There is a school form in front of me with a box for race, and for years I filled in one answer for myself and a different answer for my children, at the same kitchen table, over the same cup of coffee. The form has no language for what we are to each other. Most forms don’t.
I am an Indian American adoptive parent. Tamil, raised between Coimbatore and Madras, now twenty-some years into a life in southeastern Pennsylvania. My children came to us through an open adoption in 2010. They are Navajo, and they move through the world as white children, and I am their brown mother. Nearly every resource I was handed assumed the opposite arrangement, a white parent and a child of color, and so almost none of it fit.
This page is for the parents the resources skip. It is also the longest-running argument I have with the idea that there is a single template for a transracial adoptive family.
What Is an Indian American Adoptive Parent?
An Indian American adoptive parent is someone of Indian origin raising an adopted child in the United States, often across racial and cultural lines. It is a small and largely undocumented category. The literature on transracial adoption is built around white adoptive parents, and the literature on Indian American family life rarely touches adoption at all. The parent who lives in both is mostly writing without a map.
My version is specific. I am a Tamil American essayist in an open transracial adoption, raising children whose heritage is Navajo and whose appearance reads as white. I cannot pass down the culture of my own childhood as inheritance, because it is not theirs by blood. I cannot pass down whiteness, because I do not hold it. What I can offer is the practice of living honestly inside difference.
Adopting Transracially as a Brown Parent
The standard transracial adoption conversation has a built-in default: a white family learning to raise a child of color, learning to see race because the child has made race unavoidable. I came to it already seeing. A brown woman in America does not need an adopted child to teach her that race is in the room.
That sounds like an advantage. It is not, or not only. It built a quiet assumption in me early on, that because I knew the weight of being looked at, I understood my children’s version of it. I did not. Their experience of race runs opposite to mine. They are read as part of the majority while carrying a heritage it tried to erase. I am read as foreign while standing on ground I have every right to. Two different problems, one family, and the work was learning not to collapse theirs into mine.
The doubled outsiderness is real. I am outside the white-parent norm that adoption resources assume, and my children are outside the children-of-color norm those same resources assume. We fall through the same gap from opposite edges. It is clarifying, once you stop expecting the materials to describe you.
Open Adoption From This Side
We chose open adoption, and I would choose it again, and it has been more complex than I imagined. Birth family relationships in open adoption are not a goodwill gesture you make once. They are a standing arrangement, a phone that rings, milestones shared, a relative on the other side of the country who has a claim on your child’s love that you do not get to manage.
From the brown-mother side there is an added layer. I am the cultural stranger in my own children’s origin story. Their Navajo family carries the lineage, the language, the enrollment questions. Their German family carries another inheritance entirely. I carry kaapi and Tamil and a different worldview. Open adoption asks me to keep both of those true at once in front of the children, to not let my culture crowd out theirs and to not erase myself to make room. Sixteen years in, I am still adjusting the balance.
Raising White Children as a Brown Mother
A stranger once complimented me on my English, then asked which of the children was mine. All, I said. The pause that followed is one I have learned to wait out.
A brown mother raising white children inverts the picture people expect, and the inversion leaves a mark on a child. My children have to claim a heritage their own reflection argues against, with a mother who cannot model how to be Navajo, only how to hold what the world would let them quietly set down. I cannot give them their culture. What I have given them is a mother who never pretended the question was simple.
This is the lane almost no one writes from, and it is the reason this page exists.
What I Have Returned to Over Sixteen Years
Sixteen years is long enough to stop faking certainty. The early essays I wrote about adoption were defensive, a little proud, busy proving I had thought it through. I had not, not really. You cannot think through what you have yet to live.
What I return to now is smaller and steadier. The school form. The grocery aisle. The graduation plans. The slow correction of my own first assumption, that shared experience of difference would be enough. It was not the beginning of understanding. It was what stood between me and it.
I keep writing because the Indian American adoptive parent is real and nearly absent from the record, and a category no one fills stays empty until someone decides to live in it out loud.
Common Questions About Adopting as an Indian American Parent
Are there memoirs or essay collections by Indian American adoptive parents?
Very few. The literature on transracial adoption is built around white parents, and Indian American family stories rarely reach the subject at all. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen sits in that gap, written by a Tamil American mother raising children across color lines since 2010. The category is real and almost unwritten.
What does open adoption look like at year sixteen rather than year one?
It looks less like a decision and more like a standing arrangement that never quite settles. The opening months were paperwork and first visits. Sixteen years on, the birth family relationships have their own weather: a phone that rings unprompted, milestones shared across distance, a claim on my children’s love I do not get to manage. The agreement we signed in 2010 turned, over time, into people we simply belong to.
What is it like to raise white-passing children as a brown mother?
Strangers read my children as white and take me for foreign, and the picture confuses people who expect a woman to match her family by color. Raising white children as a brown mother means I cannot pass down my own culture as theirs by blood, and I cannot pass down a whiteness I do not hold. What I can give them is a parent who never pretended the arrangement was simple. Their heritage is Navajo, and learning to hold it honestly has been the long work of our years together.
How is transracial adoption different for adoptive parents of color?
Most guidance for transracial adoptive families assumes white parents learning to see race for the first time, because a child has made it unavoidable. I came to it already seeing. A brown woman in America has always known that difference sits in every room. The harder lesson came from the other direction. My children’s experience runs opposite to mine. They are read as part of the majority while carrying a heritage their country tried to erase. Two problems live in one home, and the work is refusing to collapse theirs into mine.
What books do you recommend on transracial adoption?
I always start anyone new to this with the adoptee memoirs, because they lived what the rest of us only witness from the outside. Nicole Chung, Angela Tucker, Jane Jeong Trenka. After them come the resources written for adoptive families, and then the picture books my children grew up inside. My essay collection sits last, where a curator’s own book belongs. The full annotated set lives on my page of books about transracial adoption.
Where to Go From Here
- The master pillar: transracial adoption parenting, the full sixteen years
- The broader Indian American identity essays
- The reading list on open transracial adoption
- The books I recommend on transracial adoption
Authority sources for parents new to this: Pact, An Adoption Alliance on transracial adoption preparation, and sociologist Gretchen Sisson on relinquishment and birth-mother research.