Differences: A Story With a Message

    I have been asked numerous times how I came to write Flip’s story, and why I chose to include in it transracial adoption, divorce, racism, and even mental illness. Sliding Into Home came into being when my own nine year old child turned to me one day on our walk home from the beach and announced that he was different. This was not the first time he had mentioned his feeling of being ‘other than’, and although it sounded more like a statement of fact than one of sadness and regret as it had other times, I wanted to explore what was beneath it for him. Ironically our conversation was interrupted by a neighboring family on a walk as well. This family just happens to be an adoptive family with a child from Guatemala. That day I left for a three day writing retreat in order to work on my travel memoir, a book I’ve never completed because the children in Sliding Into Home appeared on my retreat and would not let me leave them or their stories.

     I had no intentions of writing this book, or even the short story it started out as but because I’d forgotten my computer cord and my computer battery lasted only a few minutes I decided to pull out my writing notebook and pen and write a short story called Differences. It was going to be a story of celebration and positive outcomes to reinforce for my child that being different doesn’t mean being less than. What was meant to be short became long. What was going to be a story filled with positive messages and triumph became a tale of struggle and pain, growth and a realistic ending to a difficult series of life events.  

    I have been a writer most of my life. I started with my locked diary when I was eight or nine, then journals, then letters from years of travel abroad. I’ve never been a fiction writer however so the experience I had of sitting down to write a teaching story was new. The four children in Sliding Into Home, originally Differences, appeared on the first page of my notebook and in the two full days of writing filled one notebook and half of another. They took up residence in my mind, in my heart, and in my hand as it furiously scribbled their thoughts, feelings, pains and challenges. They did not, would not leave me for three years after that. They had a story and it needed to be told. I was simply the vehicle they needed to get that done. Flip, Kaylee, Flynn and Levi each have a story. In the first draft of Differences their stories were woven into one book. Then I was advised by a local author to separate their stories, give each one of them their own book. So I have. And the first one is Flip’s story.

    What I noticed as I wrote Flip’s story is that my experience as an adoptive mother in a transracial family, as well as a stepparent combined with my time working in a group home setting with adolescent children, street children for a year in Oaxaca Mexico and five years in a homeless shelter where we served mental health clients as well as families all found their way into Flip’s story. I think my own experience of being raised by a single mother, and having lost my father at an early age also bubbled up within the heart of the story.

    My work with children from hard places moves me deeply. As I mentioned here in my blog, young people do not stay on the surface of their emotions, they dive deeply into realms that are philosophical and frightening. Children who experience loss through adoption or divorce are more inclined to hang out emotionally in areas that are dark and inquisitive. Flip is one of those characters and what became apparent to me was that these children, Flip in particular, needed to tell his story from a place of deep emotional turmoil and pain. Flip needed to be in that dark place, and wanted parents, peers and community to understand just how difficult it can be to live in a world where family is not stable, where the color of your skin sets you apart from your family, and community, and where being different may be something to celebrate but it’s also a full time job for some.  

    When Zorba found his way into the story I wanted to jump for joy. Here was a man who wore different out loud. He was wild, uninhibited, funny, playful, kind, and yes plagued by the realities of mental illness. But for Flip and Kaylee he was the person they could identify with, who gave differences an entirely new twist.  

    But why divorce? Why did I need to bring that into the mix? Divorce, not unlike adoption, involves loss and missing parents. The separation of Flip’s parents, and the divide it created for him with his father, and in a sense his mother too, felt like a way to highlight those feelings that exist in adoption but that are often difficult for children to acknowledge or even recognize. Divorce served as an echo to the already existing pain Flip felt through adoption. This echo enabled him, and the reader to recognize the losses through an additional lens.

   Sliding Into Home has moved people who have been touched by adoption, divorce, and racism. I hope it will be used as a tool to open dialogue and encourage all of us to consider the ways in which our children struggle, and how their behaviors are simply a reflection of the full time job being a child of adoption, of color, or of divorce can be.