Different Love

Recent events (and non-events) have forced me to think more deeply about the differences in parenting the children who joined my family through adoption and the children who joined my family through homebirth. Mother On Earth recently wrote about Rebecca Walker’s now infamous comment that the love an adoptive or step parent has for their (adopted or step) child is not the same as the love a parent has for their biological child. The way Walker presents this statement comes across as a slight to adoptive or step parents–that they can’t love these children as much as they would love their biological child.

I am taking Walker’s comment and turning it in a different direction: the love I have for each of my children is not the same as the love I have for any of their siblings. They came into our family in four different ways: through a long-awaited open adoption with 2 months of preparation (and anticipation) after we were matched and before our daughter was born, through a traumatic homebirth in which I was rushed to the ER and don’t remember our son’s first day, through a beautiful homebirth where all 5 of us were gathered together on our bed a couple hours after our daughter was born, through an ‘instant baby’ evening phone call and travel the very next day to pick up our daughter.

Our children have 3 sets of genetic history, 4 sets of medical history, 1 set of food allergies, 2 genders, 3 multiracial mixtures, 4 sets of talents, and 4 very different personalities and temperaments. All these pieces of inborn information are relevant to how I mother my children. I love each of my four children differently–equally, but not the same. I parent my four children differently. We work hard to make things ‘fair’ around here (I remember saying “It’s not fair” a lot as a kid), but fair does not mean the expectations and limits are the same for each of my kids.

Parenting adopted children is more complicated than parenting biological children–and harder, if you’re doing it right. The day-to-day life and sibling relationships are the same. But the parenting has more components, and more unknowns. My children who were adopted into our family have other families, families that came before we did. In my parenting, I am beholden to my children’s ancestors and, more directly, to their birthparents. I am hopefully preparing my children to eventually go out into the world as happy, healthy, self-confident, independent adults. Adults who are culturally and emotionally prepared to be an active part of their birthfamilies, if they choose to. I only have to prepare my biological children to be a part of one family.

With biological children, parents have so much information, more than is available with even the most open (non-kinship) adoption. Whether it is tantrums, early swimming skills, or insomnia, I know which way to point the finger: here. These are all traits my husband or I had (or still have). With our biological children, we know their family/medical history and their complete prenatal experience. We know they have one uncle with eczema and another (on the other side of the family) with milk intolerance. We know that both good teeth and intractable stubbornness run in both our families.

With adopted children, parents worry more. I wonder if they have half-siblings somewhere with an underbite, or who outgrew bow-leggedness. I think about their birthparents and how to foster a relationship between them and my child that is natural, and is comfortable and positive for my child. I wonder about extended birthfamily. I wonder if my child wonders about their extended birthfamily. I wonder if the tantrums or fussiness are related to age, temperament, genetics, tiredness, or hidden anxiety about some facet of their adoptedness. I work to keep adoption a topic on the table, but not to talk about it so much that it becomes tiresome or an overwhelming focus.

I expect all my children will (eventually) tell me all the ways in which I did them wrong, the ways I could have been a better mother. I was too strict. I forced them to be vegetarian. I refused to have a T.V. in the house. But I can’t imagine they will complain that we treated our adopted and biological children differently–based on that fact alone. We have 3 daughters and 1 son; I worry more about treating my gender-different kids equally, more than my arrival-different kids.

Every child requires a different kind of parenting, and their own special love. Figuring out what that is and how to do it–that’s a parent’s job.

Multicultural Kindergarten Curriculum

Our state requires us to submit a general curriculum for what we plan for the kids to study in the next year. They let you keep it fairly broad, but not completely vague (you can’t say, “may include, but not limited to . . . ” which is an unschooling standby). Our curriculum as a whole contains an implied “including, but not limited to . . . ” which leaves us an open door to incorporate just about everything we do in the next ten months into our end-of-the-year report.

My husband and I talked a lot about what the curriculum should say and include, as we are both listed as their teachers. We took a two-pronged approach: (1) We included all the things we already do/discuss regularly and plan to continue, and (2) We included specific skills and projects that we’d like to accomplish this year; now that we’ve written them down in the official curriculum, we have committed to completing them.

The ‘History, Government, and Citizenship’ section is where the most explicit multicultural educational philosophy is visible. However, the curriculum in its entirety is included below for those of you also in the paper-filing process.

History, Government, and Citizenship:

• Develop a deeper understanding of family and community life, including the structure and rituals of our family and those of other families in the U.S. and the world
• Geography of our state (including some cities/towns and major bodies of water), the United States (selected states), and the world (continents and selected countries)
• Continue exploring Native American history, focusing on the Cherokee and local Native peoples
• Continue exploring African American history
• Foster awareness of environmental issues, including pollution, consumerism, global warming, and vegetarianism

Natural Sciences:

• Explore the outdoors in all seasons
• Environmental stewardship, and why it is important
• Continue to observe carefully, ask questions, and search for answers
• Perform simple science experiments demonstrating physical principals, including mass and energy
• Visit the local science center regularly to observe fish, amphibian, and reptile species, as well as quarterly special exhibits
• Insect study, including the lifecycle, care, and feeding of the monarch butterfly
• Visit a sugar house to observe the making of maple syrup
• Experiment with measurements, including length, weight, and volume
• Group objects into sets, and sort objects according to physical characteristics

Literature and Language Arts:

• Listen to reading of literature, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry
• Will read as they are ready
• Play-act stories
• Keep a journal
• Dictate creative writing to parent
• Orally express themselves clearly
• Phonics, including the sounds of all 26 letters of the alphabet, as well as ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘th’, and ‘ph’
• Recognize and print upper and lower case letters of the alphabet
• Enjoy books and other reading material
• Create a quarterly zine of original pictures and mini-stories
• Create one or more original books with words, pictures, and binding by child

Math and Numbers:

• Count out loud from 1 to 100, by 1s and by 10s
• Recognize, write, and read numbers from 1 to 100
• Add and subtract numbers from 1 to10
• Know the meaning of the plus (+), minus (-), and equals (=) signs
• Identify pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollar bills
• Tell time on both a traditional clock and a digital clock

Health:

• The human body, including
  a) Names and functions of body parts
  b) The human life cycle
  c) Personal health and hygiene
  d) Personal safety
• Study the growth, preparation, and importance of healthy food, including cooking and baking simple recipes

Fine Arts:

• Music: including singing, learning songs, writing/inventing own songs, playing the piano, guitar, recorder, drums, and other musical instruments, and attending live musical performances.
• Performing Arts: Create and perform in a variety of ‘shows’ throughout the year. Attend live performance art (such as plays, dancers, puppet shows, and acrobats).
• Visual Arts: Create a variety of two-dimensional visual art using materials including crayons, markers, colored pencils, tempera paint, watercolor paint, scissors, and glue. Create three-dimensional visual art using a variety of materials. Visit art museums, and art and craft exhibits.

Physical Education:

• Continue to develop skills to improve:
  a) Coordination and strength
  b) Listening and direction-following ability
  c) Persistence
• Activities to include:
  a) Walking
  b) Hiking
  c) Running
  d) Dancing
  e) Yoga
  f) Swimming
  g) Biking
  h) Cross-country skiing
  i) Downhill skiing
  j) Ice skating
  k) Sledding
  l) Skateboarding

We have two Monarch butterflies in a container on our kitchen counter; one is already in the process of becoming a chrysalis. Sky School has begun.

Multicultural Homeschooling

We finally made the commitment last week to homeschool Jaja and Rico for kindergarten next year. We have two primary reasons:

• Our district is focused on academic performance and test scores (as are most public schools nowadays). This translates into full-day kindergarten (6+ hours a day, 5 days a week) with a significant amount of ’seat work’. They have art 1 day a week, music 1 day a week, P.E. 3 days a week, and brief recess 1-2 times each day. In the name of traditional academic proficiency, these five-year-olds sit quietly at tables for hours each school day. (As my husband says, “Kindergarten should be half art and half gym.”)

• Our district does not believe they have enough ‘minority’ students to warrant cultural competency training for their teachers and staff. (I previously wrote about my conversations with district administrators and my problems with the kindergarten’s Africa unit.)

I received the paperwork we need to fill out from our state education office, and now I am figuring out how to represent our educational values and worldview while fulfilling the state curriculum requirements. For example, American History: Our family gives equal (or greater) weight to the perspectives of Native Americans (the history of this place called the United States did not begin when Columbus landed), African Americans (there is so much more to Black American history than MLK and slavery; don’t get me started), women (we have always been doing more than raising children, cooking meals, and washing clothes–a lot more), and other populations underrepresented in traditional historical narratives and texts. My children are surrounded by the predominant White male perspective and history that tries to pass itself off as “American culture” and “American history”. But that’s not my family’s culture, and it’s not my family’s total history.

In searching online for examples of elementary-level multicultural curriculum, I came across a comprehensive educational resource: EdChange. Their philosophy reads (in part):

EdChange is dedicated to diversity and equity in ourselves, our schools, and our society. We act to shape schools and communities in which all people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, (dis)ability, language, or religion, have equitable opportunities to achieve to their fullest and to be safe, valued, affirmed, and empowered.

On the EdChange site, I found the document Key Characteristics of a Multicultural Curriculum. I read this awesome list (designed for teachers at all levels) and found myself nodding, yes, yes, yes. (I don’t agree with other people’s philosophies of any kind very often.) This is exactly what I want for my children’s educational philosophy, (and curriculum and teacher-perspective when they attend more traditional school, which I assume they will for many years). The author, Paul Gorski, covers seven main topics, a few of which I have highlighted below:

• From CONTENT: Avoid tokenism. Weave content about under-represented groups (People of Color, Women, Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People, People with Disabilities, etc.) seamlessly with that about traditionally over-represented groups.
  • Do you present under-represented groups as “the other”?
  • Do you address these groups only through special units and lesson plans (”African American Scientists”; “Poetry by Women”) or within the context of the larger curriculum?
• From PERSPECTIVE: Content must be presented from a variety of perspectives and angles, not only that of majority groups, in order to be accurate and complete.
  • How do we define “classic literature” or “great books” or “the classics” and from whose perspective?
  • From whose perspective do we tell history? When is “westward expansion” the same as “genocide”? When are champions of “liberty” the same as slave owners?
• From CRITICAL INCLUSIVITY: Bring the perspectives and experiences of the students themselves to the fore in the learning experience. Encourage students to ask critical questions about all information they receive from you and curricular materials, and model this type of critical thinking for them.
  • Who wrote or edited that textbook?
  • Who created that Web site?
  • Whose voice am I hearing and whose voice am I not hearing?

Show me the school that embraces this multicultural educational philosophy–and my kids will be there. For now, this list gives us a strong framework to continue our children’s life and academic education, starting with that homeschool curriculum I need to submit next week.

I’ve been searching for a homeschooling or unschooling online group or a homeschooling website that is philosophically non-Eurocentric and that ‘accepts’ multiracial families. There are several African American homeschooling groups, but they are not welcoming of our kind of multiracial family (a couple of the groups seem open to families where only one of the homeschooler’s parents is Black). Moreover, our family’s educational/homeschooling style is not Afrocentric. Our educational perspective is consciously multiracial and multicultural, with a current focus on African American and Native American cultures (present-day and historical).

I’m thinking about starting a new Yahoo group for families who have a multiracial and/or multicultural approach to their homeschooling (in all my spare time . . . ) Anybody interested in joining?

Resources for Antiracist Activism

Here is the resource list to accompany 11 Action Items for Antiracist Activism.

• My 3 favorite (adult) books discussing race and racism
• A truly brilliant and hysterical cartoon about White Privilege (to get your friends and family talking)
• Anti-Racist Parent, the website for parents committed to raising children with an anti-racist outlook; new columns and commentary several times a week, written by parents
• Race: The Power of an Illusion, the 3-part PBS documentary and the accompanying online resources
• The concept of transracialization as written about by John Raible
• University of New Hampshire’s list of behaviors and attitudes for Adversaries and Allies
• The workbook from the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop. (This is a long pdf file; if you have the time to wade through it all, there are a lot of great ideas and information.)
• Teaching Tolerance curriculum and resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Tolerance is not my favorite word, nor my goal for our community and world. Although they take a light-handed approach in discussing prejudice and bigotry, they have widely acclaimed free diversity resources for schools and homeschooling families.)
• A glossary of current terminology in the United States, a tool for talking more comfortably about race and ethnicity
• A children’s booklist and tools for parents to talk to children about skin color, race, ethnicity, and ancestry
• Resources for building a multiracial and multi-cultural home environment
• Free e-book entitled ‘How to Be an Anti-Racist Parent’
• The Early Childhood Initiative of the World of Difference Institute: tools and training opportunities for parents and teachers
• And lastly, an article by the indomitable Tim Wise (read anything of his you can get your hands on)

Making Me a Liar

I hear one question from strangers more often than any other: “Are they all yours?” The second most common question goes something like this, “Are some of your children adopted?” Long ago I stopped feeling that these types of questions are innocuous–they are the most common and some of the most intrusive. The first question’s more frequent, and easier to answer (”Yep”) and walk away. The second one is more problematic.

To begin with, it belies the illusion the first question offers, that the questioner is simply curious because of the number of children I have. The second question also lets me know that the asker is focused on the skin-tone variations in my children, because if it were anything else the visual variety between the kids is too mixed to distinguish (3 pairs of brown eyes & 1 pair of hazel; straight hair, wavy hair, wavy hair, & curly hair; black hair, dark brown hair, light brown hair, & dark blonde hair). None of my four children physically resemble in the face, including the two who are biological siblings. Each of the children has their own unique hair, skin, and eye colors; hair texture; face shape; eye, nose and mouth shapes. (Jaja and Rico have the same foot shape (wide), and Gretel and Jaja have very similar body shapes, which makes hand-me-downs a dream at this point.)

But back to my point. Asking if some of my children are adopted tells me the asker already has in their mind which of my children are adopted, and they have made this judgment based on skin-color alone. I have more than enough friends who are currently (or formerly) interracially partnered and have biracial and multiracial children to know this question does not just come to me–it often comes to them as well. The “are they adopted” question comes more often to my White and White-appearing friends; none of us are spared the “are they yours” version.

Here’s where I’ve started to falter with my answer to the adoption-status question. I don’t want my kids to be ashamed of being adopted, to feel it is something to hide–but I also want them to to know it is not everyone’s business. (I never want to say or do anything to dishonor my children’s birthparents or their places in my children’s hearts and lives.) But that question, “Are some of your children adopted?” is just the tip of the iceberg. What most of those questioners are really asking is this, “Are some of your children adopted or is your husband/boyfriend Black?” They’re asking the half of the question that is polite enough to get out of their mouths (so they think) but think again–I hear the rest of the question continuing on in the background.

And this is where we come to the lying. I don’t lie nearly as often as I should, even to just to give myself and my family and friends a little more wiggle room. I rarely lie. Lying is a slippery slope; even a little lie leads to bigger lies to cover the tracks you didn’t think you were leaving. But when those overly-curious busy-bodies start in on the genetic origins of my children, ooh! I want to lie.

I’ve actually done it once, that I can remember, and that was just a little lie of omission. I was in the airport, traveling alone with Jaja and Rico, who were both under two at the time. We were on our layover and they were strapped into the double stroller. As I stood in line at the counter to get a gate-check tag, this 60ish (White) woman leans over my children, looks back and forth at them and then at me. She asked the million dollar question, “Do they have the same father?” I thought for a moment about my husband who was coming to pick us up at the airport in just a few hours.

“Yep,” I answered.

“Aren’t genetics amazing?” she said.

And they are, because there are countless families that look like ours, families where all the children are genetically related.

There are so many scenarios that could create a family picture like ours: interracial marriage, one or two multiracial parents, full biological siblings, half biological siblings, blended family, step siblings, adoption, foster care, mother with her children fathered by four different men out with her new boyfriend, boyfriend and girlfriend out together with their kids from prior relationships . . . why does it matter?

Why does anyone think it is their right, their business, to question somebody else about the origins of their family–usually in front of their family? Have we lost all pretense of courtesy and consideration in this day and age?

Then there is the opposite. The families who announce loudly (and repeatedly) at the beach that this is their Fresh Air child, just visiting from the city. The White adoptive parents who put clothing on their adopted child of color that announces he/she was adopted, that preemptively clarifies the underlying miscegenation question above. (WARNING: I find this blogger insightful and hilarious, but they use some stronger language.) It is becoming more common in the world of transracial adoption to hear this all-too-appropriate comparison: If you wouldn’t marry someone who is Black, Asian, Latino, African American, Haitian, Chinese, or Guatemalan (for example), then you certainly should not adopt a child with that ancestry either.

But back to the lying. The way people ask this question. The different set of assumptions and the treatment and looks our family gets when I am (a) out alone with all of the kids, and (b) out with my husband with the kids. These not-so-hidden guesses and beliefs, and how they affect the environment of my children–and the children of interracially partnered couples across our nation. These are the crazy-making false-notions that almost make me lie. Lie, lie, lie like a rug. Because the simplest answer (which should make it the most likely conclusion) to that second question, “Are some of your children adopted?” is “No”. Except that if I said it, it would be a lie.

I’ve done at least one thing I wanted to do as a parent: my kids automatically think groups of people where the adults appear to be caring for the children in any way (one or more adults, either gender, and any number of kids), my children view this group of people as a family. We’ll be back in the car and they’ll still be trying to puzzle out who the teenage girl was, and where her room in the family house must be (even when it was clear to me she was a babysitter).

If only we could all make our family viewfinder this broad.