Across the Generations

I remember the very first time I ever considered adopting a child.  It didn’t happen for me inside an impersonal doctor’s office or while I prayed in church during a particularly moving sermon referencing James 1:27.  It didn’t happen for me while I stared at red-inked hearts scattered across month after month on a calender, nor did it occur while the husband and I quietly sat together at dinner, sipping glasses of wine and dreaming together of a family.

Instead, I was a pimply-faced teenager, wearing an ugly sweatshirt and sporting fingernails bitten down to the quick.  I remember that day so clearly because it was the day I met my cousin for the very first time… Sleeping Beauty, an adorable little baby my aunt and uncle adopted from Korea just a few months before I met her.  My aunt and uncle had adopted their son, another one of my dozens of cousins, seven years before, when I was too young to dream of my own children.  But Sleeping Beauty arrived in my life at a time when many young girls flash-forward a decade or two, imagining the time that they, too, will hold a little one in their arms.

Tonggu Momma with Sleeping Beauty in 1991

That day, I cuddled Sleeping Beauty close and – for a split second – I imagined my life with a daughter who looked just like her.

Well, my daughter, whom my husband and I adopted from China, doesn’t look just like my Korean-born cousin, but – to quote my five-year-old Tongginator – they DO have “the same shiny, black, Mulan hair.”  Sometimes it takes my breath away to think of how our pasts can so radically shape our futures.

Sleeping Beauty with the Tongginator, last weekend

My cousin Sleeping Beauty is no longer an adorable little infant, forced by her ultra-feminine momma to wear pink, ruffles and lace.  She is no longer a young child with few opinions about adoption and culture and life in general.  Almost two decades later, she is a bright, attractive and self-assured eighteen-year-old, heading off to college for the very first time.  She is someone who loves her family, is dating a young, Chinese-American man, expresses more interest in learning about Japanese rather than Korean culture and generally feels content about her adoption story… at least for now.

The husband, Tongginator and I visited with Sleeping Beauty over Labor Day weekend… one last hurrah before life takes her on this next grand journey.  She and I talked quite a bit about race, school, adoption and culture.  I asked her questions and truly listened to her answers.  One thing I find absolutely fascinating is that Sleeping Beauty and her brother, both raised within the same family, feel VERY differently about their adoption stories.  Sleeping Beauty feels that part of this stems from personality, but much of it also stems from different life experiences.  You see, seven years separate her from her brother in age.  When her older brother attended their local elementary school, he was one of only TWO minority children in the ENTIRE school… and the ONLY Asian-American.  By the time Sleeping Beauty reached kindergarten age, the school population had become more diverse, although each of her classes only averaged about three or four minority children within every class of 28ish students.

Still… what a significant difference.

I found it quite interesting that Sleeping Beauty spent quite a bit of time asking me questions, too.  It makes me wonder about her comfort level in asking my aunt and uncle about all things race- and adoption-related, although I never did ask her about it.  Perhaps I felt afraid of her answer.  At one point during our conversation, my cousin shared with me how blessed the Tongginator was to be adopted by Tonggu Daddy and me.  When she said that, I paused for a bit, then…

TONGGU MOMMA: You know, I can’t say that her life is a better life because we adopted her, but I can definitely say that we’ve given her a different life.  She’s for sure made OUR lives better, but, as to the rest… (I shrugged my shoulders)

SLEEPING BEAUTY: (pondering that for a second) Well, I feel that my life was better.  I feel so blessed that my parents adopted me and that I was raised here in America.

TONGGU MOMMA: (nodding my head slowly) I’m glad, cousin.  And I hope and pray the Tongginator feels the same when she is your age and even older.  But that’s not something the Husband and I can ever feel or say for her.  Because only the Tongginator has a right to decide whether or not she feels her life was better because we adopted her.

SLEEPING BEAUTY: Well, I hope she will.  I know I do.

I hope she will, too, cousin.  I surely hope she will.

Although Tonggu Momma still sometimes acts and looks like a teenager (complete with acne, ratty sweatshirts and fingernails bitten down to the quick), she tries to pretend to be a grown-up at her blog Our Little Tongginator.

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