Speaking of Haiti

When my friend Karen adopted her daughter Jessica from Haiti she knew that she would face challenges. The problems adjusting to a new life, to a school where she was one of the only black children were to be expected. Jessica's terrible insomnia made for many anxious nights for her mother, and a divorce tested the limits of Karen's resilience. But through the years it was apparent that Jessica was growing up into an interesting person with a ribald sense of humor, and a sharp intuitive sense of people. However, it is one of the most intractable problems that Karen faces that has made me think about the difficulties of raising a child from Haiti in an almost all white environment and neighborhood: the problem of language. And I am not referring to what we Quebecers usually mean by "the problem of language" but rather something much closer to a universal human concern: how to give children the language to speak their experience. In any family this is a delicate issue. How do we speak to our children? How do we model for them the right words to make sense of their own lives? And how, as in the case of my friend, do we do so when the child's experience is so much different from our own, where we may inhabit the same household, but where we live in very different worlds. Over the years, Karen had noticed that her daughter resisted any talk of Haiti. She did not seem interested in knowing more about her origins and would say "I don't want to talk about it" when Karen pressed her. The recent tragedy in Haiti brought this issue to a head because Karen honestly didn't know how to speak to Jessica about her feelings. When she tried, she encountered the resistance she had grown so accustomed to. Finding common ground was always difficult because Jessica was acutely aware of the difference between her and her mother. "We're not the same. We're so different. We don't even have the same last name," she would tell her.

But, being a modern mother, she had been "friended" on Facebook by her daughter.  Two things on Jessica's Facebook page caught Karen's eye. One was that she had, like many people, posted a request on her status that people send funds to Haiti. A common enough request, but perhaps one that held more meaning than meets the eye. She had also posted a link to a YouTube video, part of an Oprah Winfrey show in which a mixed race girl discusses her inability to fit in to either the white or the black peer groups in her school. In the video, the girl talks about her loneliness; and Oprah, true to form, comforts her by offering inspirational messages of support from mixed race celebrities. Jessica seemed very moved by the video, and it quickly became apparent why. Of course she didn't identify with the black students in the video because, for her, the most important link was not with the students of the same race, the ones who looked like her. They were not facing the same struggle as Jessica because they had a group to call their own. The mixed race girl, like Jessica, found herself between worlds. Jessica's identification was not racial but emotional. Soon after seeing the video Karen was able to take a step in communicating with her daughter when she said "When you don't want to talk to me, it makes me feel lonely like the girl in the video." It was a small breakthrough, but Karen could see that Jessica had understood. Hearing this story makes me think of what challenges the adoptive parents of international children face. The child can't simply model her language on the parent's language. The words -- "family," "home," "different,"  "friends," "black," "white"-- don't mean the same things. But I think that children in these cases try to forge their own language with what is available to them. They will join the chorus asking help for Haiti, even when there may be far more at stake for them than they can say. They will insist "We are different" when a parent's love wants to say "We are the same." They will look for mirrors, even if what is being mirrored is not their face but their heart. My friend's experience has opened up far more questions than I can answer. I would like to hear from those parents who have adopted children from around the world. How do you give them the language that they will use to shape their experience? How do you learn to read their sometimes enigmatic codes? How do you find, or create, a language between you?