Differences
I never realized how your friends are the frame that holds the picture of who you are. I don’t know who I am here.
Flip’s world turns upside down when his parents divorce and he is uprooted from the only home he’s ever known. When a child lives in one place surrounded by people who know their story and are familiar with their family, they have less occasion to explain and therefore scrutinize their own family make up. Flip’s friends most probably no longer even notice that Flip doesn’t look like the rest of his family. While many kids in the San Francisco Mission District are growing up in families that speak Spanish as a first language, Flip’s Latino friends will have known from an early age that, although Flip looks like them, he does not speak Spanish. Perhaps at an early age that would have been noteworthy, but with time it just becomes a part of who Flip is to them.
Moving to a place where most of the people around him are strangers and do not know his story heightens Flip’s awareness of both his color and his ethnicity. Being the only person of color in his family draws attention almost everywhere he goes. People are curious and at times insensitive about how they satisfy their curiosity. Certainly in our family, and in other transracial adoptive families I know, the questions that strangers felt free to ask about our youngsters, regardless of the fact our kids may have been present, served to make our children aware that there was something ‘different’ about their family and them.
“Where did you get her?” “Was it really expensive to bring him home?” “Where was she born?” Or when introduced to a sibling of a different race, “Oh, are they real siblings?” “Oh he’s so cute, did you get more than just one?”
Of course being different is something we should celebrate but as we see now more than ever, in this country it is often something that brings shame and negative attention. When Flip is uprooted from his home and community and finds himself in a school where he knows no one, and a town where most of the people in the grocery store do not look like him, his awareness of both his color and his differences become highlighted every day. And so his sense of self begins to crumble and shift. Everyday he must define himself to those around him which leads him to question the aspects about himself and his family that he once took for granted.
My child noticed how different she was when we placed her in a pre-school where all the little kids in the dress-up corner were blond-haired, blue-eyed or fair skinned and brunette. Even when our children don’t talk about it with us, each time they enter a new situation they are aware of how their family is different from someone else’s family, or how they may be the only brown person in a room. Although it can be a difficult conversation, and parents worry about discussing something they believe their children don’t think about, opening the door to this kind of a conversation indicates to your child that you are willing to go there with them when they are ready.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Have you ever had to change schools or the town in which you lived due to your parents’ separating, or a family move? How was that for you?
2. Did the color of your skin or your ethnicity play a role in making new friends and fitting in to your new school/town?