-old son announced. His serious dark eyes searched mine. I saw the corners of his mouth trying not to smile, so I knew he was pulling my leg, sort of. My youngest daughter said she wanted to take riding lessons, western style preferably, not English.

My husband wished for a summer filled with fishing. And I chose a fantasy vacation at a writers conference on Maui, telling my kids and husband they could come along, and while daddy fished they could play on sandy shore lined beaches or surf the waves. Everyone bust into fits of giggles. Well, almost everyone. With her eyebrows curved into question marks, our oldest daughter wanted to know if she could bring a friend to Disneyworld, someday, if we ever really went.

Next we settled down to the task of the evening—to the serious family business of helping each child identify a practical, affordable, obtainable, a FUN, and slightly educational way to spend their summer days. Then I reminded the kids, as I did every year, that we also needed to agree on one family summer venture centering on ethnicity.

That particular evening, after we finished wishing, we gathered around the computer and submitted our application to attend a family-style, adoptive family heritage camp. Family-style best met our needs because our son was not yet ready to be sent off on his own, and while our oldest daughter often wanted to be rid of us, we needed more time to bond as parent and child with her. Although our younger daughter was also old enough to want to be rid of us, she was too young to realize it yet. At the heritage camp we chose our kids would be grouped with others their age for portion of the day, and my husband and I would be with other parents, and then all night we would be together as a family.

The summer prior we chose Korean language classes, and after getting connected this led to a decade of staying connected and enjoying heart-felt friendships and a rich full social life within our local Korean community. We’ve saved our pennies in order to have a homeland stay in Korea with a family exchange program, and we’ve taken the kids to eastern Oklahoma and to the Cherokee Nation, homeland of my mixed blood heritage. Other summers we’ve attended the annual KAAN conference, which is also family-based.

How did we manage to get all three of our kids onboard, eager to go, year after year? And how did we accomplish the task of preparing them to enjoy the experience?

I believe the single most significant thing we’ve done is the comment to cultural diversity my husband and I made early on in our relationship. The moment we decided to become parents we began working towards building the kind of multiracial lifestyle we wanted our children to be surrounded with. This along with the prep work and preparing we began the moment we realized that it wasn’t going to be easy.

My husband remembers how uncomfortable he felt when he first met me and found himself the only white man among American Indians. I spent my growing up years in a mixed race area of Los Angeles, and my husband had grown up in an all-white community. Blending our lives allowed us to realize we each needed to give ourselves the opportunity to be in frequent situations where we would be in the minority race and culture.

At the time we had no idea how much this would influence our lives, and our journey through parenthood. Our first child was born to us. When our daughter was three, we adopted our son from Korea. He came home to us a few weeks after his first birthday, and three years later we adopted from Korea again, this time a daughter, adopted at age ten. We set out to raise our kids to understand living racially diverse is as important as a good education, because it is an education.

Naturally they complained about homework, and they also grumbled about weekends with an ethnicity bent. But we gave our children lots of choices. They had ample free time to do as they pleased. But some things they could not chose to opt out on. This included being exposed to a variety of cultural diversity, and learning to walk gently, so they would have the opportunity to grow up understanding and respecting groups of people whose cultures and race were not the same as ours.

My niece, from my husband’s side of the family, has three children adopted from Russia. Before she adopted we had long conversations about how her life would change if she decided to adopt transracially. While she was prepared to stretch herself wide enough to encompass a whole other set of cultural dynamics within her family, she also understood her limits.

Over the years I’ve watched her children prove to be sincerely interested in maintaining a connection to their ancestry. They warm to the simple rituals of Russian origin taking place within their family day after day, year after year. Details so small the casual observer might not recognize, but her children do, and it keeps them feeling connected to their Russian heritage. How did my niece know what to do? I think it was ingrained in her own Irish-Polish immigrant family ancestry, and it carries out in her life today in subtle ways she is not always even aware of.

What can adoptive parents do if they were raised without a sense of maintaining an ethnic heritage connection, yet they hope to teach their children to value and care about their birth culture?

The successful adoptive families I’ve known who built their own connections, one step at a time, understood that in order to have fun at culture camps, within language lessons, and on homeland journeys, the first step of the journey began at home. We can begin by grooming kids for the experience within tiny snatches of conversation, braided together in an afternoon here, and a day there in settings where dark skin is the majority and Asian eyes are the norm. It takes shape when sounds, flavors and scents—lime or plumeria, sesame or curry from your child’s birth country—memories that are locked into their bones, began to awaken. But we must be careful not to focus solely on the past and on how things were five hundred years ago. We don’t want our kids to get the idea this is what culture is all about. We don’t want them to view old world traditional celebrations as the only link to their birth culture because it makes staying connected impossible, unrelated to our children’s contemporary every-day selves. Remembering the past and claiming roots are important, yet what we want our kids to connect with is the present.

To begin preparing a child for heritage camp or a homeland journey, first we need to talk with them about what their birth country culture is like now, in current terms. About what it was probably like in the year when they left, and compare it to the traditional old world cultural ways usually highlighted in culture camps, and on motherland trips. If your kids are like mine you will need to say all of this within one or two paragraphs. Repeating yourself is permitted, because older people tend to do it. Which is how most kids view their parents, as old(er).

Be prepared for the seven core issues of adoption to surface—loss, rejection, guilt, shame, grief, intimacy and relations, and control issues. Birth parent thoughts will be present. Culture camp, language lessons, and homeland journeys stir up these feelings, and they also provide excellent avenues for our children to work through the seven core issues.

In order to have a successful and happy time away from home in an unfamiliar social and cultural setting, we must began preparing ahead of time, before we set off on the journey. It’s like preparing to lay stone tiles. First we must do the prep work before we can walk the path.

First published in the March 2011 issue of Adoption Today.
http://www.adoptinfo.net
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Thoughts on Adoption Motherhood, in Black, White and Technicolor

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

The Huffington Post

When my book was published a Beverly Hills based writer-friend, who also happens to be an adoptee with famous adoptive parents, offered to do a favor for me. Namely allow her publicist to stir up Hollywood celebrity adoptive parent publicity to pair with my memoir Pushing up the Sky. But I declined her offer.

What was the promotion that I decided not to embark on which promised to land my book a mention, which I was assured would result in an Amazon.com sales rank number lower than Jack Nicklaus golf score?

The plan was simple. All I would need to do was...
read more

GROWING UP NATIVE AMERICAN

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

Tomol Trek

California Indians Regathering a Tradition

Our classes are held outdoors under a bead-blue California sky. We work on a patch of green grass, an occasional hawk sweeping over with light shining through her rust red tail.

Back in 1997, when there was money available to be used for Indian education, the Santa Barbara County American Indian Education Project began the series “Tomol Trek.”After much hard work, the project put together an academy with federal (Title V) funding. Each year the academy had a different focus. In 1997 the year’s final outcome was aimed at producing a modern-day recreation of a traditional Chumash tomol. The children and teenagers attending ranged from elementary through high school. Many were Chumash, but the kids represented a variety of tribes, all with a common bond: every one of these kid’s lives in an area that made up the traditional Chumash homeland. We all hold the culture, traditions, and history of the Chumash people in our hands and in our hearts.

The tomol, a type of plank canoe, is unique to the Chumash. Tomols were used for trips between the islands and Chumash settlements. Originally they were about thirty feet long, and could hold four thousand pounds. Usually they carried six people but could hold up to twelve.

Our modern-day tomol was built by the children under the guidance of Peter Howorth, in his backyard tomol building workshop. There is a perfect balance between master and apprentice as the children sand pieces of the vessel throughout construction. A dozen hands move slowly across the handle, moving towards the paddle end of an oar. Small hands, young hands, skin so smooth and maroon, peach-colored hands, muted brown, every child with a tribal memory circling her or his heart.

A kind of palpable energy surrounds the tomol project. People seem to want to be a part of what’s going on. American Indian students from Cal Poly and UCLA arrive to volunteer support. Before I know it, I’m one of those helping out. The more I sand, the closer I am to the tomol. Sometimes I stop in the middle of the day and am silent in respect to the ancient peoples who left the witness of their lives, their visions, the strength of their faith for us to ponder.

My son Jay, is one of those kids helping out. He knows about the pleasure found in working hard, and seeing the good results of that work. As he sands the pieces of wood I watch him find his relationship with the plank canoe he is helping to create.

Our real goal is not only the finished tomol; it is also the season long process of working together. Still, everyone eagerly waits the day the vessel will be launched. When the maiden voyage takes place, within the harbor, there is only a small gathering of people. Before the “official” crewmembers begin their training we get to know the tomol. Her name is Alolkoy—dolphin in Chumash. She is twenty-five feet long, and made of redwood. Conditions in the harbor are ideal. The sun is warm; a soft, steady sea breeze blows at our backs. We fill sandbags for ballast, and then one at a time, we each have a turn sitting inside the tomol.

Alolkoy is much lighter than I ever imagined. Slowly I become one with her. I only have to “think” of shifting my weight left, and she responds almost before I even move. By the end of the day I understand we should not take photographs while we are with her, not yet anyway. First I watch someone drop a camera into the ocean, and then the back of my camera opens, exposing my film.

Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind, as it does for most Native people seeking to affirm cultural identity in a high-tech world. There is a comfort in being with those who understand. Our kids do not have to trade in their Indian values for education; the project carried ancient memory and cultural knowledge into their lives today.

First Published in the winter 1997 issue of News from Native California, An Inside View of the California Indian World.

Postscript

Some of the children who participated in the backyard building Tomol workshop, have grown up to become crewmembers and have made crossings from the mainland to Santa Cruz Island.

Read more in the article Full Circle: Chumash Cross Channel in Tomol to Santa Cruz Island by Roberta Cordero, member and co-founder of the Chumash Maritime Association.

Native American Heritage Month Braided with Thanksgiving: An American Indian Perspective

2012-01-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Wind, smelling of wood smoke rattles the yellow leaves off the peach tree. I adjust my glasses, button my coat. My son bounds from his classroom to greet me. Eyes filled with brown warmth, he peeks out from under a cap of shiny dark hair; it’s the kind of black that shines red in sunlight.

“Mom, something about this isn’t right.” He is holding a construction paper headdress fashioned with hot pink and purple feathers. I nod, and run my hand through his hair, pushing the bangs off his forehead. Out of the corner of my eye I see children clutching construction paper pilgrim hats. Read more...

Sometimes we are lucky enough to write a story on a topic we care deeply about and it goes viral.

My story, Native American Heritage Month Braided with Thanksgiving: An American Indian Perspective was first published as an invited guest essay at: Mothering Magazine

It was reprinted by River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

The University of Arizona Press

Indian Country Today

NAFCC Native American Fair Commerce Coalition

and in The Huffington Post

American Indians In Children's and YA Literature

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

A small boy walked over to a display of books in the library.

“Wait a minute.” He whispered to his mother, “I want to look at these Indian Books.” The boy’s eyes were blue luminous water as he thumbed through the pages of one book and then another. His mom came over to where we were standing and skimmed the row of books. “How about this one.” She said.

I tensed my shoulders and tightened my toes, she was holding a copy of The Education of Little Tree, a book I liked until I learned more about the author.

“Actually, that might not be the best choice.” I announced. (Prior to his literary career as "Forrest," Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent to the civil rights movement: he worked as a speechwriter for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama; founded the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC) and an independent Ku Klux Klan group; and started the pro-segregation monthly titled The Southerner).

“It isn’t? How do you know?” The boy and his mother eyeballed me up and down. I opened my mouth, closed it and cleared my throat. “Because I’m a writer.” I said. “And my mother is a Children’s Librarian, we’ve read lots of books and have studied the authors and their backgrounds—and we’re Indians.” I added.

Then I offered up my favorite online resources for reviewing children’s books by or about American Indians. Lucky for me this mother was delighted with my bold offer. She whipped a pen and pad of paper from her purse, wrote down the website addresses I gave her, which are the same ones I will share with you here.

I read all the time. I can’t remember ever not reading. Listen to my mother and you will hear tales about me in diapers with a book in my lap. The only goal I had for my children was for them to love reading as much as I do. And I’ve achieved that success. All three were avid readers while growing up. As adults each time they move to a new city the first thing they do is get a library card. They buy books from their local bookstores, write book reviews occasionally, and contribute to literary.

Reading shapes and changes us. When Native Americans are in children's and young adult literature, it can be difficult to know if the characters in the books are appropriately portrayed from a Native perspective. Equally important is to know about the author so that we can decide if we want that person to influence our children’s lives.

Suggested Reading
American Indian's In Children's Literature By Debbie Reese
Offering critical perspectives of indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books, the school curriculum, popular culture, and society.

OYATE
Oyate is a Native organization working to see that Native American lives and histories are portrayed honestly. Their site contains a link on “Books To Avoid” but rather than simply listing the inappropriate children's books, they give you guidelines and teach you how to evaluate the books so that you can judge for yourself.

Powwow Spirit: A Gathering of Tribes

2012-01-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Terra Trevor and Robert Villalobos

Powwow is a modern day word. All of the Elders I know tell me that before the First World War they were called gatherings. After the corn was all dried, pumpkins sliced and the wild plums brought in it was a time for giving thanks. When the food was together for the hard winter months and when the work was all done they gathered. After World War I these “gatherings” were held to honor those servicemen who came back. Today it is a reunion for many Native families, clans and tribes spread apart in different cities or reservations. There is the exchange of news, ideas, song, and dance, and it’s a time when Native people reflect on traditions.

Personal Reflection: I am gathered with friends and family under a bead blue California sky, my shawl is folded over my arm, and although we’ve been laughing and joking all afternoon, now we are quiet, silence is our conversation and it tells me more than words. We are careful to sit with our feet and knees a safe distance away from Eagle feathers and other peoples regalia. First there is a Ground Blessing, then the flag bearer’s lead in with the American flag, the state flag and an Eagle Staff. Next the Grand Entry; the dancers represent many different tribes. After all the dancers are in the Arbor a Flag Song is sung, a Prayer is offered, followed by a Victory Song. I feel the heartbeat of the drum. Hundreds of soft moccasins dancing, young men, women and girls Fancy Dancing, the Elders who barely move staying close to the earth.

The drum is one of the oldest memories an American Indian has, it has always been with us, and is the single most important element of a powwow. The dance arena or arbor is sacred and is respected, like the inside of a church. Many Native families travel hundreds of miles to attend powwows across the continent. Time and distance are not relevant; it is the renewal of traditions, which is of paramount importance. It brings a long heritage back into the framework of real life.

While growing up I was taught each person has her or his own personal observance for dancing, drumming, singing and for being present at a powwow. Native people gathered around the arena are not observing - we are participating as we form a circle around the drums, singers and dancers.

Visitors are welcome, but powwows are an Indian event and are usually not directed toward non-Indians. Listen carefully to the Master of Ceremonies; this is a time for utmost respect. If in doubt ask for instructions, and remember a powwow runs on Indian time, which means it will begin when all the drums and dancers are ready.

Ask before you photograph. It is polite to ask permission from the dancers before you take a picture if they are away from the arena. It is necessary to ask because some do not want to be photographed due to our longstanding traditional beliefs. No permission is needed for photos of the dancing inside the arena, except for the Southern Plains tradition of the Gourd Dance. This is a ceremonial dance done only by members of the warrior societies or those who have been invited in. Usually no photos can be taken of Gourd Dancing, although last weekend at our annual community powwow it was announced that it was OK to take photographs, so it is always best to pay careful attention to the Master of Ceremonies because the protocol can change from one powwow to the next.

If you are able, stand during the Grand Entry, Flag Songs and Invocation. And if you are lucky enough to be asked to dance the Two-step (a social dance) do not turn down an invitation by others, especially Elders.

"I began writing this story after being asked to explain the history and purpose to a group of school children and parents prior to attending their first powwow. But I was hesitant because it is such a great responsibility, yet I knew that I must begin, so that others can finish telling the story, so that the link of knowledge continues from person to person, from one generation to the next." —Terra

—Robert writes, “A gathering is full of many lessons, such as respect, honor, integrity, tradition, and passing on to future generations, and most importantly respect to the Elders. Many of today's youth would truly benefit from these traditions, which they may not be aware of or they may have forgotten.

I don't remember if it was my Grandmother who asked me to do this, but I'm sure it was. As a young child similar to my daughter's age I was asked to close my eyes and listen. I vividly remember the wonderful sound of the drums and then I was asked to visualize what it would have been like several hundred years ago. I was able to transcend myself to a time long ago, to the essential reason why many Indians where there to honor the past and be proud of our future. Some chose to do it in their own way such as become dancers and others chose to become drummers, and others were able to link to their great history in other ways. Each and every person was connected not just to the past and with the Elders, but was able to make a statement that we are still here. This is our celebration of life past, present and future.

I will leave you with a quote from my Grandmother,"If anyone has children, they better teach their children to follow traditions that we are leaving behind because it is later than we think with all that is going on." She stated this in an interview shortly before she passed away, I still find it amazing how true it still is today.”

First published at River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal.

Braiding Ribbons of Culture: Thoughts From an American Indian Mother of an Asian Son and Daughter

2012-01-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Go alone so you won’t receive any special privilege from being a white parent of Asian children.

Go alone often. Become the minority.

My friends were grappling with a question—when should they take their daughter to China? “Should we wait?” They queried. “Because she hasn’t started asking yet. Besides, fitting in with her friends is a high priority right now.”

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. I needed to choose my words carefully because I knew my friends were uncomfortable with the topic of race. But there was no way of softening what I needed to tell them. If some of those in her friendship circle were Hispanic, or mixed race, or Asian, or if some were Asian adoptees, she would be trying to fit in with those kids too.

My friends sought occasions to hopefully keep their daughter linked to Chinese culture. Dim Sum at Sam Woo restaurant where everyone spoke Mandarin and Cantonese. They attended heritage camp, New Year celebrations and then months went by without any connection to the Asian community. While I adore this family, the truth is, they placed Chinese culture on a pedestal, saved for holidays and did not embrace it with intimacy. It’s not because they don’t want to. With little racial diversity in their day-to-day world, they didn’t know how to normalize culture.

Ethnicity, which is a dimension of racial and cultural identity, was a mystery to them. Without a firm grasp on what ethnicity is and how to claim it, my friends saw old world traditional Chinese celebrations as their only cultural link, and it made staying connected impossible, unrelated to their contemporary every-day selves, so naturally interest decreased, as their daughter grew older.

Normalizing culture comes from being around Chinese, or Korean, or Native American people on a frequent basis and sharing the same blueprint of beliefs and identities and doing regular everyday things together and sharing common interests. It’s an inheritance of ideas and attitudes conveyed from family or the people we choose to become friends with, and invite into our home. Yet for some reason my friends thought they must wait for permission from their daughter before beginning to live a racially diverse lifestyle. They have also opened their hearts and gave me permission to tell this story.

With the majority of transracial adoptees adopted into white families, in this setting, it’s little wonder cultural and racial identity are often perceived not from the point of view of America’s ethnic perspective, and certainly not from a Native perspective, but from a pan-Caucasian point of view.

ALL families benefit from racial diversity. Yet too many adoptive parents minimize the importance of race. Living racially diverse is as important as a good education, because it is an education.

But what if your child is ten, or fifteen and you have already raised them in a mostly Caucasian, or some other type of racially isolated environment. Now what?

Step out of your comfort zone. Look your kid in the eye and say, “It’s not easy being a parent. There are many things to learn. I’ve done my best, but I made a mistake. We are a mixed race family and we need to start making some changes.”

If your children have been coached to feel safest within the confines of a Caucasian boundary they will probably be afraid of change, just like we adults sometimes are. Wherever you are right now is a good place to begin. Any age is the right time to embark on a homeland journey.

By all means do travel to your childs country of birth. But before you run out and get passports, remember, we don’t have to leave home (at least not right away) to find a pathway to a child’s birth culture. Where ever you are currently living is probably filled with opportunities waiting to be explored.

If children are of Korean or Cambodian ethnicity it’s crucial to till a love of Korean or Cambodian people, except we don’t always have local access. Any Asian community is a good place to begin.

Begin your journey without your child. Yep, leave your kids at home with a babysitter. This day is for parents only. Why? If you make cultural connections for your child’s sake you won’t be genuine. You must do it for yourself to be authentic, otherwise your children will not benefit. The difference between embracing and exploiting a culture is when we are authentic we feel ethnicity in our heart.

Go alone so you won’t receive any special privilege from being a white parent of Asian children. Go alone often. Become the minority.

The goal isn’t to pack up and move to Koreatown or a totally Asian community. The neighborhood you live in is already your home. And certainly no one will expect you to become a Chinese or Korean family, nor should you try to be. This is meant to give you insight. Mainstream white culture will not look at your children and see adopted Korean or Chinese. They will only see Asian. Who knows, maybe some of the faces you saw on the streets while you toured the town belonged to adoptees.

On the drive home become a tourist in your own town. View your surroundings with new eyes. Get off your beaten path. Switch to a mixed race church or do whatever it takes so that your family will have the likelihood of meeting people of a variety of races. One friendship will lead to another, and take you where you need to go.

If you live in a college town contact the campus Equal Opportunity Program. Locate the president of the Chinese, Filipino (or whichever) Student Association. My experience is students are both willing and eager to help us connect. Ethnic cultures have a strong sense of belonging, and volunteerism is the backbone of the community. When your childs ethnic group reaches out to you, make friends, volunteer your time, and give back.

While the slant for KAAN is Korean American, Adoptee, Adoptive Families, its mission is transferable to any ethnicity, and the annual conference is a valuable resource for all Asian adoptees and their families. Let yourself listen to what adult adoptees have to say. They are our future elders.

Participation in a family-style heritage camp allows us to regather tradition, and lucky are the children, parents and ethnic communities who draw together in this clan. At age thirteen my daughter grumbled. But at age 30 she remembered loving heritage camp. In my mind heritage camp is the exception, a time when the adoption community must divide, like Native Americans. (We belong first to our separate tribes and nations, yet we band together as a collective of American Indians). Heritage Camp is cultural revival and offers a glimpse into why Native people revere a powwow.

It’s a false notion to believe our children will ask us to lead them into matters of racial and cultural concern. We parents must provide direction. Moving away from our comfort zone and blazing a trail suited for a mixed race adoptive family often rocks our old self-identity. Yet letting go of values that no longer serve us, and allowing our children to explore and claim their racial ethnicity is one of the most important things we can do.

First published in the July 2006 issue of Adoption Today Magazine.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

To Say Mother. Adoption Community Labels and Language

2012-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

The word mother is a slippery concept within the adoption community, and one that leaves me often wondering where I fit in.

Oh, just call me a mother. Because I was once a first mother, briefly. I was an adoptive mother for 14 years, and I’m the mother of a child I gave birth to and raised to adulthood.

I hold close to my heart first mothers. My mom was 15 when she was pregnant with me, and I was once a pregnant teenager with a baby to be surrendered for adoption, but the baby did not grow to full term. I hold close to my heart adoptive mothers because for 14 years I was an adoptive mother to a son, and the only reason I’m not still his mother is because he died. And for 8 years I was an adoptive mother to a daughter adopted at an older age, who decided she did not want to be adopted. Which is why I hold adoptees who have had hard, hard journeys close to my heart.

They say that the oldest child has the worst of it in most families, suffering from all the mistakes his or her parents don’t have enough experience to avoid. It struck me in later years when the mission was completed that my oldest daughter had two rookie mothers to contend with; the mom she had for the first 10 years of her life, and then she had to start out all over again with me for those last 8 years. While I was busy planning out the kind of life I hoped we would lead, she had her own hopes and her own dreams. This is yet another reason why I wish more adoptive parents would show more respect, more compassion, both on the internet and in person, to adoptees who have reasons to hold strong opinions. Because after all, what if their child grows up and has something he or she wants to voice. Won’t those parents someday want their own adult son or daughter to be spoken to kindly, treated with benevolence.

Meanwhile, no matter which motherhood label is used to describe us, the one common thread that is embedded in all of us, in first mothers, in adoptive mothers, and in all mothers worldwide, is that we want our sons and daughters, the ones we gave birth to, or have raised, to be treated with kindness.The thing is, the word mother is an identifier best describing the sacred clan of us who link our own personal identity and have journeyed into the realm of motherhood in one form or another. It is made up of women whose children live within our current lives, or are alive within our heart.

Back In Those Days, in Korea

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time in 1998, my then fourteen-year-old son and I had the good fortune to be the guest of honor at a neighborhood gathering in Cho'nan, in ChungChongNamDo province in Korea. My son was born in South Korea and I adopted him when he was one-year old, and it was his first time back. Because he had been diagnosed with cancer at age seven, much of his life he had been too sick to travel.

But he was finally healthy again and eager to meet the land of his birth.

The summer of 1998, according to the neighbors in Chonan, was the hottest in recent memory. The family we were staying with didn't speak English. Thirty seconds into our week long home stay visit the neighbor women began to arrive, all with children in tow. Round-faced women, apron-bound, carried pots of ice-cold shikye sweet rice drink, platters of pindaettok mung bean pancakes garnished with green leaves of chrysanthemum and red pepper slices. We were in a tenth floor apartment, large, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, marble floors and spotlessly clean.

Low tables were pulled out, one for the children and another for the women. Everybody sat cross-legged, loose-limbed, all but me. I on the other hand, had one knee propped up like an old bent apple tree. The meal was communal with all of us dipping our chopsticks into the same bowls.

After we finished eating, over at the kids’ table, I watched Jay throwing himself into a game of Mancala. Undaunted, Jay taught the group how to play the game. We brought the Mancala game as a gift to our host family, and immediately it was a huge success. The children, communicating only in grunts and shrieks, played for hours.

The afternoon sunlight glimmered from the window and changed from goldenrod to a rosy red sunset while the neighbor women laughed and chatted.

I smiled and nodded my head. This was partly to draw attention away from my lack of verbal abilities. After two years of Korean language school I knew only nouns and verbs. There were benefits, I'd discovered, of abstaining from speech. It gave me time to draw in the raw powerful language that flowed so freely from these women.

Birthed from Scorched Hearts

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

On a crisp December morning in 1984 under a bright blue sky in Seoul, Korea, a wide-eyed baby was readied to leave his homeland. Dressed in a pink bunting to keep out the winter chill, one-year-old Jay Kook Yung was carried aboard Korean Airlines, and he set off for a new life; adoption in the United States. When the plane landed at Los Angeles International airport Jay was placed in my arms and he became my son.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story begins in 1953, shortly after I was born when the end of the Korean War set the course of my life, because the ending of the war signaled the beginning of inter-country adoption of Korean-born children. After the war everything changed. Within a country with a long-standing national tradition of pure blood lineage, shared ethnic identity and culture, suddenly there were mass numbers of orphaned children. Many of these babies and children were mixed race, and were introduced to a largely unwelcoming homogenous Korea. Single mothers were shunned. Crowded orphanages operating with scarce resources were unable to accommodate the high numbers of orphans. In response, South Korea turned to alternatives to find a solution. Korean adoption was born officially in 1954.

Today a growing number of families in Korea have begun to adopt and the country is hoping to eventually eliminate the need for adoption outside the country. (Yes, the Korean people do adopt, I know this because I was invited to speak on a panel comprised of four American adoptive mothers and four Korean Nationals who are adoptive mothers, at the 2006 KAAN Conference held in Seoul) Yet in 1984 when I adopted my son Korea was a nation still struggling to come into it’s own.

I had a profound knowing-feeling when the telephone rang the day we received Jay’s adoption referral. I was outside watering sprouting morning glories, and before I answered the phone I knew it would be the adoption agency telling me about my soon-to-be child. The first time I held Jay immediately I understood something was far beyond ordinary about him. He was calm and centered in a way that let you know he possessed a great amount of wisdom; his presence made skeptics believe in angels.

I didn’t know on that first day that my son’s perfect life circle would be small, and that I was being called for the highest motherhood duty. Yet if I had it to do over again I wouldn’t change a thing. The amount of joy Jay brought me outweighs anything else, and has made me whole.
--A page from Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War (Fulcrum Publishing)

A while back author MariJo Moore contacted me about an anthology she was putting together, a gathering of women's voices about war, and asked if she could include a selection from my memoir Pushing up the Sky (KAAN 2006)

I'm honored to announce the chapter “Fall, 1998” pages 179 -195 in Pushing up the Sky, along with a new introduction, now shares company in Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War edited by MariJo Moore, which includes work by an impressive tapestry of women's voices.

Award-winning author MariJo Moore, asked women writers from around the world to consider the devastating nature of conflict—inner wars, outer wars, public battles, and personal losses and battles on the homefront. Their answers, in the form of poignant poetry and essays, examine war in all its permutations, from Ireland to Iraq and everywhere in between. With contributions from both well-known authors including Paula Gunn Allen, Lee Maracle, Linda Hogan and numerous others, this moving anthology encompasses a wide range of voices.

Walking Gently This Good Earth

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

The sand slips softly under my feet. My search for outward simplicity. The sea is wild. And my mind is centered on motherhood. All mothers everywhere with one simple goal, to care for our children.

I feel connected in the great circle of mothers, and of those mothers who have gone before me.

My great-great grandma gave birth to eleven babies. The first died at four months, the second at age eight. It went on like that for years, grandma giving birth and grandpa making babyboards, digging holes and lowering those dead babies into the ground. Five of her children lived, but then Willie died at age 19. It was a time of measles and smallpox epidemic for Indian people. After my son died my mind glimpsed my great-great grandma. I felt a distant memory pulling me back, and I could hear her wailing like wind coming up, crying and swaying. I thought about how her cries probably drifted into the cabins of nearby white settlers, and I wondered if they knew the high, shrill sounds pressing against the night were from an Indian mother mourning her dead baby.

-An excerpt from my memoir Pushing up the Sky

Jay Trevor, November 29, 1983 - March 11, 1999
I think about Jay's first mother. She give birth to him and I held him in my arms at age 15 when he crossed over to the other side into the spirit world.

Not my planting, but my harvest, my child, our child. And like a river stone tumbling in the raging water, my grief has grown softer over the years, and I found gold and grace along the way, but I had to reach for it.

Our family always does something special on the day Jay's soul returned home, to honor life and celebrate being alive on earth and to pay honor to the spirit world.

Grieving is hard work and we've had plenty of those years behind us. So now we also try to be a little bit silly and playful. We treat ourselves and each other with extra kindness. We give each other special treats and call them "alive gifts." We came up with the idea back when our youngest daughter was 17, shortly after her brother died, and we were shopping and she wanted a pair of red satin pants. I kept saying that they were not practical and where would you wear them.

And she said, "But Mom, I'm alive! I could wear them anywhere just because I'm here on earth."

It made us burst into laughter and tears steamed down our face, and we bought her the pants. And every year since we've made a point of buying each other something fun and a little bit unnecessary. Most of all we have fun together, just the way my son would have loved it to be.

For the first few years after my son died I felt very private in the month of March and reclusive. But now I feel a change coming on, and I'm stepping out of my old ways and into the new. I'm celebrating life!

When A Child Dies

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Living With Loss, Healing With Hope

Following my 15-year-old son’s death, my plans for parenthood sat like scenery on an empty stage. I needed to come up with a new life for myself. But how could I choose a destiny when I couldn’t even buy a new sweater without exchanging it twice before deciding on a color and the right fit. I was starting my life over from scratch, and I was terrified of making decisions, even little ones. I didn’t think I would ever care about anything ever again. My mind felt glued shut, and my heart was beginning to feel like it was laminated, sealed in plastic to keep out further pain.

Then I had a soul bleaching moment when I understood that I didn’t want to stay closed up and hollow feeling forever. There had to be a way to allow myself the space and years to grieve deep and fully and feel every ounce of the pain and yet continue to walk forward.

My son and youngest child, the pole star of my life— had passed. I would never get over it. Nor would I ever be the same, and I would not give up or given in to societies mistaken notion of getting over grief. I would find a way to learn to live with it and not allow it to hold me back.
Read more

Understanding and Challenging White Culture

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

In her article Carefully Taught Jen Helzinger asks, "Do other white adoptive parents with kids of color think about how white privilege might play into their family relationships as our families grow and mature? Are others as confused about this as I have been? It helps me (and maybe other white people) to think about our experiences with race as real. To think about white culture as real. To reflect on our own upbringing and the fact that we were carefully taught how to be white and how to succeed in white culture and that this is not a race-neutral event."

“My husband remembers how uncomfortable he felt when he first met me and found himself the only white man among American Indians.” Terra Trevor explains. “I spent my growing up years in a mixed race neighborhood in Los Angeles, and my husband had grown up in an all-white community. Blending our lives allowed us to realize we each needed to give ourselves the opportunity to be in frequent situations where we would be in the minority race and culture. Understand white culture carries the dominant influence, and has a long history of forcing assimilation, expecting its members, and everyone else, to assume its values. It demands immigrants and people of color to give up their ethnicity and take on white culture expectations.

While those who are white cannot ever know what it feels like to be a person of color, they can choose to live diversely, allow themselves the freedom to ingest the beliefs that shape the perceptions of groups of people whose racial heritage is not the same as their own. "

But is questioning white culture important only for transracial families?

I believe ALL people and all families benefit from a wide scope of ethnic and racial diversity. When we spend most of our time in wholly white enclaves with little or no access to mingle within ethnic communities, or are too threatened by its values to explore it further, we are coached to feel safest within the confines of a Caucasian boundary, and then we develop all sorts of silly notions that will keep us locked even further away.

Life is not orderly. It’s a bit scary at first to traverse into unexplored racially diverse territory, but it’s not impossible. Wherever we are is a good place to begin, starting in this moment— stretch."

Understanding and Challenging White Culture for the Benefit of the Adoptive Family

Presented at the

KAAN 2011 Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
A panel of three individuals who have been moving forward on their journeys to understand issues around white culture and white privilege shared their perspectives and engaged the audience in a thoughtful, respectful discussion.

One presenter (Jen Helzinger) is a white mother whose children are from South Korea, China, and the United States, and who has been working to bridge communities for years.

Another is a mother (Terra Trevor) who has raised children born both in South Korea and in the United States, and whose blended heritage (white and Native American) has given her unique perspectives on race and white privilege.

And the third presenter (Mark Hagland) is a father and an adult adoptee who came to the U.S. in the first wave of trans-racial, international adoptees, and whose life experience has been shaped by growing up with white parents in the dominant white culture, but with an Asian face.

All three have had extraordinary experiences and led a multi-layered audience discussion. This session was intended to give safe space for participants to consider how whites are taught to be white as well as root out those pieces of white culture that no longer fit within the transracial adoptive family.

Racism: Memories of a Former Kid

2012-01-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

First Firefly -
This morning I woke up thinking about my cousin Debbie. We are both mixed bloods; American Indian born and raised. She is one eighth. I’m a quarter. When we were teenagers, I wanted to look like her, full Cherokee. Especially on that July day. While I held in my stomach, wearing a one piece, she ate fry bread wearing that brown string bikini, tan skinned and thin, like a Pocahontas Barbie.
She leaned over and whispered that Richard Rustywire asked her to go steady. I had my eye on Johnny Drinkingwater.

Later that afternoon, after we left the pool that everyone called the Plunge, Debbie and some of the others went in to town, while I went back to her house where I was staying and sat on the porch swing, reading, waiting for a cool breeze and the full moon to rise. But before that happened I saw white beads of light, flashing off and on all over the yard. And it was the way I always wanted to remember a summer night—the night of my first firefly, and my first kiss.

While I was sitting on the porch reading Donny came over. I’d had my eye on him all afternoon too. Donny he kissed me under a bead blue sky, behind Auntie’s clothesline, between the sheets. We stood barefoot, toes touching, arms entwined. His eyes searching mine, while his blond hair blew across my face. His voice cracked when he asked, “Is this the first time you’ve been kissed?" As we stood together under a spirit sky, with purple violets blooming in my mind, I answered “No.” But I was thinking “Yes.” Because the kiss I gave to the one who lost interest in me, didn’t count after he realized I was an Indian girl.

In a sorrow-filled voice his sister said, “I don’t know why, but my brother only goes out with white girls.” But her brother wasn’t white and I wasn’t white enough for him; me- a high yellow girl with light brown hair that shined blonde in sunlight. So the way I saw it was that I was starting out again, and this time, this boy knew I was an Indian girl, and he wasn’t disappointed or impressed and in that malachite moment Donny was just kissing ME.

For Donny

September 5, 1952 ~ June 12, 2008
Thank you for sweet memories

(Part 2) Racism: Memories of a Former Kid

The ones who go around looking for and collecting experiences, and are impressed by what you are, those are the ones you have to watch out for. I know because after they broke up, Loren’s ex-girlfriend went around telling her friends that she hooked up with him in order to have an Asian experience. Can you imagine? She was bragging about having yellow fever. It is never a good sign when the words exotic and oriental are delivered meant as a compliment. That word. Oriental. Except Loren was half Asian and half white, so what she really got was a Hapa experience. Only this girl wouldn’t get it even if you told her. Loren got it, and it made him feel really bad.

I’ve known of boys with Indian princess fever too. At slumber parties my cousin Debbie and my friend Marie use to tell the stories, and we girls laughed and made fun of those boys. But late at night when it’s hard to get back to sleep, that’s when it’s hard not to cry. Especially after Jinny told me her story. She was adopted from Korea and grew up in an all-white family, in an all-white community. She said that she pretty much always felt accepted and basically thought of herself as white. But in her freshman year in college everything changed. She said that she went to some on-campus gathering and the minute she walked in the door another student took one look at her and he said,“We don’t want any #%&@-ing chink here.” The words are so horrible I almost can not bear to write them. But I also don't want anyone to ignore the fact that this kind of stuff happens all the time.

There are some people who believe that racism isn’t a problem anymore. Though any kid who isn’t white knows that this is not true.
Race matters. The problem is it matters most in those moments when we wish it didn’t matter at all.

An All-American Korean American 4th of July

2012-01-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

An armload of bulgogi covers the grill and a circle of friends surround the barbecue. Everyone has a pair of chopsticks in hand and turn slices of the sizzling beef. A picnic table is laden with platters of pindaettok, mandu, heaping bowls of kimchi, chap chae, and romaine lettuce leaves with red bean sauce for dipping. There is plenty of sliced watermelon of course, and three rice cookers stand ready in a row.

There is laughter around the table. After another helping of dry cuttle fish, after we eat as much food as we can hold, we find a grassy spot under a shade tree, pull out a folk guitar, stretch back on the grass, and sing. The familiar melody has me humming along, while the group sings the lyrics in Korean. Most of the time I forget that my husband, our youngest daughter and I are the only ones who are not Korean. At these gatherings all my friends are Korean American, like two of my children. The afternoon leaves me with a contented feeling, a sense of belonging, like I have when I go to a family reunion.

However, my friends within the Korean community didn’t feel like family in the beginning, way back when we began attending a Korean church in 1987, when my kids were then four, six and ten. I needed to reach deep with faith, because in giving my kids the opportunity to grow up within an all-Asian group I also had to let go of them a little bit in order to allow them to find their place within the Korean community and to learn to identify and express themselves as Korean adoptees, instead of tying to fit into the stereotypical Korean model everyone expected them to be.

I’ve heard adoptive parents say they want the Korean American community to accept their family on the adoptive parents terms and not to absorb their kids. They don’t want them to take over. I’ve never felt this way. I wanted my children to have the same opportunity to be immersed in the Korean community and discover their identity, as I did growing up mixed blood Native American within Indian country. The difference is Korean culture was initially unfamiliar to me. We were making new friends and I was allowing them to take my children into a world unknown to me.

I remember my grandmother’s words. “Child,” she said, “We’re Indians, and our Cherokee, Delaware and Seneca culture has been scattered into odds and bits, yet Indian people are determined to keep our life ways alive.”

I wanted to give my kids what was given to me, to make it possible for them to gather bits and pieces of Korean culture and braid it into our lives, and show them how to hold their heritage high.

While my son and my oldest daughter explored the constantly evolving questions of what it means to be Korean American, and my younger daughter who is Cherokee, Delaware, Seneca and Irish, grew increasingly more diverse, my husband and I sank in roots and worked to build lasting relationships and to let our new friends know that our interest in doing so was heartfelt. Over the past 25 years our Korean community gatherings has provided me with some of the deepest sharing I’ve ever known.

At the picnic we rest just long enough for our food to settle, and then it is time to play games. There are sack races, three-legged races, a water balloon toss, followed by a scavenger hunt. Everyone plays, the grandmas and grandpas, even babies are encouraged to join in, and there is always someone willing to lend a helping hand.

I find it wildly wonderful that fancy equipment is not needed for our game playing. We have a ball, a blindfold, two gunnysacks, and we have each other. Just people enjoying one another, a day of slowing down and relaxing at the park, it’s not always an easy thing to find.

Welcome Home: Our Older Child Adoption

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

A page from Realistic Expectations: The First Year Home, EMK Press
When our son became a member of our family he was too young to be considered an older child adoption, but he wasn’t so young that he didn’t understand the concept of ownership of possessions, and he made known the things he liked and disliked. The first thing he let us know was that he liked his sister’s collection of toy cars. And she wanted her new brother to hand over the teddy bears friends bestowed on him celebrating his homecoming, and arrival into our family.

It was the kind of sibling rivalry that fell well within the bounds of average kid behavior. Unfortunately their eventual willingness to meld their belongings into one assemblage did little to prepare me for the day, three years later, when our third child joined our family through adoption at age ten.

She walked through the door taking stock, counting shoes in the closet, books on the shelves, the kids hodgepodge artwork scattered around the house, and the seashells on the back porch, wanting to know which belonged to whom and how many did they have.

Most of the time I’m not wise and filled with insight, but on this day I was. When another child is brought into the family, he or she is suddenly the new piece of an already established unit. My insight kicked in when it occurred to me I could help her create a history within our family beginning immediately.

After lunch we went outside and searched the yard and found a round, smooth stone and a feather that would become hers, and we placed them in the basket alongside the seashells. Her face lit with a hundred watt grin.

Next she scanned the plastic picnic cups requesting the yellow one, and wanted to know if I had another Oatmeal box that she could decorate with purple tissue paper and gold beads—like the other kids had.

Then with intelligent, worried eyes she demanded to know why was there only one photograph of her on the refrigerator door, and how come there were lots of pictures of her newly acquired brother and sister?

That’s when another flash of insight spoke to me. For adoption-expanded families family photos carry more messages and meaning than for those outside adoption. Family photographs are deemed synonymous with family ties, a shared history, and belonging together. For most children who have lost their birth families, and have lived in multiple orphanages and foster homes the word forever when it comes to family is meaningless.

We must start from scratch and do the best we can to provide our kids with a well documented portrayal of life with us that they can then look back on weeks, months and years from now. If we are lucky enough to have first/birth parent, and foster family photos or other items, it is important to include them.

On our daughter’s first day home with us we shot three rolls of film, capturing her posed on her new bed, holding the cat, with the dog, all three kids sandwiched on the porch swing, and all of us grouped together as a family.

The next morning we had the film developed, and when our new daughter thumbed through the stack of glossy photos, she breathed a deep contented sigh from the core of her being. Her place in our family was no longer invisible; the photos we now had somehow compensated for those we did not.

With our third child we had missed out on her first early years but had arrived in time to preserve what was left of her childhood. We charted a plan: We vowed to keep a camera loaded with film in the house at all times, and became tourists within our own home. We let the kids snap pictures of us first thing in the morning, with messy hair and coffee cups in hand, and I photographed all three kids daily until they broke into fits of giggles and begged me to stop.

Another idea to help begin the process of family bonding took shape when I decided to make extra copies of each photo, and got out a stack of old magazines, and invited the kids to make a collage, pasting our photographs into the design and preserving a moment solid as a monument.

When my husband came into the room, the children crowded around their dad. “Check it out!” Our newest daughter squealed, “Everybody’s in the pictures and we all helped make this, even me.”

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

This story appeared in the July 2007 issue of Adoption Today Magazine

Reprinted in Realistic Expectations: The First Year Home, EMK Press.
Click here for information on how to download this e book.

Surprise (The Homestudy, With A Humorist Twist)

2012-01-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

It was one of those days. A heavy July fog had rolled in, and I couldn't wait for the work day to end so I could change my clothes. When I got home, I was so tired, I decided just to put on my bathrobe, instead.

After dinner, my husband sliced watermelon. It was my turn to wash the dishes. What could it possibly hurt, I thought, if I let the dishes sit on the table, just for a while? We generally kept our house clean, yet on this day the rest of the house was a mess—sandy beach towels, a picnic basket, and a cooler from a pleasure-filled weekend were strewn in the hall, so I decided to let the kitchen go, too. What I really wanted to do was read my book.

While I was relaxing in the untidy living room, my nose deep in my book, the doorbell rang. My husband answered the door.

“I’m from the adoption agency,” a male voice said. “I live a few blocks from here, and thought I’d drop by on my way home from work and meet you.”

I lurched bolt upright. The wood floor felt gritty beneath my bare feet... Read more

새해 복 많이 받으세요 Korean New Year, With An American Indian Twist

2012-01-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

It’s part family reunion, part cultural revival. Our friends remove their shoes at the door. Sounds overlap in layers. The song Arriang and talking and laughter mixed with the clicking of sticks from the game Yut. We’re celebrating Solnal—the first day of the first month by the lunar calendar.

Most people think of this as Chinese New Year, but Koreans celebrate as well.

My hall table is piled high with wrapped packages, inexpensive items purchased at the dollar store for that long-standing tradition of giving a gift to each guest. The scent of garlic and sesame hang in the air like a spicy fog. I slide a baking sheet with dried seaweed out of the oven and spread sesame oil across the envelope-sized pieces.

“You are supposed to put the sesame oil on before you put it in the oven,” my friend Jung Hee gasps. She pops a piece into her mouth. “Doesn’t matter, it tastes good.”

“The rice isn’t cooking,” I complain.

Two very old Elders; grandmothers with small wrinkled faces strain the excess water and get the massive rice cooker I've borrowed from the Korean church to cook a perfect pot of rice.

I pull out a large pan filled with chop chae. “Is this all right?” I ask.

I always feel a tiny bit worried when I cook Korean food for my Korean American friends. I hand a pair of thin stainless steel chopsticks to one of the grandmothers. She tastes a bite, and nods her head in approval. Duk kuk, the special soup made with rice cakes, simmers on my stove.

A group of teenage girls are gossiping in the back bedroom, while the boys play video games in the den. It’s OK. They are soaking up Korean culture by osmosis.

Meanwhile in the living room more game playing begins. Our silliest game is the javelin. We write our names on wooden chopsticks, stand behind a line, and toss them. Prizes (the wrapped packages from the dollar store) are given to everyone. Koreans, I’ve discovered, like Native Americans, love to gamble, so we always include a lively jest of Fifty/Fifty pulled from my own American Indian culture.

A treasured tradition of Korean Lunar New Year is getting new clothes; a traditional Korean hanbok. Wearing a hanbok the children line up, and one by one offer a sebe—a bow to elders, which is the first greeting to the elders of the year.

Our elder-friends gathered, all with high-cheek rounded faces, are our family and Korean and Native community friends. Gloria, wearing her turquoise beaded ear-rings, the pair she beaded last summer that play against her dancing eyes, is the first elder in the line and the littlest boys and girls began trotting up to her, and one by one they bend into a deep bow.

Each child who bows receives a red envelope containing a small amount of “lucky money.”

The word “money” draws the first teenage boy out of the den. He folds his lanky body into a bow with his nose touching the ground, and becomes an instant hero. The laughter draws out the teenage girls.

Throughout the evening my kid’s outgrown hanboks are worn by my friends’ children. Each year they become more stained and frayed from years of bending and bowing. Yet I treasure the memory more this way than if I’d kept them pressed clean in plastic on the top shelf of the closet.

Fiery in spirit and flamboyant, the kids swirl around the living room, their slightly oversized scarlet and fuchsia hanboks rippling, with rainbow sleeves shimmering in the light. My son joins the pageant, and slides around the dining room in his stocking feet. He has a smirk on his face and yet he is glowing and beaming with pride.

We try to prepare the food as authentically Korean as we can, and I will drive an hour in cross-town traffic to get mung beans to make pindaettok. To keep the doings simple we ask each family invited to bring a panchan—a Korean side dish. My husband prepares an elaborate fish dish, and since it’s not a meal without rice and soup we provide that too.

Remembrance weighs heavy on my mind, as it does for all American Indian mothers seeking to affirm cultural identity. So when our family first began embracing Korean ethnicity and braiding it into our lives, way back in 1990, we were careful to stay well within old-style traditional cultural boundaries. However, after making numerous close friendships with those in the Korean American community, I quickly discovered it’s all right to play with various ways of celebrating, and put a modern day personal spin on the holiday. What’s important is to create rituals of intimate gathering with family and friends, sharing a Korean meal and good times together, so that our children will grow up holding a piece of Korean tradition in their hands and in their hearts.

When our kids were teenagers and the idea of hanging out at home was no longer at the top of their list of fun things to do on a Saturday night, we suggested they each invite a friend, or two or three, and our guest list grew.

One year, while caught in the throes of a winter season requiring my unremitting attention, I asked my kids, “Couldn’t we make do with a smaller party this year?”

All three gasped at once and said “But we like the big party.” My son chimed in, “Didn’t you know— it’s our favorite holiday.”

My attempt to peal back the layers and discover what this lunar new year gathering actually meant to him was brushed aside in a typical teenager manner. Then a kind of palpable energy hovered in his husky voice, "It just makes me happy, Mom, that's all."

saehae bok manhi badeuseyo Happy New Year!

새해 복 많이 받으세요

Baby Steps

2012-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

It was the end of a perfect weekend. Before my oldest daughter began the nine hour drive home to her own house, she said, “I’ve got a big favor to ask—can you take my clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer? I’ve got a last minute errand I need to run, do you mind?”

Sorting through the tangle of jeans and underwear reminds me of the day I met my daughter for the first time. We adopted her from Korea in 1987, when she was ten-years-old; a live-wire pixie with flashing almond eyes and a deep belly laugh. There was an unsettling side to her too— a flash fire sense of mistrust that kept her heart sealed in plastic, and didn’t allow her to get close to anyone.

The only clothes she had were the ones she came wearing. The first night home she pulled off her jeans and threw them into the dirty clothes hamper. I’d planned to take her shopping the next day to begin to assemble a wardrobe. Yet because she would need something clean to wear in the morning I decided to wash her clothes. Before I put her jeans and T-shirt into the washing machine, I held the little knit shirt she had said good-bye to Korea in, had traveled across the world wearing. It was steamy and smelled sweetly of sesame, ginger and garlic. The fragrance of the country, and the people she left behind were melded into the fabric.

Now, all these years later, folding my daughter's laundry reminds me that she is still out of reach to me, like the brass ring on the merry-go-round that I was always trying to catch. By the time she was twelve, she began doing all of her own laundry. While her sister and brother complained about having to wash their own clothes and mopped the floor with paper towels after overfilling the machine, this child welcomed laundry. She sailed through washing, drying, and folding without my assistance. There are drawbacks to adopting a half-grown, independent, competent child, it meant she allowed me few opportunities to mother her. Then at age eighteen, after only eight years together, my daughter moved out on her own. Though we talk on the phone often, I never lived with her again.

I sit cross-legged on the floor, with the pile of my daughter’s clean clothes in my lap, sorting through its treasures as if stories could be released from inside and tossed out. I stroke her sweater, the same pale green as good jade. I brush its silky knit with my fingertips. I breathe in the textures and colors of her clothes as if I am reading the words in a diary, trying to get to know my daughter who is filled with secrets and privacy.

When my other kids come home to visit, they spill the contents of their pockets onto the floor, leave a trail of gas receipts and sales slips on the counter, a residue, an update, journalizing their lives. But she keeps everything inside her suitcase, locked tight beside her vulnerability. I don’t know anything about her except the things she chose to tell me.

All of a sudden I wish that something of hers remained unwashed. And then I see the pillow, and rumpled blankets on the bed. I bury my face in the sheets, inhale the scent of her perfume, deodorant and perspiration. She is my daughter, and I am her mother, yet in some ways we are still just starting out.

Terra Trevor is the author of the memoir Pushing up the Sky: A Mother’s Story (KAAN), from which a portion of this article is excerpted.

The Dog Who Came To Stay

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

We’ve always had dogs, but we were a one-dog-at-a-time, family. Then shortly after adopting our third child, who came to us at age ten, I found myself face to face with a puppy in need of an owner and a family to call her own.

“I’m not sure if I’m ready for another dog,” I whispered to the friend who had set up the arranged meeting.

Then I followed the pup around the yard. The day was bright and sunny with the faint colors of autumn emerging in the scrub oak. It began to dawn on me that I was delighted. She was perfect, a mixed breed, calm, and going to be big. Her exact age was unknown, yet by the way she suckled my finger I guessed her to be about six weeks old. I cradled the puppy and nuzzled her soft neck. I felt her heart thumping, her breath quick and marvelous.

Although this was not something I’d planned for thankfully serendipity intervened, because the addition of another dog to our household proved to be an ideal avenue to help our newest child merge into our family.

When another child is brought into the family, especially a child who is adopted at an older age, he or she is suddenly the new piece of an already established unit. On her first day home with us our new daughter walked through the front door taking stock, counting shoes in the closet, books on the shelves, the kids hodgepodge artwork scattered around the house, and the seashells on the back porch, wanting to know which belonged to whom and how many did they each have.

Next she scanned the cups in the kitchen cupboard requesting the yellow one, and then she wanted to know if I had another Oatmeal box that she could decorate with purple tissue paper and gold beads, like the other kids had. Then with intelligent, worried eyes she demanded to know why was there only one photograph of her on the refrigerator door, and how come there were lots of pictures of her newly acquired brother and sister?

Usually I’m not immediately wise and filled with insight, but this time I was. Moments after bringing our new puppy home I understood that with the raising of this dog we would begin to create a history for our new daughter within our family beginning immediately. The family pet is deemed synonymous with family ties, a shared history, and belonging together. As a cohort we watched the newest doggy member of our family learn that dog biscuits came from the pantry, and that crackers are a wonderful thing and the way you know if somebody (who might give you one, if you sit nicely) is eating one is that the paper inside the box rattles.

Each week, as a family, we took our new puppy to canine kindergarten classes, then on to novice training. At home we took turns practicing walking on the leash, coaxing puppy to the left side. “Down” for a cookie, “sit and stay” and “fetch” with return.

With the adoption of our third child we had missed out on her first early years but had arrived in time to jump into what was left of her middle childhood. As the months went by, our new dog became more than a pet. She became a companion, to love and enjoy.

And when Sadie-dog won first place in novice my daughter breathed a deep contented sigh from the core of her being. Her place in our family was no longer invisible; the dog we were raising together, somehow compensated for the things in our past that she had not shared in.

She hugged the blue ribbon to her chest and squealed, “We all helped to train her, even me.”

Best Interest of the Child?

2012-01-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

I was reminded once again that transracial adoption is fertile ground for curiosity. We were at the 7th grade Spring Sing, and a few days away from traveling to Korea. At intermission, while our family stood munching cupcakes purchased at the school bake sale, laughing and talking with a large group, one of the mothers turned toward us, and with a big grin on her face and in a kind and most sincere voice she asked my 14-year-old son, “Are you going to try to find your birth mother?”

It’s unintentional of course; she thinks she is only asking an appropriate question. My son Jay stared with wide brown eyes brimming with question marks, and he grimaced. I vowed not to get involved. My son had to be the one to decide what information he wanted to share with others. But the next day while getting my hair cut, it was my turn to answer noisy questions. “We’re going on a vacation to Korea.” I said casually to my stylist, wondering which part of our lives was about to be held up for public display.

“Do you know who his real family is?” she asked next. I answered in that monosyllabic way that mothers have of bringing down the curtain on unwanted conversation. Yet since she had been cutting my hair for years and I truly liked her I wanted to be genuine, but without giving too much information away. I prayed to God to help me find a way out, and what I heard was, “You have been given this child to love, cherish and protect, and as his parent it is your responsibility to hold his private and personal information in trust.”

With open adoption receiving more and more media attention, and birth family search and reunion stories frequently appearing on television and in the news, most of the adoptive parents I know are finding that we are fielding more and more personal questions. “The best interest of the child” is a concept that consistently is embraced as a core principle of adoption. And those children whose best interest we want to protect grow up to be adults who hold their own rights to privacy. Still, I’ve often found myself sitting within a circle of adoptive mothers and there are always a few who offer long stories that feel too intimate to be sharing, even with other adoptive parents. What would be a parent’s motivation to step over the line like this? I feel the motivation is pride. Parents truly want their children to succeed and to be recognized.

When our children first join our family the job of educating those who are unfamiliar with adoption falls largely to us, their parents. Together we form an adoption community of adoptive parents who work towards setting the bounds of privacy while empowering our children to face bothersome questions, and we’re committed to teaching our kids to insist on the right of privacy early on, to know that what feels private can legitimately be kept private.

Reunion stories in particular draw people in, and while it’s good that the taboos have been lifted in today’s paradigm to expect contact with first parents and birth family members, this widespread sharing of intimate information lends the notion that ALL adoptees and adoptive parents enjoy being the object of curiosity, and that it’s okay to open up our lives for examination.

The pride we take from building our family through adoption can sometimes be more powerful than good sense. Ties of love we have with our kids are the most commanding in human relationships. We freely acknowledge that the love we enjoy with our children is the richest, most satisfying, least ambivalent in our lives. This kind of unqualified, no-strings attached love is heady stuff, one of the sweetest rewards of parenthood. By becoming parents we also expand our whole sense of who we are. Talking about our children with people who are interested helps us hold on to them. Ask parents about the rewards of adoptive parenthood, and they will talk about how deeply satisfying it is to be able to take care of their child.

With our children standing in the center of our lives, deeply loved, it’s natural that we sometimes believe the topic of adoption compels us to serve as ambassador to the uncomprehending. Yet the decision to tell others about our children’s orphanage experiences, birthparents and background history rightfully belongs to the child. Many of us go beyond these limits, especially when talking to other adoptive parents.

From watching my three kids pass through puberty—that age when the bedroom door slams shut—I know that children go through stages; a kid who might not care if their parent gives away intimate details at age 10, may have a change of heart a few years later. The teen and young adult years are a time of making and changing decisions, of trying out different options and possible identities.

When friends and neighbors ask about our children’s background information or about their birthparents, keep explanations short and simple. Don’t make your child’s adoption story the subject of talk. We are fortunate enough to be placed with a child for adoption and that child’s history becomes ours to safeguard. Being open all along with our children is key, yet our openness in sharing that history does not build a foundation of security for teenagers and young adults. Just as we set the healthy boundaries teaching our small children that information, which feels private, can be legitimately kept private, it is equally important to outline the bounds again when our children reach adolescence.

Of course, we cannot protect our kids entirely from nosy and insensitive questions anymore than we can’t protect them from racism. But if they see us giving away too much information we loose confidentiality. At the same time, we are extremely proud of how we built our families and of our children. Accordingly, we want to brag and celebrate with those who ask and show interest in us.

Now that I have become the mother of adults what have I learned? That it’s important to picture yourself 20 years from now and begin creating the kind of relationship you hope to have with your kids when they are grown. In order to best support our kids we will need to keep some of our favorite stories to ourselves. Begin practicing now.

We’ve discovered that saying, “Why do you want to know?” or “That’s a exceptionally personal question—let me think about it before I respond,” to be a sincere and honest answer to questions that feel too intimate. When a parent continually steps over the line sharing intimate details about their child’s life, it sends a message, “I don’t really believe you are capable of growing up and speaking for yourself, so I will do it for you.” What have I learned from my parenting mistakes? Paying attention to the messages we send can restore the balance of power allowing our children opportunity to grow up, and find their own voice.

First published in the August 2009 issue of Adoption Today.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

We Had Three Kids...

2012-01-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

We had three kids. Two were adopted. Our oldest daughter arrived at age ten, and our son was placed with us as a one-year old with special needs.

When we decided to add more children to our family we chose adoption because we wanted to make a difference in this life by parenting children who were already born, waiting, and needing a family. We wanted to adopt kids that were considered hard to place because deep down inside I knew adopting children who were waiting to be matched with parents was my calling in life. When I shared this with my husband he said, “I've got that same feeling.” Then we tortured ourselves by examining and delving into the myriads of types of special needs adoption we wanted to pursue. We wanted to adopt a child with a special need, but we only wanted to take a small risk.

Twenty-four years later, looking back, I can see that our thinking was pretty much the same as those who claim they only want to adopt a “healthy child.” We wanted to believe that it was possible to be in control of the outcome. We wanted to chart our future and to be able to map out our children’s medical conditions. But when I gave birth to my first child we were open to receiving our baby in whatever form he or she was delivered into this world with. Why then when it came to adoption did we insist on only adopting children who would carry a medical label that felt minor and easy for us to handle?

Today if I were able to adopt again I like to believe I would welcome the opportunity to consider all types of special needs, instead of only those requiring corrective surgery. Now I’d consider receiving a child with a host of unknowns, because the unexpected special medical need our son developed much later on, that we did not choose, which we would have given anything to avoid, has reshaped me, chiseled off my rough edges and softened me, made me better, and filled me with tender grace. But back then I was looking for a guarantee that my children would have only minor health issues.

After nearly a year of waiting, finally the call came and we received a referral for a one-year-old boy in Korea who was born with Syndactyly. His fingers on both hands were joined together, bones and all, making his hands look like small mittens. Might this child be right for our family? We wanted this baby and we began to do medical research to familiarize ourselves with what this condition would mean. While we considered what might be ahead health-wise for our child to be, our good friend, Bruce, who is blind and lost his eyesight as a young adult, yet went on to become an outstanding wood craftsman and cabinet maker, kept telling us he had a strong feeling this was going to be one of those things we looked back on as no big deal, and that our little boy was going to be fine.

And when my son was placed in my arms, immediately I understood something was far beyond ordinary about him. He was calm and centered in a way that let you know he possessed a great amount of wisdom; his presence made skeptics believe in angels. This baby became my son Jay, the one who would later pick wild flowers for me, and the child who bestowed me with the honor of being an adoptive mother.

There was something extraordinary about the trauma that surrounded Jay’s early life and how he eased his way through it. He endured the first syndactyly-release surgery when he was eighteen months old, and the process involved skin grafting, with grafts taken from the soft skin near his groin area. Every few months he underwent another surgery to separate another finger, and by the time he was five, he had ten individual fingers. Granted they were misshapen and scared. But he had fingers. Fingers that he could now stuff into gloves, or a baseball mitt, which delighted him, and he found his own way of making his new fingers work perfectly for his needs.

Turned out Bruce was right. The condition that caused Jay to be placed with us as “Special Needs” when we adopted him, turned out to be hugely unimportant. We’d managed to have an easy outcome, just like we set out to do in the beginning. It breaks my heart, however, knowing that if my son had congenital heart disease, or AIDS or a host of other diagnosis, or if I had looked into my crystal ball, chances are we would have been frightened off, and might not have adopted him, causing me to miss out on having him for my son and some of the best years of my life as a mother.

The truth is before we adopted Jay I did look into my crystal ball, or rather I went to the hilltop and I got real quiet, and what I knew for certain was that if we adopted this baby, it would be wonderful, better than anything I could ever imagine, and that his life circle would be small. Within a slip of a moment I could feel my joy and pain braided together, and I knew that I was meant to take this journey. When you know, you know. But how could I know?

With my vision tucked into the recesses of my mind, for the next six years I enjoyed a blissful, wonderful motherhood, joyous beyond measure. Then suddenly ours life changed forever. I learned that 7-year-old Jay had a brain tumor. The diagnosis of cancer came as a shock. Cancer was something that happened to other people. Now, we were the other people.

Following surgery, radiation, and then chemo, the cancer went into remission and the brain tumor was gone, and stayed gone for much longer than the doctors had initially predicted. Each time Jay had an MRI, the scan came back perfectly clear. He was back to snorkeling at the beach, and he looked healthy, if fragile. And on the head of a pin we delighted in eight more wonderful years, joyous beyond measure. And then the tumor came back, and Jay died.

Following my fifteen-year-old son Jay’s death, I felt the way Mt. St. Helens looked 15 years after her summit was removed by a volcanic eruption. I stood under an evening sky watching the slate blue dusk blend into ragged peaks and lava domes. A friend once had a cabin perched on a bluff overlooking the lake, surrounded by gigantic pines, and now fireweed and purple-red flowers dotted the level earthen floor, in a place where a forest once stood. My son Jay, a pole star of my life, had passed. I knew I would never get over it. Nor would I ever be the same. And I would not give up or given in to societies mistaken notion of getting over grief. I’d find a way to learn to live with it and not allow it to hold me back. I walked, circling the crater, and saw wild violets blooming. The mountain had been scattered and sundered into bits, and she survived. I swallow a clotty grief deep inside my throat. A grief so wide it gives me laryngitis.

Bold and enthusiastic thoughts of my son Jay filled me. I shuffled out into the empty field of my mind to find enough words to make it through another winter of writing. My life has changed into something I didn’t want, and I began gathering the pieces that were left of me, coaxing them back into growth, and starting again, but like the mountain I’d lost all of my big trees. I felt myself a part of the mountain, with hills catching the sunset through a furious wind, dust devils kicking up dirt. All my senses became alive, out on the edge. I imagined fireweed blooming on the burned over land in my heart with tiny purple petals, and it was a beginning.

That was me in 1999. And like a river stone tumbling in the raging water, my grief has grown softer over years, and I found gold and grace along the way, but I had to reach for it. If I had the chance to do it over again, I would choose to be Jay’s mother and take this journey. Everyday I thank my lucky stars. Out of this has come an unimagined gift. Loving Jay with all my heart and soul, and having to let go, gives me the faith to open my arms and embrace each moment. The special need Jay came to this earth with—was to spread his love wide.

First published in RainbowKids.com, July 2008.
Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

River of Words

2012-01-01T03:00:00.001-08:00

Terra Trevor, author, essayist, memoirist and storyteller of Cherokee, German, Delaware and Seneca ancestry, whose work is infused and shaped by her identity as a mixed blood in both Native and white societies. Trevor is a contributing author of 10 books, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Mentoring Core. She is the author Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story, a memoir which has been widely anthologized with excerpts included in Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond to War, Childhood Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors: A Guide For Families, Friends and Caregivers, and Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education, the first anthology to document the struggle for Native American cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. The University of Arizona Press.

Terra Trevor, Contributing Author

Children of The Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
(The University of Arizona Press)

Edited by Robert Bensen. The first anthology to document the struggle for Native cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Included are classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson, along with the works of 20 contemporary authors including Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, Terra Trevor and numerous others.

The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal
(University of Oklahoma Press)

Edited by Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams, Kathryn Walkiewicz. After passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, tens of thousands of American Indians were relocated from the American Southeast. Yet, a significant Indian population remained behind after those massive relocations. The People Who Stayed is the first anthology to focus on the literary work of Native Americans who trace their ancestry to people who stayed in southeastern states after 1830. This volume represents every state and every genre. While many speak to the prospects and perils of acculturation, all the writers bear witness to the ways, oblique or straightforward, that they and their families continue to honor their Indian identities despite the legacy of removal.

Foster Parenting: Building a Toolbox, Fostering Connections Resources for Foster Parents and the Professionals Who Help Them (EMK Press) Edited by Kim Phagan Hansel

Childhood Brain and Spinal Cord Tumors: A Guide for Families, Friends and Caregivers (O'Reilly and Associates) Edited by Maria Sansalone, Patsy Cullen, Tania Shiminski-Maher.

Birthed from Scorched Hearts: Women Respond To War
(Fulcrum Publishing)
Award-winning author MariJo Moore, asked women writers from around the world to consider the devastating nature of conflict—inner wars, outer wars, public battles, and personal losses and battles on the homefront. Their answers, in the form of poignant poetry and essays, examine war in all its permutations, from Ireland to Iraq and everywhere in between. With contributions from Paula Gunn Allen, Carolyn Dunn, Linda Hogan, Kim Shuck, Lee Maracle, Kimberly Roppolo, Terra Trevor, and numerous others. This moving anthology encompasses a wide range of voices.

2012-01-01T03:00:00.000-08:00

This is not a blog in the usual gist. Instead I have reprinted a collection of my feature articles, essays, and columns, all of which have been previously published. Before I was a mother, I have always been a writer. I'm a contributing author of 10 books and my memoir Pushing up the Sky, published in 2006, is widely anthologized.

With my husband I raised three children, who are now grown. We waded into uncharted territory, as not only were two of our children adopted transracially (I'm American Indian and my husband is white), but we adopted an older child changing the birth order within our family. We had a birth daughter who became our 'middle child.'

In addition to writing I work with at-risk and foster youth in transition. But I never planned to write on the topic of transracial adoption. Editors began asking me to write about adoption mothering about twenty-five years ago and although I also write in other genres, I have written numerous feature articles and penned columns in Adoptive Families, Adoption Today and Mothering Magazine. I was asked to write about my most important role; my life as a mother and about what mattered most to me.

Now that my kids are grown I enjoy seeing how my perspective has evolved and changed over the past three decades.

My special thanks go to the editors and publishers where these pieces originally appeared. Reading In Writing Motherhood is much like rummaging through my attic. My stories provide a glimpse in juxtaposition to each other about the path I have traveled as a mother, and what I have discovered in the process. Yet I'm not suggesting that my way is the best way. I enjoy reading the experiences of others, and I'm offering up mine. Within these previously published essays I’m sharing with you every single thing I’ve experienced as a mother and what I have learned, at least so far, as of today.

It's a privilege to have readers. Thank you for being one of them.

River, Blood, And Corn

2011-12-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

In Writing Motherhood

This Mother

Indians

Considering A Transracial Adoption?

Race and Adoption: Who Do We Think We Are

Journey of a Thousand Miles: Adoption Parenting

Learning Adoption Culture, Learning to be a Transracial Adoptive Family

Coming To Terms With Adoption Loss: A Mother Reflects

Six Things Your Adopted Child Might Be Thinking, But Will Never Tell You

Race and Identity: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

A First Mother Glimpse. My Story

Full Circle: Journal Writing and Talking Circles with Kids and Teens

Giving My Children Custody of Their Own Lives

Listening To Adult Adoptees: A Lesson For Adoptive Parents

International Transracial Adoption: Then and Now

Race and Ethnicity: Preparing for Culture Camp, Language Lessons, and Homeland Journeys

Thoughts on Adoption Motherhood, in Black, White and Technicolor

GROWING UP NATIVE AMERICAN

Native American Heritage Month Braided with Thanksgiving: An American Indian Perspective

American Indians In Children's and YA Literature

Powwow Spirit: A Gathering of Tribes

Braiding Ribbons of Culture: Thoughts From an American Indian Mother of an Asian Son and Daughter

To Say Mother. Adoption Community Labels and Language

Back In Those Days, in Korea

Birthed from Scorched Hearts

Walking Gently This Good Earth

When A Child Dies

Understanding and Challenging White Culture

Racism: Memories of a Former Kid

An All-American Korean American 4th of July

Welcome Home: Our Older Child Adoption

Surprise (The Homestudy, With A Humorist Twist)

새해 복 많이 받으세요 Korean New Year, With An American Indian Twist

Baby Steps

The Dog Who Came To Stay

Best Interest of the Child?

We Had Three Kids...

River of Words

River, Blood, And Corn

Promoting Community and Strengthening Cultures

Follow Along With Us!

River, Blood, And Corn