Adopted by Rachel London

“Rachel, are you adopted?”

            I stopped climbing the stairs and turned in shock to face Giovanna Daoud.  My six-year-old brain could not begin to fathom why my classmate would think I was adopted.

            “No,” I answered thickly and I continued to make my way up from the schoolyard to the street where Giovanna and I could see my mother waiting for me at the top.  Mom was wearing sunglasses and a denim jacket and as she took my hand to lead me to the car, I wondered how someone could think that I was not my mother’s child.  I knew for certain that I was; I had seen pictures of my mother in her hospital bed holding me as a newborn.  It seemed perfectly obvious to me; why was it not obvious to Giovanna?

            It took me a few more years, and more queries from my peers, as well as adults, regarding the believability of my parentage, to realize that I did not look like my mother.  I also noticed that I did not get the same questions and looks when I was with my father, but I spent much more time in public with my mother than with him.  My mother later told me stories of how many times she would be pushing me along in my pram and some people would assume that she was my nanny.  I also came to grow jealous of my younger brother because he looked more like Mommy than I did.

            Now that I commute to school instead of being picked up and dropped off by my mother, I have an even harder time explaining the pictures of my family in my wallet.  Most of the time, I have to show them as proof of “what I am.”  It is a common question in a New York City public high school and I have a standard response when someone asks me.  If I am surrounded by friends when the question is asked, they will usually hoot and say, “oh, this is going to be good.”  I draw a long breath and trot out my memorized speech which is as follows: “Well, my dad’s family are Polish and Russian Jews and my mom’s family is from England, Wales, Jamaica, and Belize.  You do know where Belize is, right?”

            My cousin has the same problem, only on the opposite side of the color spectrum.  My mother’s sister married an Indian man from Trinidad, so my cousins are much darker than his mother and many people ask them the same dreaded adoption question.  Sometimes when we are each in public with our respective mothers, and we notice the “looks,” we deliberately lean over and give our moms big kisses on the cheek and say “I love you, Mommy.”

            Over time I have grown more accustomed to the general public’s shock as to the mix of my family’s countries of origin, and, unfortunately, I have even gotten used to some people simply refusing to believe me when I say I take pride in what I am.  Although it is almost a necessity in New York City it has been practically impossible for me to identify with a specific ethnicity.  But for me the advantage is that my group of friends is much more diverse than if I did solely interact with one group of people based on race.  Being mixed will always have its challenges, but I am comforted with the knowledge that there are other people in the world like me, who are not so easily placed in racial categories on the basis of looks, and, given the increased globalization of our age, there will continue to be many more.