Each year, more than 50,0001 children in the foster care system are adopted in the United States. That’s more than 50,000 chances for kids to be welcomed into love and security, 50,000 kids who may feel adrift from their past, and 50,000 unique stories. To understand adoption, we need to hear those stories.
Angela Tucker ’08 is just the right storyteller. A Black woman who was adopted by white parents, she has dedicated her life to mentoring and advocating for other adoptees. Tucker is the founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, a podcaster, and the author of the 2023 book You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption.
Seattle Pacific alumni Andrew Shutes-David ’03 and Erica Shutes-David ’03 drew from their experience as adoptive parents to talk with Tucker about her book.
Andrew: I want to start by affirming the main title of your book. As adoptive parents, Erica and I have had many people tell us how lucky our kids are to be with us and in our lives. Could you talk about what it means to hear that?
Angela: When people tell me my adoptive parents are great and I’m so lucky to have ended up with them, I usually push back and politely say I don’t think there’s any luck involved in adoption — whether parents are awesome (mine are!) or not. My birth mother was not lucky to lose her rights to parent me.
Society’s view of adoption is quite simplistic. For example, people think we were adopted because our birth families didn’t want us or abused us. In reality, many birth parents (like mine) don’t have the resources needed to parent us. If they did, they would.
It is a balm for people to simply believe an adoptee is lucky to have a second chance or a new lease on life because everyone loves a rags-to-riches storyline. I am working hard to enlighten communities about the more nuanced complexity of child welfare.
Erica: That simple storyline also feels like a projection. In our culture, we want everything to be OK. We don’t want to dig into complications, racial complexities, or anything that messes with the story that we’re OK. At that surface level, your adoption story feels affirming. If you’re OK, then we’re OK.
Angela: Yes, people want to point to my wonderful transracial family so they can believe racism doesn’t exist. But it hasn’t been too hard to expand people’s viewpoints about adoption and to humanize birth families. I might say, “I wonder how my birth mom would feel if she heard you say that?” People often admit they didn’t consider that and quickly pivot toward a new understanding.
Andrew: Your book is partly about your search for your birth family, a search that seemed to accelerate when you were a junior at Seattle Pacific University. Could you tell us about your search?
Angela: I turned 21 while I was at SPU. At that time, Tennessee allowed adoptees who were 21 or older to obtain their original birth certificates, which I wanted so I could learn about my birth family. I borrowed $500 from my adoptive parents to pay for it. What I received back was redacted. I was very upset, and my roommates tried to console me. They told me how great I was doing and that I had everything I needed. They told me I didn’t need the information about my birth family. They were assuming it would be better not to find my birth parents because they were in the South and likely poor.
At the same time, my classmates and roommates observed my hearing aids and wanted to anoint my ears with oil to fix my hearing2. I had been ashamed to wear hearing aids when I was in elementary school, but by the time I reached college, I had accepted them. In fact, whether my hearing loss was hereditary or occurred during pregnancy, I saw it as one of the few remaining ties I had with my birth parents.
My friends’ intentions were lovely — they wanted me to be happy — but the impact of those intentions was very different. I was at SPU living in the Wesley Apartments at the time, and my now-husband was living above me. He helped me sort through what people were telling me and gain clarity that what I really wanted and needed was to know my birth parents.
Erica: In the Scriptures, we read of God adopting us into God’s family through Jesus Christ. It’s depicted as a divine blessing, but I think your book complicates that. If adoption is a messy jumble of love and fear and loss, what does that say about our relationship to God?
Angela: I recently heard somebody talk about grief. They said we shouldn’t be surprised when grief enters our lives. We should accept it, just like a friend — welcome it in and say goodbye when it goes. But, like a friend, we know it will come back. I love that. Similarly, when we hear that quote from Scripture, we may think about it simplistically: We’re all adopted into God’s loving family — how wonderful!
But, just like human adoption, perhaps there’s also a messiness to embrace. Perhaps it feels to us that God’s love comes and goes like a friend; like grief and pain come and go. I think that’s my relationship with God and faith. It is not static. And I have come to think that’s OK.
Andrew: You use author Betty Jean Lifton’s term “ghost kingdom” to talk about how humans build imaginary worlds to address questions we can’t easily answer. Could you share more about that?
Angela: We all have different forms of a ghost kingdom. It’s not simply relegated to adoptees. Some of us enter the ghost kingdom when we think about what life would have been like if we chose to go to a different college or married a different person, for example.
Ghost kingdoms are not nefarious. In fact, I encourage adoptees to enter this space, especially adoptees who were adopted at younger ages! It is not bad to wonder whether my birth mom was famous. But then we need to dig deeper: Why would I think that? What would it mean if my birth parents were famous? What if they were ordinary? If excavated carefully, those natural musings can help us make sense of our bifurcated stories.
There’s a tendency for people to believe they should avoid talking or thinking about adoption, but what we really need is for people to honestly share the full spectrum of events and feelings associated with adoption, all the good and the bad.
That’s the thesis of my book: There are a lot of adoptees who have wonderful adoptive parents, but that isn’t enough. Love is not enough.
Andrew: Another theme of your book is transracial adoption. One phrase that stuck with me was the term “color evasive.” Could you unpack that term?
Angela: People may be familiar with the term “colorblind,” which suggests someone doesn’t notice skin color. This is outdated language. I appreciate Stanford Professor Subini Ancy Annamma’s updated terminology of “color evasive.” As Annamma explains it, “When you choose to be ‘colorblind,’ you’ve made an active choice. There’s a paradox there: If you say you’re not going to see color, you’ve already acknowledged it.”
I love this because it doesn’t let white people rest in racial ignorance. In the ’80s and ’90s, there was this popular shirt that said, “Love Sees No Color.” If we consider the term “color evasive,” we can see that if someone has the wherewithal to wear that shirt, they are also aware that race matters and are avoiding it in some way.
Andrew: Were there ways your adoptive parents modeled an awareness of race?
Angela: Definitely. We lived in Bellingham, Washington. As I wrote in my book, Bellingham is predominantly white, and it is a former “sundown town” — a term for places that once directed colored people to leave a town by sundown.
Around Christmas, there were many ways racism popped up, and my parents made decisions around that. For example, our mall only had a white Santa Claus you could take a photo with, so we would drive 90 miles south to Seattle to have an opportunity to interact with a non-white Santa.
In our daily life, we would eat meals on educational placemats which often contained facts about historical figures, maps, and flags from around the world, or other materials that would stimulate conversations about the diversity and complexity of our world.
Andrew: Your book had my heart and head spinning. I found myself wiping away big tears as you related fraught conversations with family and strangers. I marveled at your adoptive mother and felt embarrassed at how other adoptive parents seemed oblivious to trauma, attachment, and family systems. Yet, as an adoptive parent who has had my heart wrung out by the challenges of adopting older children, I also felt defensive. Your guidance for adoptive parents in the book rings true to me, but I wondered whether it undersells some of the challenges of parenting foster kids.
Angela: Yeah, I have two related responses. First, it is so important to me that this book is adoptee-centric. I gave my parents a final draft of the manuscript and asked them what I got wrong. They told me they weren’t going to censor me, but my dad had a funny critique: “The one thing I’m so mad about,” he said, “is that I do not marinate ribs. I marinate steak. If you put that in the book, it will make me look like the worst barbequer.”
They also said I made them seem really great in a one-dimensional kind of way. I told them that was on purpose. Society already wants to focus on adoptive parents. My book is not about that. It’s about the adoptees. To make that a reality in my book, I purposefully painted my parents with broader strokes.
My second response is that people assume I speak on behalf of all adoptees. I do not. The same is true for my adoptive parents or other adoptive parents described in my book.
There’s a scarcity of adoption stories out there. It’s true that your experience (and the experience of many other adoptive parents) is not represented in my story. My book ranges in its stories, but they tend to focus more on people who were adopted as infants. I absolutely feel for adoptive parents who feel like the whole story is not being told here. We need more stories about adopting older kids, but that’s not what my book is.
Erica: When you spoke of your desire for the book to be adoptee-centered, it made me think of the word “feminist.” That term doesn’t mean women are better than men. It asks us to strive for things to be more equal. Likewise, being adoptee-centered doesn’t mean discrediting the experiences of adoptive parents or birth parents; it just means we need to have more truth-telling instead of shallow stories that put adoption in a cute box as if it were this perfect thing.
Angela: Yes, there are so many more perspectives we need to hear, and we’re not hearing them yet. This reminds me of the film American Fiction in which Jeffrey Wright plays a Black novelist who publishes a very complicated novel that’s not about being Black. To his frustration, it gets shelved in the African American section. This feels a little bit like that. There’s not a lot of room for me as an adoptee to speak in an adoptee-centric way without people compartmentalizing me.
My adoptive parents have become used to people asking whether they are OK with what I write and say about adoption. There’s this expectation for me to always think about and speak on behalf of my adoptive parents, as though they are being hurt by my words when they’re actually not.
Andrew: Speaking of your family, you stated it is difficult to speak honestly about adoption. I imagine writing a book about your own adoption was even more challenging. How did you maintain your relationships while telling the truth?
Angela: Thankfully, it was not hard to write my truth and be in a relationship with my adoptive parents. It gave us opportunities to go down memory lane, and even though they might have remembered anecdotes differently or had different feelings, they gave me permission to tell the story I felt and remembered. They were supportive and curious throughout the entire process.
My birth mom had a similar ethos. She wanted to let me tell my own story. I would share parts of the story that directly involved her to get her permission. I had to be careful though, because she has not had the space to process her trauma. I think this is the case for many birth parents. I did not want to hurt her or send her into a tailspin when recalling her past, so I used some different techniques. For example, it was a lot easier for her to speak in the third person versus first person, so I allowed and encouraged her to distance herself from her own story when interviewing her.
Andrew: Your book is not solely a memoir. It’s not just your narrative. You also include anecdotes and stories from your work with other adoptees.
Angela: Absolutely. I’m especially excited to share anonymously from some of the youth I mentor. They are unfiltered in their perspectives. I sometimes mince my words because I’m trying to educate and to protect; to be honest but not upset people and make them run away from the book, so I appreciate their candor. It’s something I’ve also sought in my podcast, where I feature a range of adoptee beliefs.
Andrew: In the book, I was really struck by the moments you included from the Adoptee Mentoring Society’s Adoptee Lounge. Could you share briefly about that?
Angela: The Adoptee Lounge is a virtual space where every month different adoptees from across the world gather and don’t have to tell their “migration narrative.” It’s such a blessing to not have to explain yourself.
The adoption researcher Robert Ballard came up with the wonderful term “narrative burden” to describe how adoptees feel the need to explain their whole story to strangers to make sense of who we are. We feel the need to go back to square one, and, all of a sudden, we’re telling the Uber driver we were abandoned, or we’re explaining to the server at a Mexican restaurant why we look Latinx but don’t speak Spanish. That burden to tell all of our story is one many of us may not even know we are carrying because we’ve been doing it our whole lives.
As the facilitator of the Adoptee Lounge, I actively teach adoptees how not to do that. I begin by asking “Who are you?” Then I tell them not to tell the story others taught them, not to share what happened to them at age one.
We are strangers — none of us have earned the right to know all those details. Instead, I have them tell who they are without that story. It may feel wrong to not disclose they were adopted, but they do not owe that to people.
There’s a strong desire to be with other adoptees, and there’s a feeling in the lounge that can’t be created with even the most loving adoptive parents.
Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees. The suicide rate is so high that we have Adoptee Remembrance Day in November. It’s not because they were abused by their adoptive parents. For many, it’s because they don’t have a space to say things like, “I don’t like it when people call me ‘lucky.”’ It’s amazing how many mentees I have who are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s tell me they’ve never talked about this with anyone. People waited until their adoptive parents died before they tried to learn about their birth family.
As we expand the Adoptee Lounge, I’m hoping to work independently with certain groups of adoptees — for example, kids who are adopted from day one. Their stories are different even from my story. They’ve had loving parents since they were born, yet that still may not be enough.
I’m also excited to be working with the nonprofit Think of Us, which focuses on foster youth and legislation. They train mentors who specifically support youth who were adopted as teens. Sometimes those adoptees have such different experiences in the context of their birth families that it can be tricky to have them in the Lounge. It’s important that we talk through the diversity of our experiences, but I’m also excited to have spaces that are safe for everyone.
And I’m excited to train other adoptees to lead as mentors. The challenge with training is that once adoptees have gotten to this place of enlightenment where they understand these dynamics, they want to turn on the fire hose and pour their insights on others. What we really need are “pebbles,” as my mom always called them. We drop pebbles in the water and watch the ripple. We may never know what the ripple touches, but that’s OK.
Andrew: Do you plan to write another book?
Angela: That’s a great question. At this point, I’m embracing this fun period in my life of going on a book tour and seeing people hold my book in their hands! If there is to be another book, it’ll likely encompass my thoughts around open adoptions — specifically, examining the limitations of the nuclear family model.
There’s so much we could learn if we all just knew our neighbors, and it doesn’t seem practical to me that two parents are the best model for providing all the things that kids need to thrive. We all need a community of people who love us and can play different roles.
The question people often have for kids with open adoptions is whether they were confused about having both birth parents and adoptive parents in their lives. The research says absolutely not. Some of those open adoptions could be excellent models for all of us. That’s something that seems very exciting to me.
1. Data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), U.S. Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children, Youth and Families.
2. Some Christians believe Scripture instructs people to anoint the sick with oil for healing according to James 5:14-15. “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.”
