Building Bridges

As an adoptive parent, I struggle to figure out how I can best offer my children opportunities to know, claim, and participate meaningfully in the culture of their birth.

My children are Ethiopian, and so they will have an additional layer added to their identity because most people who will interact with them are not likely to recognize them as Ethiopian, but will characterize them as Black. Given the history of racism in the United States, we will have to carefully prepare them for what having brown skin in America means.

While I cannot predict how they will ultimately choose to identify, I do hold out hope that they will grow to be proud of their complex identity, and will eventually possess the tools to be able to navigate between cultures successfully. I recognize that it is my responsibility to help my children acquire those tools, and I understand that there will be times when I cannot be enough for them because I have not lived what they will inevitably experience. At those times, I hope I will be empathetic, and that I will never dismiss my children's feelings. I also hope that I will be able to call upon my friends to help us through the more difficult moments. It truly does take a village to raise a child.

By adopting children who were born in another country, we are forcing them to change their identity. They have no choice in the matter. As a result, I believe that we must also redefine our own identities. We are not white families who happen to have children of colour. We are now multicultural families. While we certainly don't become an honorary part of another culture by adopting a child from that culture, we can, and should, work to increase our understanding of the interplay between culture and identity.

We constantly expect our children to be the minority, but we also need to be willing to step outside of our comfort zones to create connections with people from our children's culture.

Finding ways to bridge American and Ethiopian culture is extremely important to us. If our children should decide to live in Ethiopia someday, I want them to feel like that's natural -- that they're not just strangers in a strange land.

Learning about Ethiopia is a family affair. It's just what we do. My husband, friends, and I regularly attend cultural events from Ethiopia and other countries around the world. When it is appropriate, we take our children with us. Other times, we go on our own. When our children begin to learn Amharic, we will learn more of the language too. And we plan to travel to Ethiopia regularly so that they can develop their own thoughts, experiences and relationship with the country of their birth. We do not want their only images of Ethiopia to be the famine, poverty, and devastation that the media tends to showcase.

When the day comes that the kids decide that they would rather go to a friends house than an Enkutatash celebration, they may have the choice to opt out. But that doesn't mean that we will.