Mayhem and Magic

Being a Conspicuous Family in South Africa?

We're planning our trip to South Africa now, which is very exciting.  Someone else (a travel agent we know in South Africa) is going the nitty-gritty stuff for us, like making reservations at places where we'll stay, getting a car, and that kind of thing.  Nice... 

I've been thinking about what it will be like to be a conspicuous family in South Africa.  When we met Sparkle there, I occasionally felt surprised by reactions we got.  Looking back, I'm not sure if I was surprised by the responses themselves, or just surprised because being conspicuous was new to us. 

And actually, there really were not that many times when anyone seemed to care in the least.  No one congratulated us or thanked us (like I've heard adoptive parents with children from China talk about).  A few (Black) workers in a restaurant were curious about our story and asked us if we really loved Sparkle.  They made mildly disapproving noises about the idea of a mother placing a child for adoption.  Once an older white lady kind of hissed at us when she looked in our stroller and saw that our baby wasn't white.  Very weird. 

But overall, not that many people seemed to notice our family, which was fine with us.  Except that sometimes I could not believe that not every single person wanted to stop and coo over this baby who was clearly the most adorable infant ever.

Here in the U.S., I think we handle being a conspicuous family pretty well.  Mostly, we just...  act like a family.  I don't want to blow off the significance of being aware of surroundings and aware of trying to make sure our kids don't get the spotlight put on them, but sometimes (often, even) what works best is to refuse to be uncomfortable.  We mostly do our thing, expecting to be treated well and not be questioned.  If someone wants to act like our family is odd or whatever, we don't necessarily make it easy for them. 

When someone asks, for example,  "Are they brothers?"  we feel totally okay with giving them a long, confused, blank look...  (long enough for them to feel just a bit uncomfortable)  And then saying, "Yes!"

(Here's another post about that question in particular, from a mini-set of postings in the category Adoption FAQ.)

That's kind of a simplistic summary, but you get the drift. 

I'm not sure if that's how it will work in South Africa.  I'm not sure what to expect.  Here, I don't feel too much obligation to satisfy people's curiosity.  But maybe in South Africa we might need to plan on being "adoption ambassadors" just a bit more?  Maybe we should be more open, knowing that many people in South Africa need to see a positive picture of adoption?  I just don't know.

(Are they brothers?  Are you kidding me?  They're so darn brotherly I can hardly stand it!  I so wish this picture was clearer because I love it!  But it's fun anyway, even if it is blurry.)

More About the Trip

Thanks for being excited for us!  I'm planning to blog about our preparations and hopefully throughout the trip.

What we know so far is that we will be in South Africa for just over two weeks, with most of that time spent around Pretoria and Johannesburg.  My parents are coming with us.  (Hooray!  And also, Whew!)

We started saving for this trip almost immediately after we came home with Sparkle in 2003, so we've been looking forward to it for a long time.

We have only one major goal:  Have fun in South Africa!

Even before we met Sparkle, we had some ideas about when we might visit South Africa again.  This may turn out to be flawed logic, who knows, but here's what we've thought about visiting the country of our internationally adopted child.  We don't want visiting his birth country to be a one-time-only event.  We want South Africa to be a real place for us, not just a travel destination, or, in Sparkle's mind, the mythical land of giraffes and Nelson Mandela.  If it's at all financially possible, we'd like for him (really, for all our family) to have a whole collection of memories and plans about time spent in South Africa.  At this point, we hope this will be the first of three family trips to South Africa.  (I'm cringing a little because it sounds... ambitious... to think we can go three times when so far we haven't even been back once.  I suppose we'll start saving again as soon as we get home.)

We want to go once when Sparkle is young enough to anticipate going to South Africa as an adventure, but not feel a lot of pressure to Explore His Roots.  We want him to come away from the trip basically just with a positive impression of South Africa, some exciting memories of time together, and a positive (if very tentative) self-identification as a South African.

It seems to me (and obviously this is just me, a non-adopted white woman), that it would be hard to identify with a culture and country that you know next to nothing about.  Honestly, right now Sparkle knows that South Africa is far away (he can usually find it on a map or globe but not always), there are lions and giraffes there but no tigers, and Nelson Mandela was president, and his first mother lives there.  I'm simplifying a little, but basically he only knows what we tell him, and has very little personal feelings about South Africa that are actually based in his experience.

Right now he may be too young to fully appreciate the experience of traveling to South Africa, but in a way, that's kind of the point.  I want him to grow up into the experience of being a Black South African American.  And having some personal experience of actually being South African in South Africa seems kind of critical to that goal, you know?

Already, I can see him exploring this a little.  He asked yesterday, "When we go to South Africa, will I still be African American?"

I think it's a darn good question. 

(I'm so proud of him, by the way.  Have I mentioned that?)

Somewhere along the line I read that sometimes an adopted kid might get nervous about seeing first family or traveling to the area where he was born because he wonders if he's going to get left there again.  We didn't want Sparkle to be nervous about that at all, so we have looked at the calendar to see the date we leave, the days we'll be in South Africa, the day we leave South Africa, and the day we'll get home.  We made sure he knew we are all going, and we are all coming back.  Either we calmed that fear pretty effectively, or he hasn't felt nervous about being left so far, because it hasn't come up at all.

It will be interesting to see what questions or expectations he has as we get closer to the trip. 

I feel like I'm rambling a bit now.

In the next few months, I'd like to blog about what we're planning to do in South Africa, our tentative hope that we might be able to contact Sparkle's first family, and our plans for visiting South Africa several times as Sparkle grows up. 

Tickets: Purchased

It's official.  We're going to South Africa!!

We're very excited! 

The tickets are purchased, so we're about $6000 committed to the trip right there. 

(We were committed anyway, we just didn't know when we'd go.) 

But now dates are set and detailed planning will commence!!

Fall 2008:  Mayhem and Magic comes to South Africa!