Cultural Appropriation, the sequel

First of all – I got two comments in one day – woo hoo!! It does feel nice to know that at least a couple of people are reading this, and that it’s not just me talking to myself. Well, OK, it is mostly me just talking to myself – but it’s nice to know that others like to peek in from time to time.

So, AntiM’s comment on my “questions” post, made me think a little bit more about the question of cultural appropriation and why I worry about it. I’m not as concerned about offending people in general as I am with giving the C.T. the space to figure out who she is for herself. I feel that there is a fine line between, on the one hand, trying to make sure that she is comfortable in her own skin (as much as I can) and comfortable and proud of her Chinese heritage and, on the other hand, not going so much overboard with the embracing of the Chinese culture that it becomes more about me than about her.

With regard to the mother necklace, I can see a couple of sides to it. On the one hand, again, it could represent to the C.T. (like it does to me) that I am absolutely and forever her mother and that she will always have the same place in my heart that she would have had if I had borne her myself. On the other hand, I don’t want to diminish or ignore her birth mother and her birth father and their role in her life. Somehow, someday, she is going to have to come to terms with the fact that she will likely never know who they are or why they chose not to raise her. I can love her and support her and be there to listen and help her process her feelings about that, but I can’t make that fact go away and I can’t ignore the fact that they will always be a part of her life.

One of the best things that my parents ever did for me was to let me decide for myself what my feelings and relationship would be with my father. They didn’t try to force me to have feelings for him that I didn’t have – but they didn’t badmouth him either, even though there were lots of negative things they could have said about him as I grew up. I can’t say the same about him. Some of my most powerful memories of my father are the negative things he said about my mother and stepfather. And it always affected how I felt about him more than it affected how I felt about them. I want to give the C.T. the same freedom. The freedom to choose how she feels about her birth parents. The freedom to choose how much or how little she wants to assimilate into the majority culture. The freedom to discover and to be herself.

I have more thoughts on this, but it’s late and I need to go to bed.

To be continued.