I am a Transracial Adoptee (I think)

“I don’t think of you as white,” she told me the other day, and I’d never felt so warmed by a truthful voice of a friend. 

And before that, a little interjection on my behalf in a meeting: “Shannon is a transracial adoptee, too” followed by my awkward explanation that “I’ve grown out of the term Heinz 57, but haven’t confirmed with DNA the exact label yet. To be determined.” And my nervous laughter. 

I have successfully put off sending in my DNA to both major companies, Ancestry and 23&Me, for a whole year because I am scared. There is no denying, especially after learning more about my maternal genetics, that I am half brown. Or as my paperwork puts it: “Mexican?” 

But if I get up the guts and send off my spit in a bottle and the results come back and I have the words for what I am, then I’ll have to admit the insidious racism that colored my upbringing, the gaslighting that convinced me that I was a white girl with “dark brown hair” and freckles who “tanned very well” and had “hair other women might be jealous of, maybe you should think of that.” I’ll have to grapple with all those weird moments at the grocery store when sweet old ladies would speak to me in Spanish, then make weird faces when I spoke back to them in English, all the fajita meat I missed out on because the closest I ever got was frozen chicken meat with “fajita” seasoning from Schwann’s. I’ll have to ask why they kept it from me, why they are uncomfortable with any terms, Mexican, Hispanic, Latino. I’ll have to cry over the culture that I lost, the music, the dancing, the queso, the language, the stories, the hair, all of it. I’ll have to look at myself in the mirror, try to convince myself that it’s true, I do stick out in pictures, and how dare my mother beam in public when people told her I looked like her. 

And do I really want to dissect my life all over again after I just got done excavating the complex narratives I’ve been spinning in order to reconcile with the lost stories of what I could have been? Well, yes. But I’m going to need some rest before I do. I’ve earned that. 

Until then, hey. Is it okay if I start using the #transracialadoptee hashtag? I’ve got a closet full of trauma that needs unpacking.