Adoption Tearoom - open for business

[MediumPretty]

or maybe a place for me to talk to myself . Not as glamorous as the One Child Families tearoom, just somewhere to have a cyber cuppa and chat.

I went to pick DD (adopted from China) up from school yesterday. Whilst waiting in the playground I got chatting to the grandma of one of her classmates. I find playground chitchat hard work sometimes and I made a lighthearted remark about life since we adopted DD. The perfectly nice Grandma said "it's hard bringing up a child who isn't your own". She said that 30 odd years ago she had fostered two boys for what should have been a few weeks but they stayed with her until adulthood - one was still living at home.

I told her that we think of DD as "our own".

Silence followed then (as the bloody school bell still hadn't gone), I said something inane about enjoying having a daughter and Grandma said "I feel closer to my daughter, than my two sons who are not mine".

She didn't mean any harm with her remarks but it was an insight into how some people view adopted children as somehow less than a birth child and I felt a bit deflated

Just wanted to offload - will nip to M&S for some scones in case any one pops into the tearoom.

Morning all!

My DS's are now, in the main, well behaved outside of the family, however "indoors" they do let rip! I think with all children it is different. DS1 used to leak insecurity wherever he went but has that a bit better under control now. He still gets very stressed but manages it a lot better than he used to and is doing very well. I feel sorry for him though as he is more or less the youngest in his class and with emotional immaturity on top of this he struggles at school. However, at his out of school activities he is incredibly popular and fits in very well, so the issue may well be more to do with the school than him IYSWIM. We will see in September when he moves up. The problem we do have is that he is, academically, a very clever boy so we have struggled getting school to understand his needs. However the secondary school seem very clued up and switched on to the fact he is going to need their support so I am really chuffed about that.

Agree Hester. Yes in our case it was to do with both ethnicity and my husbands religion - couldn't place a half Muslim child couldn't place a half Sikh child IYSWIM couldn't place a Punjabi child so it came down to not just half Indian but actual states in India and of course the language issue. We were so open other wise - under 5 would consider disabilities etc etc I hope the changes are now being implemented - a lot of children have of course remained in care for these reasons during the period we have been associated with adoption. Yes it is to do with as far as possible not being obviously adopted and of course cultural heritage but surely the most important thing is to have a family rather than to remain in care wating for the ideal match as many of us have said on here before. And we do know of a few of these "mixed race after all" stories!

Welcome to the tearoom beemail

Thank you for going to the cash & carry Daisy, now someone needs to get an aspidistra!

Can we talk frankly about skin colour. I am white and DD is Chinese. What colour is she? (I ask because it matters to her). My ex-Bil would reply without hesitation "yellow" which of course she isn't. Being from southern China she is, I suppose, a light caramel colour. She is becoming more aware of the difference in skin tone to the extent that, when doing a self-portrait, she will use an inaccurately dark brown crayon for her face.

When we were doing the LA prep course the SW stated that 90% of the people in the world are black (or it might have been 80%). DH said "what about the 1.3 billion Chinese?" to which the SW replied "they are black" .

So do people from India consider themselves black? What are South Americans? Are olive-skinned Italians non-white? If DD is non-white, what colour is she?

is the small cutting from the 'other' tearoom not sufficiently aspidistra-y for your then Medium?

Oh, sorry, mistle, am not greenfingered and wasn't sure what to do with an "offshoot" - think I put it in the herbal tea caddy . Could Mellors pop in and cultivate it for us, please?

Easily done - good thing that that's a capcious teacaddy here though as its in a fairly big pot as it is - its just that the one in the other tearoom has taken on enormous proportions, despite JM's best attempts.

Pretty - DS has a similar "issue" (though it doesn;t seem to be an issue for him at present) and we have talked quite a lot about his skin colour. He is central asian probably mixed race with a dollop of Russian. His skin colour is virtually caucasian in the winter and peanut buter coloured in the summer - which of colour genetically makes sense because he comes from a region which is 20 below in the winter with risk of vitamin D deficiency and baing heat in teh summer! He seems quite happy with the concept that he is my colour in teh winter and has a "lovely brown tan" in the summer. He is more conscious about his eyes and asks why he has "chinese" eyes. I explain that he deosn;t have Chinese eyes - that they are Kazakh eyes and lots of people in Kazakhstan have eyes like him. Luckily we have many mixed race friends and several childrne in his class are not white.

We sat next to an extremely attractive couple in M&S cafe last week - she was polish and he was korean and we got chatting becasue she kept staring at DS. Eventually she said to me "we have an 8 year old who looks just like him"!

Luckily DS is very attractive [biased emoticon] so people regularly compliment him on his lovely eyes/smile so he doesn't equate how he looks with a negative connotation just a differnt one. I know it can be more of an issue with oriental/asian boys rather than girls who tend to suffer more from china doll syndrome (if thats the right term)

Oh mistle - and you were one of my favourite Only TeaRoomers! Why did have have to bring one of the dreaded a-words? Why???
I've been so good in the Only TeaRoom. I haven't attacked any A's, haven't even mentioned them. And I've been away from MN for so long and have just found my way back. And now this.

I don't know. I may have to take my goodies and the butler with me and trail sadly away.

No... - I'll be the better person. You can keep the goodies and the butler.

Bye.

Kew - we were all very of a peruvian friend at Uni who went home for reading week, same colour as us (pasty white)(Nov) and came back with the most wonderful tan - you almost did a double take. Its such a good thing to tan easily rather than burn.

JM - look, I've put it in the corner - if you sit over there you won't even be able to see it

Gee, thanks mistle... I'll just go sit in tge corner, shall I?

Cinnamon buns, anyone? Or poppy seed cake? Or iced lemon loaf? Or Okanagan peach pie?

Back to the actual discussion, I have a friend whose mother is Irish and whose father is Chinese. He is the most attractive thing you could imagine. I couldn't figure out what kind of a racial mix he was and asked him straight out one day. He likes to say he get the best of both!

GOT the best of both...
MNing on an iPhone. Not the best.

Funny thing skin colour. My daughters always refer to themselves as having brown skin which of course they have. They never refer to themselves as being black and not heard any Asians do so although politically.............?However younger one tans more in summer and older one can at times be paler than me - supposedly white. How many of us know what their mix is really though - I was very interested in a prog I saw a while back where they did blood tests on some white people to establish their racial mix. Most white people had some interesting mixes as you might imagine. Would love to have it done.
Any samosas in this tearoom or shall I nip out and get some?

Peanut butter colour - that's a good description of DD, too, and she is lighter in the winter; although when I pointed out that her face was almost the same colour as mine she was quite insulted. She's one of the few non-whites in her primary school (and the village as well) and I don't think it's a problem for her, she is very enamoured by her own reflection! I do wonder how she will feel when she's older as there are no Chinese role models in the British media.

I think I was put on earth to worry.

there's Pui from Cbeebies...

Like to find me some Kazakh role models? (please don't say Borat...!)

dd2 is caramel-coloured, and the most beautiful child on God's planet [preens at her cleverness in producing such pulchritude, till she remembers that - oh yes - she actually didn't].

Rather wonderfully, she is the exact same colour as my dp, even though dd is dual heritage and dp has two black parents.

She is lucky in that there is no shortage of half-black role models

dd1 and I, on the other hand, are the product of generations of potato-eating peasants, and consequently are the colour of milk.

helllo. de lurking breifly.
I like tea rooms.
I read some adoption threads as a number of DCs mates and various cousins are adopted or fostered.

Fab lemon drizzle cake. Thank you.

Good evening all :)

Honestly, I don't understand why a child can't be placed in a couple where only one parent is the same ethnicity as they are. There are so many children growing up fine in that situation! I understand why they are iffy about situations where both parents are a different ethnicity/race to the child, but lets be realistic, if they have one parent the same as them, I don't think there are likely to be problems with the other parent. It's no use holding out for a family who are the 'perfect match' when in all likelihood they don't exist. It isn't fair on the child

Now I need some help!! I seem to have managed to change the page so the whole thread appears in one page. I can't make it change back again so there are several pages, I don't know how, and clicking away and back doesn't do anything. Anyone know what to do, it's seriously annoying me now!?

Oh, and having had my memory jogged...I was turned down for a child once because we looked too different and the child would stand out! Her skin tone was slightly although noticeably darker than mine, and she had very bright, stand out eyes in a totally different colour to mine. Her hair colour was darker and she was very tall for her age. And apparently, that means I couldn't parent her

It was 15 years ago now, and if I had been matched with her, I wouldn't have my wonderful DD1, but at the time I felt angry and discouraged. And I'm a single parent, so anyone on the street would have assumed she looked like her father! sigh

My three and I don't look all that alike IMO. I can pick out similarities between each of them and me individually (and of course being biological siblings, DD2 and DS do look very alike) but all 4 of us together look quite different. You would only automatically know DD2 and DS are related

When my ds was about 3 or 4, he started noticing differences between people and asked about why some people have brown skin. I asked him what colour our skin is (pasty blue-white Irish skin) and he thought for a moment and said "beige".
I never did understand where the terms black and white came from because neither is at all accurate. Caramel and peanut butter are brilliant descriptions - I can totally visualise the colour of that skin.

Genuine question here: I was on school tour this morning and brought the suncream with me. I was doling it out on the bus first thing and the two brown skinned twins (African but here several years so not used to being under the sun a lot) said they don't need sun cream. Other non-white children (Asian, Indian) accepted the suncream so what's the story? Surely people with brown skin can still get sun damage on their skin?

Yes, brown skin can still get sunburnt, lettinggo. Not as quickly as us pale types, but it will still happen.

I thought so, Hester, but they were insistant they never use suncream and said their colour skin doesn't burn.

Anyway, the sun didn't shine on our tour after all I was tempting fate with the suncream.

How sad about that little boy who was still available a year after that couple were initially turned down for him. Is there no time limits laid down for finding the "optimum" match for a child before moving on to the "close enough" matches? I can totally understand that it's important for a child to be in a family made of his own cultural make-up but at what point does the need for a perfect cultural match damage the child more than being raised in a family where the cultural match is not as perfect?

Can I join in? I've brought homemade chocolate muffins :o
I am coming at this from a different angle having been adopted myself as a baby.I can honestly say that I never felt different from any of my friends growing up I was told I was adopted at a very young age by my parents. (yes they are my parents, they raised me, cared for me and did everything that a parent should do so they are my parents not my 'adoptive' parents as some people might say). Occasionally I have wondered what my birth parents are like but have never once felt the need to try and find them. my parents never made my being adopted an issue and neither did anyone else in our family , and to every one I was introduced to I was their daughter NOT Adoptive daughter (ok so I have no siblings but I do know other adopted people of a similar age who also have siblings who came along after them and they were/ are treated no differently from any other member of there family) I would hate to think that my parents felt any different towards me because I was not theirs biologically or that any one else would for that matter. It is nothing to give birth but it takes alot to be a parent !

yes they can but a bigger issue with non-white children in this country is vit D deficiency. DS doesn't have sun cream unless we are out in the hottest part of the day for at least an hour in July/August (or a particularly hot June one year). He always wears a sun hat due to the heat issues and damage to eyes but I don;t use sun cream on him on the whole and he has never burnt . I need sun cream way befre him (even when he was a tiny tot) so its pretty easy for me to guage when he needs it...

Lilka - on the whole people do assume DS's father is Asian. (well of course he is, but you know what I mean)