We attended a wonderful Chusok last Saturday evening. Delicious food, beautiful music/dance/drumming, wonderful friends. Yet, I felt sad...I look around the room and see families such as ours...mirror images which should be comforting (for lack of a better word). But, then I look again and see overweight, old Caucasian parents w/beautiful Korean kids. That's part of what makes me feel sad. I can't even explain it but I have felt that way before at a festival for Internationally Adopted Families. And I don't mean to be "weightist" since, until a few weeks ago, I was overweight--nearing obesity--myself (thank you weightwatchers!) and it's pretty obvious that I am old and Caucasian!
I think the other thing that makes me sad is that I feel the losses...the loss of biological connections for kids and parents. Not that it really matters...love beats genetics anyday, truthfully, but there is still loss and it is still palpable to me when I see families where the children and the adults are of different races. And, I realize that many parents adopted not due to infertility but many did suffer the losses related to infertility before taking the road to adoption. I feel those losses, too. With domestic adoptions the (sometimes) sameness of race masks some of the things that are (sometimes) apparent w/international adoption. I don't weigh the loss for the children and the parents the same, either...the parents still get to parent a child and have a family but they still get to know some of their own genetic history (unless they were adoptees themselves)...the children don't get to know a single person who shares their genes until they themselves have a biological child. I can't imagine what that feels like...I wish I knew so that I could help dd deal with it if she ever has questions/issues.
And it also looks silly to me to see the moms adorn their big hanboks...and even sillier to see the dads in hanboks. I wonder how KADs feel about that? Would they prefer their parents wear their typical American clothing or would they prefer they dress in traditional Korean finery? I noticed that one of the women there (an AP and a KAD herself) was just dressed in jeans (like I was)...and her son wasn't wearing a hanbok. Not that there's anything wrong with whatever one decides...just rambling thoughts!
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