It’s National Adoption Awareness Month, which is taken by many in the adoptee community, as a challenge to write every day about our experience as adoptees and our beliefs about adoption. While I can’t promise to blog every day, or blog everyday about adoption specifically, I am always an adoptee blogging. Adoption, the experience of being adopted, is who I am and clouds how I view and interact with the world. Some people try to boil my adoptedness down to the event, the legal action taken one day that made me my parent’s daughter, but being adopted is NOT just an event, it is a lifetime experience.
As a new parent, one of the things that is most often on my mind is how my son looks like me. Or how he looks like Boof. And the wondernment as he grows and changes. Because, I was 25 before I met someone who looked like me.
I was twenty five before I met someone who looked like me. And so I immediately began obsessing over features.
And here is a picture of my 1/2 sister, when I met her she was about 4 and the picture of me on the left is about 2.
Even though Potamus most often gets mistaken for a spittin’ image of Boof, he currently still has my blonde wispy curl hair and blue eyes. And there’s something about his eyes and nose shape that makes me think, in a few years, I’m going to be comparing his face a lot to my own childhood face. Even my parents say that he looks like me as a kid.
In college I used to get mistaken for a guy, and it used to bother me A LOT. But now, I can see perhaps that maybe they were seeing my father in me.
I am still trying to wrap my mind around genetics, and how little bits of me are now in my son, but it’s been helpful to be in reunion with my biological family, so that I can see a more linear progression of features.
boof & monk-monk 