In Writing Motherhood, Race and Identity: 10.23

A Motherhood Life Lesson

Photo credit: Terra Trevor (1986)

My babies are all grown. I no longer sneak off to my writing room to finish that one last page. I’ve learned not to try. Now I’m a grandmother, and it’s easier to just stop the writing for a while. Children are tromping through my house again, requiring snacks, water. Pulling books off the shelves and asking me to read one more story, and then we snuggle with books on our laps.

With my husband I raised three children. Two of our kids came to us through transracial adoption and foster care in the early 1980s. We waded into uncharted territory, as not only were two of our children Korean (I'm mixed-blood American Indian, and my husband is white) but by adding a foster child who was the oldest, and we later adopted at age 12, we also changed the birth order within our family. Next our son, then age 7, was diagnosed with a brain tumor—an event that changed all of our lives and taught me to let go of expectations and to forge a new identity.

What has motherhood taught me?

If could jump cut back to my early years and have a talk with my younger self, I would say, “Terra you have three children and their childhood will run through your fingers like water as you lift your hand to capture a moment with the camera. In what feels like the flick of an eyelash they will be adults, miles and miles on their own."

If I could step back in time, I would teach my children not to fear mistakes, let them know that failure doesn't exist, and that what some people think of as failure is really only a temporary setback.

If I could walk in my younger mother shoes one more time I’d say, “Every day write down three things you adore about your children, because you will want to have this list when your kids are grown. You will want to remember and write it in their birthday cards when they turn 40 and 50.”

I would tuck notes into my pockets reminding myself—when I’m having difficulties, admit it. Line up support ahead of time. Find a good therapist before I need one. Keep my sense of humor. Whenever I can, laugh at myself. And, so what if the house is messy, again, right after I’ve cleaned it.

Every day I’d tell my children I loved them and let them know they are dear to me, even on the days when they broke curfew, spilled something sticky on computer keyboard, or put a dent in the car.

If time were returned to me, I’d remember to be kind even when I was sick with a cold, had to work overtime and was in a bad mood.

I would send myself e-mails saying, "Have more faith because one day the searing pain you feel about your son's death will become softer, and like a river stone in the raging water it will smooth into tender grace."

I'd write letters to myself saying don't worry, but always remember one of your kids wears a raincoat on her heart, sealed in plastic, to keep out further hurt and pain. She is hurting from from much loss, and years in multiple foster homes. Hug her lightly and often. And don’t pay attention to what the experts say. You won’t be able to solve the bonding problems, but you can give up your silly notions about the way things ought to be, and allow her to go off and live her life, her way, and love will ebb, like waves rolling in and out on the beach.

Most of all, I would tell myself to let go of my great expectations. To just take care of the moments and the years will take care of themselves. Because things will turn out to be better than what I mapped out and had planned, and that’s a promise.

Author's Note

Before I was a mother I have always been a writer. I'm an essayist, a memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books in Native and Indigenous Studies, memoir and nonfiction, and the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir, and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story.

But I never planned to write about my journey though motherhood. It began with a single essay in 1984 when my editor invited me to write a feature article, and my readership grew. I'm well into grandmotherhood now, and I'm leaving a trail of my motherhood footprints behind.

When I began assembling a collection of my essays to include here, I found that each one begged for revision. A number of my feature articles were too magazine-y in tone and needed to be reshaped into essay and memoir. Other pieces, when further examined with my poet’s eye, had become too pretentious and gave off the full-bodied notion that as a mother I had things all figured out, which of course I don’t.

I also contemplated my gloomy stories. Although I'm often remembered for difficulties I've faced, I want it to go down in history that there has also been great joy within my journey through motherhood. Today as a mother and grandmother my life in no way resembles what I had hoped for, or expected it to be, and yet I am deeply thankful for where this journey has led me. I also enjoy seeing how my perspective has evolved and changed over the past five decades.

Thank you to the editors where these essays were first published.

Photo by Lawrence K. Ho

Southwest Moonlight and Making Babies: An Excerpt from Pushing up the Sky

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 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 at the social welfare office, 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 are American 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 Native American and 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. I was a nineteen-year-old 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 Nevada, 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.

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 first mother. I like to believe his mother is a lot like me, but was forced to make a decision that I did not have to make.

An excerpt from Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story A Memoir by Terra Trevor

Three Sections from MY LIFE

I received a long-awaited phone call from my social worker. But 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.

Then on a crisp 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 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.

. . .

We had three kids. First I gave birth to our daughter and our son was placed with us as a one-year old with special needs from Korea. Then we added a third child to our family who came to us from foster care at age ten. When we decided to add more children to our family we wanted to make a difference in this life by parenting children who were already born, waiting, and needing a family. We wanted 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 placements we wanted to pursue. We wanted a child with a special need, but we only wanted to take a small risk.

Looking back, I can see that our thinking was pretty much the same as those who claim they only want to parent 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 foster care or adoption did we insist on only children who would carry a medical label that felt minor and easy for us to handle?

Today if I were to bring another child into my family, I'd 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 child 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.

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 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 I know something, I know. But how could I know? As a young child I discovered that often I feel things, and 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.

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 at age 15.

Following my son's death, I felt the way Mt. St. Helens looked ten 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 in 1999. Like a river stone tumbling in the raging water, my grief has grown softer, and I found gold 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 again. 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.

Race, Ethnicity and My Face

As a mixed-blood woman of Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German descent, I came of age understanding that I'm not totally a Native person, and I’m not a white person. I'm a border woman dwelling between the boundaries.

I have light skin, light enough that some people think I’m white. My dad, a Native man, and my mother, a white woman, had me when they were teenagers in 1953.

I grew up in Compton, California. The family next door was Bolivian and they loved me like a daughter. My best friend was Japanese and Mexican. Still, when I was 10 years-old, my dad sat me down to have “the talk” with me about race. He told me about how to navigate the streets, about how to stay safe. He also wanted to make sure I understood that in order to be accepted by certain white people it mattered who your friends were.

By that point, however, I already knew.

I had discovered that when I went to the houses of my white friends after school I needed to be aware of how I was holding myself at all times. I learned to stay alert and watch for clues: sometimes there might be an older brother who pulled his eyes in an upward slant and said something mean about Chinese people; or a father that casually spouted racial slurs at people of color, and made fun of Indians. When this happened, I knew I had to make an excuse to go home and I’d never go back. Sometimes I’d make up stories when asked about my darker skinned, mixed-race family in order to protect them. But if the mothers of my white friends didn’t feel satisfied with my answers, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay at their houses for long.

Things would be different when I went over to the houses of my friends of color. Their mothers would always take me in without hesitation. And if there was a grandmother at home who spoke English with an accent, or didn’t speak English at all I could usually be certain they wouldn’t ask me if my daddy had a job. In their homes, I felt safe.

As a child I had things all figured out. But when I reached my late teens and early twenties it became more complicated.

Hanging out with my friends of color meant witnessing them get treated poorly and face multiple instances of discrimination by white people. Being out with my white friends, however, meant that we could expect to be given preferential treatment no matter where we went. When I began dating and went out with Native boys or other boys of color in my community, I was considered “white trash” by many white Americans. I could even expect to have a white man point to my date and ask me what I thought I was doing being with the likes of someone like him. But when I dated the first guy that was white, I was allowed to be white by association and had access to the privileges of white America because of that. In stores or restaurants, we were always served or seated first, before people of color.

When we acted up or got into mischief in public, it was laughed off as opposed to being taken seriously with the assumption that we were up to no good like it is for teens of color. My early adulthood was charged with decisions to make: Should I mention my Native identity? Should I let white people I don’t know well and may not ever want to become close friends with, assume I’m white? Keep my racial identity private from employers and others who would discriminate against me if they knew I’m a mixed-blood Native American woman.With dark skinned family members and dark skin friends, and with strong ties to Native America and firmly rooted within a community of color.

When people look at my face, what they also can not see is that my mother, who was born white, is a member of a mixed-race family, with white and Black and Mexican family members.

At age twenty-three, I found myself employed full-time in a company that was predominantly white. So white, that my intuition told me if my boss had known I was anything other than white, I would have probably not been hired. My white co-workers seemed to only accept people of color who adhered to white social norms and didn’t challenge their biases. They could not accept how vastly different the culture values, thought processes, and social norms of ethnic people were from white America.

I wear the face of a woman with light skin privilege. While keenly aware of the advantage it has given me over my friends and family who are not able to pass, I always make the decision to disclose my Native identity. I never try to pass. Passing would mean turning my back on my Native family, my family and friends of color, and my community and my identity.

Following my experiences working in a predominantly-white company at 23, I began to make sure that at each interview I had for a new job, I’d take a “racial temperature check” to ensure that people of color who looked like my friends and family were always welcomed. And I’d proudly list all the positions I’ve held within American Indian and Asian-American organizations on my resume.

Later on in my life, I married a man who was white and we had a daughter together, before adopting two Korean children. Two of our kids had apparent ethnic features and their black hair and darker skin often caused people to mistakenly assume they were Native American. I knew that blending into white society would never be an option for them. So it was always a toss on whether they would be able to ride on the wings of my white privilege, or be subject to the racism that ruled America when they were out on their own.

In turn, I did my best to connect them with their Korean roots by becoming deeply involved with the Korean community in our town. For more than four decades my heart and my soul was shaped by my connection to the Korean community for which I am grateful to be a part of.

Now, in my 70s, my gray hair and wrinkled face reveal the many years I have lived. Yet what has not changed is what most cannot see: I am a border woman. Borders are set up to define or to separate, but I am neither part white, nor part Native. My blood is a mix between two worlds, Native and white merging together to form a third: a mixed-blood dwelling between the boundaries.

First published in Santa Clara Review, vol 108 / issue 01.

An All-American Korean American 4th of July

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 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 trying 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. But 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 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, 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.

For three decades our Korean community gatherings 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.

First published in Adoption Today. Reprinted in The Huffington Post.

Considering a Transracial Adoption?

You are waiting to adopt a child and your heart is soaring like an eagle. If you are a white person and if you are living in a predominately white community, the moment you make the decision to adopt a child of color it's time to build a multi racial family lifestyle. While it’s important to till a love of the ethnicity and the people 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 community and 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 in an ethnic neighborhood you could begin to frequent? If you are ignored, show kindness. Being ignored is what it often 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 and its people is that 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 multi racial lifestyle is built. Some of the best things in life take a long time to achieve.

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.

I believe the single most significant thing we’ve done is the comment to racial 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 family and in a mixed race community in Los Angeles, and my husband had grown up in an all-white family 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.

We built new friendships within our local Korean community 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 and our identity comes first from the family and community we are raised in. And while those who are white cannot ever know what it feels like to be a person of color, the choice can be made to live diversely, with 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 Adoption Today. Reprinted by Tapestry Books and in a number of other venues.

Journey of a Thousand of Miles: Transracial Adoption

While riding on a bus in Korea with my friend Mark, he bent his face close to mine and said, “Transracial adoption is a journey of thousands of miles.” Mark was adopted from Korea, he is a father, and he is endearing and wise. It took me about ten minutes to realize that he was talking about “my journey” and not the one my daughter and son were walking.

Just being a mother is enough to send anyone searching for a thousand answers. Add the dynamic of transracial adoption braided in, 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 I could become well balanced and how my identity as a mother would grow and change as my children grew into adulthood.

The more I learned the more I discovered the need to let myself feel vulnerable and admit that sometimes my behaviors in the area of adoptive motherhood were thwarted and of self-interest. And sometimes I just plain didn't know how to move in those areas where the line between being mom to a son and daughter adopted from Korea, and being mom to a daughter who is not adopted, became 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. It's occurred to me we must renew our vows and pay attention, for the times they are a changing—as the song goes. 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. But sometimes parents are slow at catching on, delayed in understanding the harm we bragging adoptive parents 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 ten, eleven and 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 are adults now and live on their own, and my fifteen year-old son died from cancer and joined his ancestors in the spirit world in 1999, 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 some of us, though not to everyone. Maybe it's 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, father like; maternal, motherly, mother like. Thankfully we will always be a father or a mother. But if we will always be viewed within the adoption triad 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 easer 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, and it is time we 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 and bad parenting to allow any kid to live with the pressure of believing their parents saved them.

My mind raced as the bus rolled along in Korea, across the motherland of my children, and it continued racing when I reached Colorado and walked the good land where my grandfather’s 94-year-old twin sister still lives, and 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, instead of parent to child. I can even offer to help; yet I’ll have to ditch the adoptive parental thing of being all-knowing with a take-charge attitude. Because it was the thing that drove me batty on our 14-day trip throughout Korea; all those parents, parenting day after day. They even parented each other, and they parented 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 the good Colorado land I call home.

First published in Adoption Today. © 2007 Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Back in those days, in South Korea

The summer of 1998, according to the neighbors in Cho'nan, was the hottest in recent memory. The family we were staying with didn't speak English. Thirty seconds after my fourteen-year old son and I arrived for our week-long 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.

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.

After we finished eating, over at the kids’ table, I watched my son throwing himself into a game of Mancala. My son was born in Korea. I adopted him when he was a year-old. Although his Korean language skills were limited, undaunted, he taught the group how to play the game. We brought the Mancala game as a gift and immediately it was a huge success. The children, communicating 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 how to speak only with 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.

Like the others I was content, embraced in the peace of the moment. I could see into the summer of a year in my own childhood. And if only in mind I was again in my grandma's kitchen, gathered with my deep-eyed Indigenous aunties with their high cheeked faces.

Around midnight somebody pulled out a Korean-English dictionary, and I was able to grasp that the plan was to wake up in time for an early morning hike, then go to the bathhouse. I’d never been to a Korean bathhouse, and I loved hiking. I drifted off to sleep looking forward to the morning.

Instead I woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache. By seven a.m. I was worse, and called my son. “Get the Korean dictionary and look up the word for illness, and go get Young Oh's mother. Just say Ohma, and point to the word that means sick.”

I fell asleep and opened my eyes to see many black-haired, high-cheeked women standing over me. It was noon; my skin was grayish.

"You go to doctor," one of the women said in English.

"I'll be better in a little while." I argued. I pushed the skin on my leg, and it dented like it was made out of clay.

"Okay, doctor." I agreed.

The neighborhood clinic was new and modern, spotlessly clean with a Korean-style squatter toilet. I sank to my knees and vomited again. The doctor didn't speak English. A woman translated for him: the diagnosis was food poisoning, probably from eating at an American style fast food hamburger chain the day before in Seoul. I hadn't wanted to eat hamburgers, I prefer Korean food but our train got in late and the only place open was an Americanized hamburger chain, so that's what we ate.

"You get a shot with needle," she translated next.
"No needle," I insisted. I felt in control. I was sick, but didn't feel overly worried; I'd taken Imodium, the diarrhea had stopped.
"Little needle, not big one," she reported. "Not hurt."
"Let me see the needle,” I demanded. Then because I didn’t know how else to phrase it I requested a fresh needle, using the word “fresh” in a way that was meant to be spoken at the green grocer’s to ask for fresh vegetables.

The doctor brought out a package of unopened, sterilized needles and a new IV bag containing liquid to replace the body fluids I'd lost. He held it up for me to see, the ingredients were listed in English.

"You better fast," the doctor explained.
"Okay," I agreed and held out my arm. The smell of alcohol drifted over me.

The neighbor women gathered around me,
"We go home, then come back, get you later ."

My son flashed me a worried look.

"I'll be fine," I announced, and then off they all went.

Meanwhile, while I was in the Korean hospital, an air conditioner hummed in the corner. Outside it was 105, not counting the waves of heat from the pavement. Inside the clinic, cool air blasted around me. My head rested on a green quilted pillowcase. A small voice in my mind kept saying, maybe I ought to be worried. But I didn't feel worried. I was amused.

Although my son was seven years past a brain tumor, he still had a shunt because hydrocephalus persisted. Shunts are such tricky things; like the plumbing in a house they can block and back up or malfunction. At first I worried about traveling outside the US in case something should go wrong with his shunt and he would need to be in the hospital. Yet here we were in Korea, and I was in the hospital. But instead of feeling worried I felt confident I was receiving care equal to, and probably better than that of many medical clinics at home in America, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

Later that afternoon Young Oh's mother and her neighbor friends came to get me as promised. "We go to museums now," one of the women said. The doctor told her to make sure they gave me plenty of water and Gatorade to drink.

My son pressed his face next to mine, and whispered, "Do we have to go to museums?"

Even though I was feeling a lot better, I explained to the women that I was still much too weak for an afternoon of walking, so we piled together in the car and went home.

The night before I'd slept in the youngest son's bedroom, in a twin bed. Now I was invited to rest in the master bedroom, on the queen sized tol ch'im dae, a stone bed. It had a wood carved head and footboard and instead of a mattress, the sleeping surface was a polished stone slab, expensive looking, beautiful and hard. After about twenty minutes of resting on this bed, I went into the living room and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the floor.

Rather than holding us apart, my sick day actually strengthened bonds. We were able to share stay-at-home time with our host family in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if I were feeling healthy.

With help from the Korean-English dictionary I asked Young Oh's mother if she liked swimming or camping. At first she said ahn chu an hey yo which is a polite way to say she didn't care for either. But I pressed her further; finally she giggled and said the Korean word that meant she hated swimming and camping.

I pointed to myself and said that I liked both.
Young Oh's mother fell into the game. "Indoor girl," she said pointing to herself.
"Outdoor girl," she said pointing to me.
We laughed.
My son looked up the Korean word for fisherman and pointed to himself.

There were moments of real intimacy between us. We had time to rest and shore up. I was fed homey Korean comfort foods, soothing creamed rice dishes, with cucumber kimchi on the side of course. I discovered Mee Hwang delighted in inviting friends over and treating them with her home cooked food. In the neighborhood just the mention of her name made everyone think of her delicious meals.

“Sometimes when I smell rice cooking, and everybody is singing in Korean, I can remember being a baby in Korea,” my son admitted. “It’s not a regular memory I can think about as long as I want. It’s much quicker than that.”

He was delighted to play big brother to the younger kids. Making paper airplanes and an afternoon of watching Korean cartoons were simple things that still warmed his heart.

The kids pulled board games out of the closet, and the whole house felt warm with our day together. Or maybe it was the kimchi tchigae simmering on the stove. Whatever, it was awfully nice.

—an excerpt from Pushing up the Sky, a memoir by Terra Trevor

Author's Note

I've traveled to Korea many times since that long ago day, and each time culturally specific memories of growing up American Indian sneak up on me unexpectedly. It doesn't matter that the conversations taking place are in Korean, each time I feel the power of togetherness, it needs no translation.

Full Circle: Journal Writing Circles With Kids and Teens

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 twelve-year olds 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 written, 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. As a writer, and an instructor of creative writing, everyday I practice this form of faith. As a mother and grandmother with the goal of supporting my children's developing sense of identity of who they are, and where they come from, I also routinely practice faith by trusting that I am doing my best job of helping my kids find avenues to explore and launch their feelings. And silence is silence, and nothing about it is golden if I allow myself to believe that children, who don’t talk about race, or racial teasing or racial stereotyping, aren’t dealing with these issues.

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.

I’ve found the most successful journaling circles are when the kids 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, or 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, 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” taken 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 kids 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 them 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 groups (and for my kids this also included transracial adoption groups, and 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.

Motherhood 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. And, I thank my lucky stars because frequently she calls home, providing me with sweet, intimate details of her newfound independence, returning the faith and trust I gave her so freely.

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