So, I had brunch this past sunday with a friend of my partner who is suddenly going to adopt a child from China. He said he had an "in" at an orphange there and could probably have no problem playing straight and adopting as a single parent. He's going to do this privately but legally.
I know he has put some thought into it, he knows the whole process like the good asian that he is. But I don't know if he really has identified the reasons on why he wants to adopt nor do I know if he as thought any further about raising an adoptive child… come to think of it raising an adoptive child as a gay single parent.
Don't get me wrong he is a good man and I am sure he will be a wonderful father and being of Chinese decent I know that he will have a better understanding of the racial issues that may come up.
I put forth a question to him. Thinking back it was an unfair one. I said "Let's just say that at some time during the process you see something in a document you shouldn't. Or something was disclosed that shouldn't have been. Or in twenty years your child finds something in her records that went unoticed. Let say you find out that your child was conceived by rape. How are you going to handle that? Do you tell? How do you tell? When do you tell?"
That stopped him dead, and as soon as I saw his face, I knew it was a really unfair question to bring up. But a part of me wanted him to know that there are going to be some really hard questions to answer and some questions he won't have and answer to. I backtracked a little by saying that it was the hardest question I could ask and most other questions won't be that hard. I do feel bad.
I used to talk to waiting adoptive parents and a local agency. Some were clueless white parents and a few were people of color. I got somewhat discouraged though with the Asian adoptive parents. There was this sense I got that because they too are Asian that they wont have any problems because they have all the answers. There is more to this conversation than just race and ethnicity (which is a big part in itself,) there's separation, abandonment and circumstances that lead up to it.
My partner recently brought up the having kid idea again. I told him, that before we really come to any conclusion that we really need to think deep an hard about it. When we ask ourselves the question "Why do we want children?" we need to have more of an answer than just "Because we want one."
