There is a home video, made when you were about nine. You watch your nine-year-old self lead your aunt (behind the camera) off into the house, blithely walking past your mother as she sits on the couch. Stop, you want to tell the girl onscreen. Reach out and touch her!
It wasn’t my mother's prejudice regarding her potential adopted offspring that struck me; it was this racism infecting my adoption origin story. She hadn’t waited years and years for me because there was some baby shortage in our small Midwestern town. She had waited to adopt because she wanted an "all white" infant girl.
Openness in adoption means more than acknowledging the fact of the adoption, "honoring" the birth mother's decision, celebrating "Gotcha Day." Openness means that everything is on the table.
When my cousin invited me to her wedding, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat any of the auto-responses I’d stocked up over the years to get out of going home. Instead, I blurted out: “I’m super happy for you, but sick of pretending like I'm Single in the City -- like the love of my life doesn’t exist -- for the sake of other people’s feelings.” “So…” she said, “who is he?” “She,” I choked out. “Her…
Adrienne Celt's previous work for The Butter can be found here. The first time, you nearly died on Easter, at home in the greenlands of Washington. I was sitting outside at a restaurant in Arizona, having skipped a hike with friends so I could relax and hang out with the dog. The waitress brought me a pear and Brie sandwich, which sweated in the heat. I didn’t have the spirit for a hike I…
I don’t remember when I began tending to my dad’s back, but it must have been as soon as I was tall enough. He suffered from a kind of arthritis that left him dealing with psoriasis, and even though he’d mostly conquered the arthritis part after a hardcore round of steroids, he was left dealing with the raised, flakey skin. Every time he got out of the shower, he needed to put a special cream…
Years ago, two friends sat across from me at their gleaming kitchen table and asked if I thought they should adopt a child. It might seem like a strange question to ask a fresh college graduate still years away from becoming a parent herself. But this couple happened to be weighing transracial adoption, and I was the only adopted person and one of very few people of color they knew. We had recently been introduced by…
The end of Paris Fashion Week brings to a close the major shows of the Spring/Summer 2014 season. You know who has a lot of opinions about clothing? My parents! Though neither of them usually gives much thought to what happens on the runway, there is no shortage of critical fashion analysis when I go home to visit, particularly from my mom (see: “You’re not going out in that, are you?” “I don’t think that’s…
