Sharing Stories: An Interview with a Mama of Adoption and Divorce

Last year around this time I had the opportunity to audition for, and then perform in the Listen To Your Mother show in San Francisco. What was amazing for me about this experience was the way in which telling our stories to one another, and to a large audience, united us in a sisterhood that goes well beyond our genders. Sharing stories of motherhood with other women has always been a source of great comfort and support for me. Stories matter. They matter to the person telling, and to those that listen. It is an honor for me to listen to the stories others have to share because I grow each time I hear the ways other women, mothers, and sisters suffer, celebrate, conquer, and surrender.

I have had the great pleasure and honor to sit and speak with Nicole about her journey as a mother, a wife, an adoptive parent, and a deeply vulnerable and brave woman. Before our interview began, Nicole shared with me the impact Sliding Into Home had on her. She described the ways in which she found the grief that she had long ago buried around the pain her divorce had caused her children. She shared the ways that reading Flip’s story, and feeling his pain enabled her to feel the sorrow she had been unable to tolerate years ago when she sat down with her husband to tell their children that they were separating.

I was deeply moved by how Sliding Into Home touched Nicole. I invited her to tell me her story. Here it is.

NV Can you share with me how you came to adopt your son Lucas?

NZ I Always thought I would adopt, I’d make two children, and adopt two. So when I was in the park in Oakland with my daughter Alexa who was one or two years old at the time and saw this woman there who had two Mayan babies I asked her about her family. I had experienced giving birth and I knew there were so many beautiful kids I could love equally. I just knew I wanted to adopt. I went home and spoke with my husband and we decided to adopt a child. We knew we wanted to get a baby from a healthy situation, and as young as possible. We considered adopting from Guatemala or Vietnam and wanted a boy since we had a girl already. We were told that our child could be placed in a foster home rather than an orphanage if we adopted from Guatemala so we went with that. It took nine months to bring our child home, the same amount of time it took to birth my daughter.

NV How old were your kids when you and your husband separated?

NZ Lucas was ten and Alexa thirteen when we seperated. The image of him when we told him was just like in your book. He sat in his special chair. It was horrible. We were fighting a lot. Our unhappiness was leaking out. We both realized we couldn’t stay in that situation, it was brutal but I had no choice. I felt that if we didn’t divorce everything would collapse. I felt responsible for the pain our separation caused our children because I was unwilling to live in that situation.

Alexa was in middle school. She put on the “I knew it was going to happen,” face as she knew a bit of what was going on. Lucas looked like someone had driven a truck into him. Lucas had Tourettes Syndrome. His tics would come and go, but when we told him about our separating his tics ceased. It was as if the devastation was so extreme in that moment even his Tourettes was suspended. He was in disbelief, and was furious with me. Just like Flip’s relationship with his dad in Sliding Into Home Lucas loved me, but he worshipped his dad. His dad was an emotionally safer parent. Lucas didn’t want to feel all his feelings, or talk about his adoption or our transracial family, his goal was to fit in and be like everyone else. His dad was less reactive around Lucas’s physicality as well. Of course, I was the stay at home mom and around it all the time.

NV Did your separation change the relationship between Lucas and Alexa?

NZ We started out doing the usually prescribed back and forth: the kids were with dad every other weekend and Wednesdays. But the kids had different needs. Alexa refused to go to her dad’s. Lucas was overwhelmed and angry with me, he didn’t want to go back and forth, he wanted his dad back in the house. This is where our kids began to take sides. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at this time as well. I was very depressed. Alexa didn’t want to leave me, I think this made Lucas feel left out. He wanted to be closer to his dad. We then began a week on week off schedule.

When Alexa was in tenth grade, and Lucas in seventh I was offered a job in Seattle. I hadn’t worked in fifteen years but given our new situation I felt I had to take the job. Alexa wanted to come with me. Lucas wanted to stay with his father. The kids would visit the other parent one weekend each month. Lucas said he was fine with it, enjoyed the trips, but I think he felt abandoned. Alexa felt disappointed in her father because of what he’d done. Eventually Lucas didn’t want to move up to Seattle and Alexa was suffering a post concussion so I moved back to the Bay area and got a house closer to my children’s father. We returned to a week on and a week off with both kids for a little over a year. Once they were each 16, they chose to live where they preferred which meant that Alexa stayed with me and Lucas with their dad with every other weekend visits. It was tough.

NV Can you talk about the ways you as an adoptive parent in a transracial family of divorce related to Sliding Into Home.

NZ In the beginning when Kaylee was born I was reminded of when I brought Lucas home. I never thought about skin color being an issue when I saw my kids together. My belief was that love would solve everything. But the hard lesson I had to learn was that love doesn’t solve everything; the color of our skin, adoption, Tourettes and divorce do matter. I walked into transracial adoption with a pollyanna sort of attitude. My love would protect Lucas from everything – and then my family fell apart. What had great impact on me was the way that in the book Flip’s family found a way to stay solid together. My family did not. Flip’s parents did not put the kids between each other.

When Flip and Kaylee were exploring the houseboats in Sausalito and found Zorba it brought back great memories of when my kids were young having adventures in the yard. They were friends then. Our kids went through what we went through with the divorce and they haven’t found each other again. Now that they are older I have hopes they will.

NV How was Sliding Into Home of value to you?

N It helped me to see what I couldn’t allow myself to see during our break up because it hurt so much. I could hear what Flip was saying and I knew it was how my own son felt. I could really feel it now, and accept it. It was so overwhelming to see my son’s pain at the time of our divorce I couldn’t take in the magnitude of what it was doing to him. In the book because it was Flip and not my son my heart could open to his pain, I could feel it all. I found myself sobbing through the story because I could finally allow myself to feel the grief.

Sliding Into Home was helpful in the way that if normalized transracial adoption, and divorce. Being adopted, being a different color than other people in your family, and a child of divorce can all make you feel really different. Lucas never wanted to be the ‘adopted kid’. He didn’t want to go to groups for trans-racially adopted kids, he wanted to be on a sports team like his schoolmates. Lucas was bullied because he was different, not because of his skin color but because of his Tourettes Syndrome. He dealt with racism but I don’t think he was aware of it – he seemed ‘white inside.’ I know he was followed at the Rite Aid, but he didn’t know he was being followed.

I think also for the siblings of adopted kids this book has value. There are so many things kids don’t know how to talk about. Sliding Into Home helps them understand what it’s like to be the person adopted, and how it feels to be the only person of color in a family. I think it should be required reading for transracial families of adoption. It’s really hard to know when you are a sibling or even a parent how your adopted child feels.

I wonder if I had read this before if I would have taken a different path. Lucas’s behavior became the focus in the family. He was a real challenge for us. But your book gives one the opportunity to see the feelings beneath the behavior. In the book Flip has a story to tell, you can hear his thoughts not his words – that’s what we need to hear, the thought bubbles – we get caught up with what they do rather than what they feel. The book allowed me to create enough distance from my own child’s behaviors at the time to understand them.

Your book really helped me a lot. I didn’t realize how unhealed and painful those years still were. In fact, what I realized by reading this book is that it triggered some of the old traumas that remained within me from my divorce, my own parents’ divorce, and then I could see through my son’s eyes the pain of his past and his present. I loved the book. For me it was affirming and it showed me there is a way to go through something painful and survive – you can go through it and you will be ok.