Diversity: An Interview With Kay

At lunch, I hope that Ricki will ask me to sit with him. I would ask him myself but that feels too lame. I watch as he walks off with a bunch of Latino kids. I guess it wouldn’t work for me to eat with them anyways. They’re all speaking Spanish. My Spanish abilities begin and end with the following: “Hola, me llamo Flip. Tienes un perro? Yo necesito el bano.” A really stimulating seventh grade conversation that in English would be: “Hi, my name is Flip. Do you have a dog? I need a bathroom.” I don’t think that’s going to put me at the top of the popularity list here at Willow Tree Academy of Linguists. I decide to eat my lunch under a tree instead of showing off my language skills.

Internationally adopted children have many complex layers to manage. Not only do they often not look like their adoptive parents, and sometimes siblings, but they often do not speak the language of their country of origin. In Flip’s case, because there is a large population of Spanish speaking kids in his new school, and because they haven’t known him from his earlier school days, they have no way of knowing that he’s adopted, and doesn’t speak Spanish. Flip notices now in a way he never did how this divide both culturally and in terms of language sets him apart from the people he looks like. Many of our children encounter similar situations to that of Flip. Kay has two children adopted from Guatemala. Kay shares with us here some of the ways in which her children have benefitted from the living choices she and her partner have made.

NV Hi Kay can you tell us a bit about yourself and your family.

K I am a 61 year old Jewish lesbian. I have an MA in early childhood education and do consulting for Head Start programs.

I have a 31 year old son who was conceived through donor insemination. His donor is known and has played somewhat of a distant ‘uncle ‘ role. My son is 1/4 Japanese. He lives in NYC and is engaged to a Chinese woman.

My partner of 16 years is also Jewish. We have two children who are Guatemalan. Our son is 16 and has nonverbal learning disorder. Our daughter is 12. We have had ongoing contact with both of their birth families in Guatemala since our son was three and try to visit every 1-2 years.

We chose to live in the Bay Area for its diversity. Our daughter attends a school that is majority kids of color. She has been part of an all Latina Girl Scout group. She studies Spanish at school and all of her closest friends are kids of color.

Our son has been in special ed schools since third grade. He currently attends a boarding school in East Coast that is a fabulous fit for him socially and academically. He is happier than I thought he could ever be. However he is in a very white town at a school that has less than a handful of kids of color. We have made decisions for him based on his particular challenges that have put him in overwhelming white environments. That has felt like and continues to feel like the right decision.

NV Your family is diverse in so many ways. Tell me what diversity in culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and home mean to you.

K I think first off it means things are complicated. Less so now and less so where we live. We live in the San Francisco bay area our lives exist mostly in Oakland. When both kids joined our family we were living in New England and made the choice to move back ( I lived here in the ‘80’s-’90’s) in large part because I wanted to raise them where there was a much more diverse community. I have a 31year old son and the difference in terms of raising a child as a lesbian then and now is huge. My younger children don’t get questioned about that--- it is so much more normalized then it was back then.

Culture is tricky—My two younger children are Guatemalan and will proudly identify as Guatemalan but culturally they are not. We go to Guatemala every other year and spend time with their families but they are clearly American kids. Out in the world they are identified as Latino and when they were younger we would be at playgrounds and people would come up to them and speak Spanish. My daughter was in an all Latina Girl Scout troop for two years but it was very hard for her to ‘fit in’ and be truly ‘in’ as she was not bilingual and there were also class differences that I think affected her experience. During the meetings, the girls would often switch back and forth from English to Spanish and my daughter would miss out on what was being said. The conversations between the Latina girls were also all in Spanish. Although her school is very diverse, there is not a large Latino presence there so my daughter has very little exposure to being in the Latino culture. This made the group difficult for her to navigate as well. She eventually did not want to continue. She is pretty hesitant/resistant to being in all Latino situations—other than Guatemala of course. We have been part of a mother daughter group that meets weekly since she was in second grade (she is going into 7th grade now) that is aside from me all mothers and daughters of color. I feel there she has the mirrors and role models for growing up a girl of color.

When we visit my kids’ families in Guatemala we are aware of the differences. Even my son, who because of his neurological differences is not always very aware of social nuances, commented last year on how he walks and takes up space differently than the Guatemalan teenagers he sees. He commented that they take up less space and seem to have a humbleness about them. He also noticed how well behaved the kids are in relation to their parents. Just receiving a stern look from a parent brings a child back into line.

NV You made choices in your life that are directly centered around honoring your children, how did you make those choices and in what ways were they both rewarding and difficult for you?

K I think the two biggest choices I have made are moving back to the Bay Area and establishing and maintaining relationships with their birth families. Moving back to the Bay Area was not so hard. In many ways it was ‘home’ to me. I still had very close connections.

My initial reasons for attempting to find and establish contact with my kid’s birth families was first that there are so many rumors in Guatemala about Americans buying babies and selling them for parts--- I wanted my son’s family to know he was safe, loved and adored. We had not adopted my daughter yet. My son came to us the week of his first birthday. He was a profoundly sad child. He had been taken from everything and everyone he knew. We talked to him all along about adoption and that he had a birthmother named S. One day out of the blue he said “I miss S in my heart” At that point we began the search and first went to visit when he was four. The challenge we faced when visiting my son’s family is the tear we all feel. Benjamin adores his birthmother, grandparents and four brothers. They adore him. They are lovely, loving people. We all cherish the time together and I am at each parting left with the huge feeling that this child is my son and he is S’s son as well - only I get to have him all the time and she gets to visit him for a few days every one to two years. It is wrenching for her and me—for our son and his brothers they are just so happy to be with each other for that time.

NV You have a child with learning differences at a boarding school where many of his needs are being met, but where he is in the minority in terms of race. Has your son expressed the challenges of this to you either directly, or in ways that you notice that he may not? If so, how do you address these challenges with him?

K Our son is not very concerned about being in the minority in terms of race. For him, being at school where he is with kids who developmentally are like him and that he has a social life there is WAY more important to him. I have talked to him quite a bit, as well as the staff at his school, about him living in a much less diverse area and him being a Latino teenage boy who now looks like a young man. He carries a passport card with him and the school has a copy of his certificate of citizenship. We have talked about responding to police and/or ICE extensively.

NV Your children are growing up in a home with two mothers. Does that impact them socially, or in other ways both positive and negative that you are aware?

K I honestly don’t think it has a lot of impact socially. Some of that is being in the Bay area—it is so normalized at this point in the circles they travel. For all three of my kids I do not think there has been a negative impact. For my oldest there were questions growing up—‘what do you mean you don’t have a dad?’ those sort of things, not so much with the younger two.

NV Kay, you have provided your children with such rich and diverse opportunities in life – thank you for sharing that with us.