A Black Box

I think adoption is still a big black box for many people. This lack of understanding about adoption resulted in me getting lots of silly questions and negative responses when people found out that I’m an adoptee, I’d take this personally when I shared my story with them. They’d say things like “oh no!” or “I’m sorry”, negative responses that didn’t make me feel great. This lack of understanding makes me want to advocate for adoption, just to educate people that adoption is a different way of forming a family and that ‘different’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘bad.’ As an adoptee, I want to tell people not to just assume that adoption is negative.

My dad is Caucasian and my mom is Asian, so by just knowing my parents, people know that I’m adopted. I was very ashamed about it, and I think it would have been better if I’d had conversations earlier with people that I’m close to. But I think people are scared to even ask, so no one speaks anything and there’s no communication. Even for my best friends since I was ten years old, when I told them only a couple of years ago that I was adopted, I realized that they were scared to ask, and I was too scared to ask about it too. There was no exchange of information.

While I knew I was adopted, my parents and I rarely talked about it, and growing up, I never explored my adoption at all, even though I had many questions about my birth family, and the reasons why I was adopted. I asked my mom recently how come we never really spoke about adoption before, and she said it was because I never brought it up, so my parents thought I was fine.

But at a pivotal moment in my life, when I was 18, right before I left for university, my parents gave me a letter from my biological mother that she’d written before placing me for adoption. This letter was life-changing. It answered a lot of questions, and made me feel more at ease, more whole and at peace with myself.

I’ve now gone through my root tracing process and taken it as far as I can go. I’ve been able to pull all these pieces of my life together and it sort of makes more sense to me now. Finally, I can fully accept and embrace my story, and who I am.