A long time ago, the term “passing” referred to black people with such fair skin they passed as white people. I could write an extensive commentary about my views on that whole topic, but I’ll stay focused.

In our family, we’ve recently been talking about the idea of “passing” as a biological child. People never question whether Tess is our bio child, but Remy is always visibly “other”. It seems unfair that Tess can “pass” so easily, yet her brother stands out so starkly. It shouldn’t make a difference one way or another and it hasn’t, but it does lead to uncomfortable conversations. I almost feel like I “out” Tess sometimes almost in solidarity for her brother, but that feels weird and blurty too – especially knowing her birth parents picked us partially because we look like them. I wonder if I’m betraying their intention in (perhaps unnecessarily) protecting my second child.

Where’s the line between openly proud of adoption vs our kids’ privacy? With Remy on our hip, we wear the adoption badge as a family everywhere we go. We are super proud of our children, feel honored by their birthparents, and delight generally in our family experience. We are lucky, lucky people to have each other! Still, the opinions about sharing in adoption vary as much as opinions about putting kids’ photos or stories online.

We’ll play it by ear as we do everything else – but we definitely feel like we have another year or so to experiment before it really starts to count. The pressure to successfully model adoption speak for our kids definitely looms!

On a more realistic scale, we had a great weekend with the kids and friends, at brunch and in the park. It even got slightly warmer out, so we could revel in the coming spring.