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Marlene Your Mom Research Paper

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I’m sitting at the kitchen table, working on summer homework while babysitting my cousins when I hear: “How is Marlene your mom?”. I look up from my work and focus on my eight-year old cousin’s questioning face. How do I answer a question like that? I was adopted at eight months old from China, she is the only mom I know. I don’t know my birth mother, and from what I know I was at the orphanage for a few months before. As I stammer my way through an explanation that I hope he a curious eight year old can understand, I think about who I really am, how my family came to be and how it can be confusing for him to understand something that seems so different from his family. But, my family is not too different from his. My mother has known me since eight months, so she has been there for the major milestones like any other parent. Then, in his usual way, he hears the answer and goes on to ask what movie we can watch that night, the conversation apparently was over.
Yet, for me, it was far from over. I started to think about all the things my mom had to in order to adopt me. In a way, it is like parents who are planning to have a child themselves. One has to prepare, buy supplies and learn about how to care for children. None of this is different from what my mother did, the only difference is that she went to …show more content…

For me, equating ‘Asian’ to ‘smart’ automatically doesn’t mean that I was born smarter than others, rather I feel I have a thirst for knowledge that has been influenced by my background, and that ‘thirst’ is what is making me personally smarter. But, I am not saying that other people who are not or haven’t been in my situation don’t have that thirst. Now more than ever, I find myself thinking about how different my life could have

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