Lakshmi Iyer is a Tamil American essayist and adoptive mother whose work examines transracial adoption from the adoptive parent’s side. For more than fifteen years she has written about open adoption as an ongoing relationship rather than a closed event, the legal architecture of family-making, what it means for a brown mother to raise white children, reunion with birth parents, and the ethics of putting your own kin on the page. The pieces gathered here trace it: the decision to adopt, the years after, and the questions it keeps reopening.
For years I looked for the book that described my family and never found it. The adoption shelf held white parents and children of color, in that order, every time. Never a brown mother and the children who read as white to the rest of the world. This began, in part, as a search for a book that was not there.
Transracial adoption parenting is the raising of a child of a different race than the parent. The version most people picture is white parents and children of color. Mine runs the other direction. I am a Tamil American mother. My children read as white to almost everyone who meets them, and they are Navajo. We have lived sixteen years in an open adoption, both birth families in contact, the door never fully closed.
What follows is the reference I wish someone had handed me back then. Underneath it sits the longer essay, the actual sixteen years.
What Is Transracial Adoption Parenting?
Transracial adoption parenting is the ongoing work of raising a child whose race differs from your own, and of doing it well enough that the child does not have to manage your discomfort on top of their own questions. It is not a one-time event finalized in a courtroom. The relationship with race lasts as long as the family does.
In practice it asks a parent to learn a history that is not theirs, to find mirrors for a child the wider world will not always provide, and to stay in the conversation about difference long after the paperwork is filed. The child does not have agency in this decision. The parent chooses all of it, then spends years making sure the child is not the one who pays for a choice that was never theirs.
How Open Transracial Adoption Differs From Closed Adoption
Open transracial adoption keeps the birth family present in some ongoing form: letters, visits, a phone that rings on a birthday. Closed adoption seals that contact and the identifying records behind it. The difference is not a detail. It decides what a child can ever know about where they come from.
| Open transracial adoption | Closed adoption | |
|---|---|---|
| Contact with birth family | Ongoing, in some agreed form | Sealed; little or none |
| Access to origin and medical history | Available, evolving | Often blocked until adulthood, if then |
| What it asks of the adoptive parent | Hold two relationships at once, across racial difference | Hold the child’s questions largely alone |
| The child’s later search | Already underway, supported | Frequently begins from zero |
Open adoption did not make any of this simpler. The birth family is a person, not a file, with a phone number and a birthday and a claim on the child that predates mine. Birth family relationships in open adoption ask the adoptive parent to share a child’s love rather than guard it. No brochure prepared me for that.
What Adoptive Parents Wish They Had Known
That a brown mother is not exempt from the work simply because she also knows what it is to be looked at twice. My children’s experience of race is not mine, and assuming otherwise comes with its own danger.
That the hard questions arrive late and stay. Not at five, when the answers are picture-book sized, but at eleven, at fourteen, when a child knows enough to ask why they are not with their family of origin and why they cannot be.
Who Writes About Transracial Adoption From The Adoptive Parent’s Side
Begin with adoptees. Nicole Chung, Angela Tucker, Susan Devan Harness lived what I have only witnessed from the next chair, and any reading on this subject that puts the parent first has the order wrong. The book list I keep starts with their voices for that reason.
I write from the adoptive parent’s side, which is a narrower and more compromised vantage, and I try not to smooth its contradictions into something flattering. I am a Tamil American essayist who has lived this arrangement of race and family. The view from here is partial. It is also rarely written down, which is the only reason I keep writing it.
Raising White Children As A Brown Mother
At the grocery store people have asked, kindly, whether I am the nanny. My children have a Navajo great-aunt and a brown mother and a last name that belongs to neither. They move through the world as white children. They are not only that, and the gap between how they are perceived and what they carry is an experience we have navigated since 2010.
A brown mother raising white children is not the story transracial adoption usually tells. There is no script for the parent who is herself a minority, who cannot hand down whiteness and would not if she could, who has to help children hold a heritage the world keeps overlooking.
For the full arc of this, see the Indian American adoptive parent essays. For the books I trust on this subject, start with the reading list on open transracial adoption and the seventeen books I recommend on transracial adoption.
Authority sources I point parents to: Pact, An Adoption Alliance for transracial adoption preparation, and sociologist Gretchen Sisson for the research on relinquishment and birth mothers.
January 2010. A hotel room in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Two infant girls sleeping in a portable crib while I stood at the window watching the parking lot lights flicker. My husband beside me, both of us too wired to sleep. We had flown in from Pennsylvania the day before. The girls were ten months old. I was thirty-five. I had never changed a diaper.
That is one version of how this started. There are others. The phone call from our adoption agency. The years of failed fertility treatments. A girl in Chennai watching her grandmother fold jasmine into her braid, never imagining she would build a family that looked nothing like hers.
Adoption does not have a single origin point. Neither does writing about it.
I am a Tamil American woman. My children are white. They were born in March 2009 and came home to us in January 2010. They are seventeen now. I have been writing about transracial adoption, open adoption, identity, and motherhood for more than fifteen years. The writing is a record, kept honestly, because nobody was writing from where I stood.
Most transracial adoption narratives in America move in one direction: white parents, children of color. Our family reverses the arrow. I am the brown mother. My children are the white ones. When people talk about transracial adoption, they rarely mean us. When I write about it, I am writing from inside that gap.
What Wanting Could Not Do
Before the girls arrived, people asked whether we were sure. They asked it gently, which made it worse. I wrote about the decision in So, You Want To Adopt? and again, more sharply, in Adoption: Do Not Adopt Unless You WANT To. What I kept circling was not whether I wanted children. I wanted them with a hunger that embarrassed me. It was whether wanting was enough.
It is not. Wanting gets you through the paperwork and the home study and the waiting. It does not prepare you for the moment your daughter asks why her skin does not look like yours and you realize she is asking a question you cannot answer with love alone. It has a history and a politics. It has a body too. Hers, and the bodies of the people who made her.
I wrote about this in Why Can’t We Talk About The Money? because the economics of adoption decide who adopts whom, and those conversations get swallowed by sentiment. I came back to the structural failures in Amy Coney Barrett: Emblematic Of All That Is Wrong With Adoption, which examined how adoption gets wielded as moral currency by people who have never had to sit across from a birth mother and account for what they are taking.
Nobody tells you adoption is heavy before it is beautiful. I tried to tell myself in Adoption: Complex, Nuanced, Heavy. The essay was written for parents early in the process. At year two it read like a warning. At year ten it read like an admission.
The Open Door
Our adoption is open. Both birth parents are known. Both families are in contact, though what that contact looks like has changed from year to year. A note one year. A long silence the next.
Open adoption is a relationship you tend. The paperwork ends; the tending does not. Some years the tending is easy: birthday photos exchanged, a phone call on on the day I became a parent, a visit planned and carried through. Other years it is harder. I wrote about this ongoing negotiation in Open Adoption Goes Both Ways and in Open Adoption: Real Lives. Real Impacts. Both essays push against the fantasy that openness closes the loss at the center of adoption. It does not close it. It keeps it in the room with everyone.
Reunion brought its own weather. When the girls were old enough to have questions I could not answer from memory, we began looking. I wrote about what that search turned up in Adoption Reunion: Pain And Pleasure. The pain and the pleasure arrived together and stayed that way. Reunion opened a door. It did not close the question.
Milestones accumulate. The first diaper, the first day of school, the first time someone in a grocery store assumed I was the nanny. At the end of the first year I took stock in The Rearview Mirror, the year the adoption was finalized in court and I marked a first Mother’s Day. Ten years in, I took stock again in Ten Years. Many Lessons. It read less like a celebration than an audit: what I knew, what I had bungled, what I was still figuring out.
The question of how to mark adoption anniversaries is its own essay. On Gotcha Days And Marking Milestones wrestles with the language itself. “Gotcha Day” sounds like a punchline. The day your child came home is also the day she left someone else. How do you celebrate that? We never fully figured it out. We kept showing up for the day anyway.
Citizenship, Jurisdiction, Belonging
I am a naturalized citizen. My daughters are birthright citizens. I have held a green card, an H-4 visa, a stamped passport that determined whether I could work, drive, or stay. Immigration taught me that belonging is a legal category before it is an emotional one. Adoption taught me the same lesson from the other side.
The amended birth certificate that lists me as my daughters’ mother also erased the names of the people who made them. That erasure is literal. A government document with a seal, my name where two other names used to be. I wrote about the legal architecture of adoption in Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof, because the Fourteenth Amendment promises equal protection and the family court system delivers a sealed file and a certificate that rewrites who a child came from.
Every November brings Adoption Awareness Month, and every November I brace for the greeting-card version of adoption that fills social media. Brief Note On Adoption Awareness Month was my attempt to say what awareness should actually require. Less gratitude and fewer rescue narratives. More accounting of what adoption costs, and who pays.
In Journeying Home, I traced the geography of return. Las Cruces is where their lives began and nowhere any of us is from. Going back is never simple. Tectonic Shifts followed the ways adoption rearranges not just families but the ground underneath them. The movement is slow, invisible for years, and then everything has relocated.
Whose Story This Is
I write as a mother. The adopted person’s story and the birth parent’s story belong to the people living them. My daughters will tell their own version when they are ready, if they choose to. That is theirs to tell, not mine to anticipate.
I tried to explain this boundary in Why I Share My Story. The essay was partly a defense, partly an examination of what it means to write about your family when your family did not choose to be written about. Motherhood, Cleaved went deeper into the split. To mother through adoption is to hold two truths: you are their mother, and someone else is also their mother. The cleaving runs both ways.
The Truth Shall Set You Free is the essay I return to most. It names the cost of honesty in adoption without pretending to settle it. Telling your children the truth about their origins is a practice, not a conversation you can have once and check off. It requires you to say things that hurt, to absorb anger that is not directed at you but lands on you anyway, to trust that truth serves them better than comfort serves you.
For readers looking for books, organizations, and further reading on transracial adoption, I maintain an Adoption Resources page with annotated recommendations. For the adoptee perspective, which is the voice to read first, I most often point readers to Nicole Chung and Angela Tucker. My children’s book Why Is My Hair Curly? approaches identity and family through a middle-grade lens, following a girl who looks nothing like her parents and begins asking why. My essay collection The Smudged Hyphen gathers several of the adoption essays above alongside pieces on immigration, identity, and the Tamil American life I write from.
Sixteen years in. The girls are taller than I am. They roll their eyes when I ask them to taste the sambar. They have their own questions now, and I am not always the person they bring them to. I keep writing anyway. The writing is where I work out what I still have not.
The hotel room in Las Cruces stays with me. The parking lot lights. The crib between the beds. Two sleeping infants who did not yet know my face. I did not know theirs either. We were all beginning.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is transracial adoption?
Transracial adoption is the adoption of a child by parents of a different race or ethnicity. In the United States it most often describes white families adopting children of color, though it includes any cross-racial placement. The arrangement raises lifelong questions about racial identity, cultural access, and belonging that do not end when the paperwork closes.
What is open adoption?
Open adoption is an arrangement in which the adoptive family and the birth family stay in some form of contact after placement. That contact can range from occasional letters to a relationship sustained across childhood. Lakshmi Iyer writes about open adoption as something renegotiated over years, not a single decision made once.
What is a “Gotcha Day,” and is the term controversial?
“Gotcha Day” is the term some adoptive families use for the anniversary of the day a child joined the family. It is contested. Many adopted persons and adoption writers find it centers the parents’ gain over the child’s loss, and prefer language that holds both. Lakshmi Iyer writes about adoption anniversaries with that ambivalence rather than celebration.
Who writes about transracial adoption from the adoptive parent’s perspective?
Lakshmi Iyer is a Tamil American essayist and adoptive mother whose essays examine transracial adoption from the adoptive parent’s side without smoothing its contradictions. Her angle is less common than the white-parent narrative: a brown mother raising white children.
What does it mean for a brown mother to raise white children?
It reverses the more familiar transracial adoption story, in which white parents raise children of color. A brown mother raising white children navigates a different set of assumptions in public, at school, and within extended family. Lakshmi Iyer writes about this from inside the experience, including how strangers read the family and how the children come to understand it themselves.
How does reunion work in an open adoption?
Reunion in an open adoption is less a single event than a long, uneven process of contact, distance, and renegotiation among the adopted person, the birth family, and the adoptive family. It can include searching for a birth parent who was not part of the original arrangement. Lakshmi Iyer writes about reunion as ongoing and unresolved rather than a closing scene.