One of the grandmothers, a gentle woman in her sixties, turns to me and says, "Are your girls real sisters?"
I look at her. We're at a birthday party. It's a large one, kids everywhere, pizza boxes half-empty, giant cake decorated with Ninja Turtles about to be cut. Noise level: elevated. My girls, who were both adopted as infants from China, are in this mix, the 3-year-old chasing the 5-year-old, who is tackling the boy she calls her boyfriend.
Now, this grandmother. She often shows up at the birthday parties. She's been a part of this group since preschool, as have I. I'm taken aback that the question I so often get from strangers should come from someone I know.
"Are they real sisters?" It happens at the grocery store and at the mall and at the bank. I get sick of it. You don't have to be an adoptive parent to know it's rude to pry into the details of any family's genetic makeup. It's invasive. Would you ask such a personal question of someone who has a child who looks like only one of his parents? Would you say, "Hey, did you have an extramarital affair that resulted in that one?" Would you say, "Wow, sure looks like a donor-sperm baby to me! Am I right, or am I right?"
Most of us have filters preventing us from making those sorts of blunders. But when it comes to adoption, very many of us don't. I speak from lived experience. The real-sisters question is particularly troubling when, as so often happens, it is asked in front of the sisters in question. Imagine yourself a 3-year-old or a 5-year-old and some grown-up is talking to your mom about whether or not your sister is real.
Parents are born to protect children, no matter what it takes. So the natural tendency here is to go on the attack. "What do you mean, real?" I could say to the grandmother. Or, "Mind your own beeswax, sweetheart." Or, "What gives you the right to question the authenticity of my children's place in the world?"
Oh, you can get militant with this stuff. It's probably the same with any group of people who feel woefully misunderstood. Maybe at first you roll your eyes at the numskulls of the world, but at some point you get so frustrated, you decide to crusade.
I may still decide to crusade, but it won't be at a kid's birthday party. What stops me is a memory, the same one that usually puts the kibosh on things when I find myself in this situation. It happened very early on in my parenting years. I was driving home Amy, the college student who was baby-sitting for us. Amy, I knew, had been adopted from Korea, along with her two brothers and sister. She was sitting there in that passenger seat, and I don't know what came over me. "Now, are your brothers and sister your real brothers and sister?" I said. Me, an adoptive parent, with my adopted kid right there in the back seat.
I was curious! I have no other explanation. I was fascinated by the notion of a family of four adopted kids and wanted to know the story. I have no idea why I felt entitled to it.
Amy told me which of her siblings came to the United States first and second and third and fourth, and said there was no biological connection among them. She didn't color this answer with a defensive, or even romantic, hue. There was no, "But we're siblings in every way that matters and feel that our souls are forever intertwined." It was just a straight-ahead factual accounting. Having gathered myself, I apologized for asking, said I should have known better.
"People are curious," she said, with a shrug. She had many memories of her mother fielding inquiries about her adoption, always casually, and often with a shrug. The facts of her earliest years were, simply, facts. Her mother never treated them as something odd, or particularly interesting, or as a secret to protect, and so Amy never did, either. "No sense getting all worked up standing up for yourself," Amy said, "when you're already standing."
I've never forgotten the line. Any parent, any mentor knows this one: It's all about the example. If I get on my high horse and crusade for the proper use of adoption language in America today, I'm sending one message to my kids. If I forgive the questioner for the invasion of privacy that I, too, have been guilty of, I have the chance to send another.
"Anna was born in the Shanghai region," I say to the grandmother. "And Sasha was born in the south, near the Vietnam border." She nods, listens, seems satisfied with the information, but more interested in making a point of her own.
"You know, I just love your girls," she says. "I can't imagine our little group without them."
Now, see, that was important information I might otherwise have missed out on.
Jeanne Marie Laskas's e-mail address is post@jmlaskas.com.
