Five Questions with Cheri Register

(View Biography)

Last month, you asked Cheri Register some tough and direct questions regarding race and adoption. Cheri has answered five of the most common questions with grace and candor. She has given us all a lot to think about.

Thank you, Cheri for your wisdom and honesty.

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1. When did you come to the realization that race matters? Was there a defining moment, did something specific happen?

Because I had been peripherally involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I came to adoption “knowing” that race was a critical issue. Yet I had little idea how soon and how deeply it would affect my daughters’ daily experience. There have been many revealing moments. The first was the day my not quite two-year-old toddled around in a group of children and identified each one. “Baby, baby,” she said as she pointed at the Caucasian children in turn. When she came to the three Asian children, she called them her own name. And then there was the day my younger daughter, who takes a quick census of every crowded room she enters, discovered that she and her sister were the only non-Caucasians in our entire extended family. She was scandalized and I thought, yes, it is shocking. What I have come to feel most sorely is what one daughter calls her “perpetual foreigner” status. It comes clear in the stupid questions people ask, like “Where are you from?” or “How did you learn to speak English so well?” The notion that they don’t really belong here turns Asian Americans invisible—in public life and in popular culture. It still hurts to think how excited my daughter was about buying her first Teen magazine and how she thumbed through it looking in vain for the Asian faces. I encouraged her to write to the editor, which she did. I truly believed she’d get a response, which she didn’t.

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2. Do you have any regrets about the way you raised your 2 daughters? What would you do differently?

If I had it to do over, I would choose a different neighborhood to live in, one with a greater diversity of people and closer proximity to ethnic neighborhoods so we would all cross paths more often and more naturally. I’m glad that my daughters did go to a high school with a diverse student body. I would also try to find ways to move beyond tokenism in our engagement with Korean and Asian American culture. I’m still not sure how we might accomplish that within the frame of our family life, without pushing to “cultivate” Korean American friends, for example. I’m always interested to hear how other families achieve a familiarity with their children’s ethnic group that’s entirely mutual and not self-serving. Ideally, I would have spared my children a divorce that has been a second abandonment. But that would mean rewinding my life back to age 19 and paying more attention to that other guy.

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3. What advice would you give to prospective adoptive parents contemplating international adoption?

First, adopt from a country with which you welcome a long-term relationship. If you would never consider living for a time in a certain country and can’t imagine marrying a person of that ethnicity, then don’t adopt a child from that country either. Read, listen, learn. Be humble about your aspirations as a parent and be ready to hear what adult adoptees and older parents have to tell you. Stay in touch with other adoptive families so that you have a peer support group in place whenever you need it. Look to those families to help discern what is “normal” for your children. Love your children unconditionally and treasure all that they bring into your lives. Don’t expect to remake them in your own image.

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4. What advice would you give to parents who are “in it” and just beginning the pre-teen and teen period?

Remember how mouthy/rebellious/withdrawn/secretive/risk-taking/insecure/whatever you were as a teenager? Keep that image of yourself in mind and never forget that adolescence is a rough time for almost everybody. For kids who have been displaced from birth family and country and culture, adolescence can be marked by feelings of isolation and abandonment that lead to anger and/or despair. Mostly this is normal, but stay alert for signs of self-destructive behavior. Be a safe haven for your kids. Listen to them and be grateful whenever they confide in you, even if what they say makes you uncomfortable. Yes, they may scream at you and dump all over you, especially if they trust you not to run away. Seek support from other adoptive parents, and rail with them about your ornery kids when you need to blow off steam. Learn to recognize when your kids are hurting and can benefit from professional help, then choose a therapist familiar with international adoption and its norms of teenage behavior.

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5. What would you say to parents that may react defensively about the race issue and being white?

What do we parents want most of all for our children? Is it happiness? Security? Success? A kind heart? Their achievement of these goals requires confidence about who they are and a place of comfort and safety in a world where many people ignore, stereotype, misperceive, fear, or even hate them because of the way they look. How will we help them mature if the mention of race makes us uncomfortable or defensive? To equip ourselves to raise children of a race different from ours, we need to come to terms with ourselves as racial beings. In the realm of race, white is not a neutral color. We white people are not the basic form of human being from which all others depart. We are as marked by our race as those “others” are by theirs. As we set out to raise our kids, we need to examine—by reading, listening, studying, remembering—how being white has shaped our lives. What we don’t figure out, our kids may tell us. They have some valuable lessons to teach us.

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Our next featured guest is Tiffany Morrison, owner of Mix It Up, a new line of greeting cards for interracial couples and multiracial consumers (www.Mix-It-Up.net).