I was considered for adoption…

Therefore, I do not consider adoption. Adoption is not an option.

Everyone could see I was not the fruit of my parents loins. That Eastasian child was obviously not related to that perfectly white couple. What a sweet fruit of colour she is, bringing some exotic flavour to our otherwise so monotonously white village. Pity that child will grow up and become an adult, an Eastasian woman. Whom will she marry and mate with? We all know what kind of men choose women of her kind, right? Let’s check with her if she plans to reproduce or import.

Ever since I was a child in elementary school, I have been subjected to questions about whether I would like to adopt and as that loyal obedient adoptee, I rejected the idea of having children OF MY OWN. Those forbidden words. “Don’t you know adopted children are just as “OF OUR OWN” as biological children. As if I was not a biological child; as if I was made up of some other strange material… So I vowed I adopt instead of having a child of my own, thus leaving everybody relieved.

As an adoptee, you are obliged to wanting to adopt. If you reject adoption, it is perceived as if you are rejecting not only your own family constellation but also that beautiful and charitable deed which is adoption. You are putting heritage before environment, hence disrespecting the love of thousands of adoptive parents. If your objection to adoption stems from ideas of racial mirroring, representation or post-colonialism, you are suggesting that adoptive parents are racist and that people of different colour cannot live together as one people. In fact, you are the racist.

As a child and teenager, I actually did not want children. I was never one for playing with dolls and babies equally bored and disgusted me. During my years at university, the thought of children was far away for natural reasons. I was a student in a studio. Should I bring a child into that kind of existence, after having been told throughout my whole life that poverty equals bad parenting? Of course not. I would not consider having a child until I had everything that is required when adopting a child. However, I was not certain that I would ever want children and this is what I told the man I later came to marry. I did not tell him why, since I honestly did not know why. I just knew it was not for me.

I met my future husband the same day I landed my first teaching job and the following years were all about learning the craft of teaching. I had no interest nor energy to consider children. By this time, in my early thirties, I got questions about children nearly on a weekly basis, since the pupils that I worked with asked me over and over again and so did their parents. When I got married six years after meeting my partner, my co-workers showered me with questions about – no, calls for children. Not wanting to share my inner thoughts on the matter, not even with my beloved husband, I chose to make jokes about preferring cats to kids and cementing the image of me as someone who should not even be trusted with a doll. I was child-free, not child-less.

Of course, I was told I would end up old and alone to which I replied that having children does no guarantee future company. I was told children is the meaning of life and that any objections you might have against children in general vanish once you have children of your own. As if I did not understand this. As if I were a child. And the closer I got to that 4 and 0, the more demanding the tone of those voices became. My jokingly evasive way of handling the questions generated that old familiar phrase. “You can always adopt”. And again, I felt that my objections against adoption were unwelcome. I would not be able to explain why adoption is not an option.

Because how do you explain such a thing during a coffee break with co-workers or in the classroom with your teenage pupils, something you cannot even talk about with your partner? How do you talk about not wanting someone else’s child when you are someone else’s child?

How do you explain that you want to see what you can produce when you are not the production of those you call parents?

How do you make people understand that since you lack roots you want to plant?

Today I have to live with the consequences of the choices I have made. I have finally understood why I never wanted children in my life and why adoption never could have been an option. Knowing this allows me to finally grief for the child I will never have. I pity the man whom I denied that child. My intellect told him he could leave, my separation trauma forced him to stay. I know what you are going to say; the choice was also his. As if choices are easy and a choice made cannot leave you with mountains of regret. By the time I understood all this, it was too late for everything; I do not want to have my first child by the age of fifty even if it were possible.

So here I stand after nearly fifty years of being child-free or child-less, depending on who asked the question in which context.

To the world I was child-free.

Today I am childless.

And adoption was never an option.

Korean adoptee in Sweden