We were late and swim lessons were beginning. One child in the pool and the next almost in, I am focused and in full mom mode. Until a woman, a white woman in her 40’s, gets really close to my body as she’s passing and asks in a low voice, “is your daughter adopted?”

Huh? This throws me off my game. “No.” I reply with a look that says, “What the …”.
She is flustered by this and says, “Oh, well mine is and we’re always looking for other adopted children.”

“O.K. lady,” I am thinking. I’ve heard this before and just keep going on about my business.

The next day she greets me at the front door of the pool, as if she’s waiting for me, and gets in my face again. “I’m sorry.” She says. “I have been thinking all night about what I said to you and I feel bad. I’m sorry.”

Hummph here’s my chance, I don’t even think, I just react. “Well, it was pretty racist, don’t you think?”

“Yes”, she admits. “It’s just that we’re always looking for adopted friends for our daughter. I’m sorry.”

I say, “thank you for the apology,” and walk onto the pool. For the rest of the summer she avoids me.

I know I have talked about this a handful of times here, but it still irks me when people ask if my children are adopted. The funny thing is I was retelling this story to a girlfriend yesterday, who had more than a decade-long career at an adoption agency, and she said well, “she’s just looking for friends for her black child”.

I laughed and said, “But the child was white!”

So I wonder now to myself, would it have made a difference to me if the child was black. Yes, I think it might have, even though I hate it when people ask me if my children are adopted. I guess in some way I’ve joined this club of mixed race families, adopted or not.

But there was also this secondary rage that bubbled up in me from this interaction. It came later when I marinated on the fact that I was almost knocked down by a complete stranger at the YMCA as she sought to fulfill her agenda of finding all the adopted kids in the class.

At first I thought, why does she need an adopted playmate for her young daughter? But then I realized that was a subject I really couldn’t deeply understand.

Then I became angry with the fact that a complete stranger was asking me such a deeply personal question? So if my child was adopted, aren’t you now asking me about my journey into how this child arrived in my life? This was no longer about “Mr. Pasedena.” This is about a painful period of time where perhaps I wanted children and couldn’t conceive them. Or worse this child was a victim of being unwanted or abandoned. The speculations are endless, and this woman feels she has the right to ask because my kids don’t look just like me?

I understand that people are just trying to make sense of what doesn’t look “naturally” true, a white mom birthing brown children. But where does the line of being curious and being respectful end? My daughter came home from school the other day and reported that a girl walked up to her and asked, “Are you adopted?”

I look forward to the day when there’s no longer a question about our children’s parentage; the day when mixed race families are the norm, and its unusual see an all white family.