WAF member Augusto and his partner Michelle are parents of two-year-old twins through transracial adoption. In this blog he reflects on the complexity of being part of a “mixed” family.
My wife is Australian, her background is Filipino, I am Argentinian (I grew up in Spain), my background is largely white European and our kids are Black British. When we started the adoption process, we discussed at length the possibility of transracial adoption. From the perspective of social services, it seemed that an ideal match would be children whose background combined a Southeast Asian country and a Mediterranean one. This brought up one of the main issues for me about this discussion, and that is that the aim appears to be a visual match, it is colour matching not factually matching ethnicities or cultures.
To match our backgrounds would be rather impossible, we both have a fairly mixed background beyond the things mentioned already. If we were to have biological children, they would not match either of us individually. And this presented the question for me about what makes an ideal match in this sense. If my wife and I were to split or one of us die, then we would stop being ideal parents. A parent member of the LGBTQ+ community may be better prepared to understand matters from that community, yet, their generations are different and their experiences likely would be too. All of which is to say that perfection does not exist, so we really need the honesty to ask what is that we need to look for in a match. We use the euphemism of culture. We say culture instead of race, yet from a cultural perspective the match is still not accurate on likely any match made.
This is because we mix fact and cultural concepts and use them interchangeably as needed to suit our views. I believe parents need to be ready and open to adapt and learn what their child needs them to, so they can support them in developing their identity. Families by adoption will always be a combination of cultures, regardless of the larger cultural background of each individual, because families have their own culture too. And so, in our family we make a very conscious effort to develop our own culture which very much pays a great deal of attention to the needs of our children.
There are elements in a family’s culture that are special and extraordinary, like it can be Christmas traditions, and there is also the mundane, from every day. Things that one would not pay attention to unless one happened to be lifted out of that world and thrown into another. Those are the details that I think can make someone feel like they belong, it is the difference between integration and assimilation. An adoptee told me once about a popular dance in their cultural background that they did not get to know about until they were a grown up. In our family food is fundamental, it is tied to every single one of our traditions and things we do as a family. One of the first things we learned to make for our kids was Jamaican porridge. Since then, making it every Sunday has become for me one of our most special routines and what I hope will be just another Sunday breakfast watching cartoons for the kids.
