Mixing It Up: When Multiculturalism Truly Begins at Home
On a shaded, curvy street in Glendale, a mass of sage- and mauve-colored drought-tolerant plants sets the Weiss home apart from its ‘50s-style neighbors. The family inside is a similar surprise. The four children seem like more as they rush to greet you, arms outstretched, eager to explain themselves.
First, Kevin, a sturdy 10-year-old of Native Hawaiian, Latino and Anglo descent, holds up a photo of two identical girls. “This is Brianna,” he tells you, “and this is Keana.” They are his 5-year-old sisters and they are African American, Latino and Anglo. Brianna skips up with a picture from the ‘60s, a long-haired couple of Eastern European and Russian descent, embracing. “See my Mom and Dad!” she cries. Keana offers a photograph of an African American woman with a big smile. It’s “Aunt” Monique, her mother’s best friend.
They bring picture after picture--of Luis, the son of their mother’s El Salvadoran helper, of white-haired, pink-skinned grandparents and a double photo of Kevin and his brother James, 13, holding candles. “Here’s me and my brother on Hanukkah,” Kevin explains.
Over the past 10 years, Leonard and Sharon Weiss, a high school teacher and a social worker, have deliberately built their kaleidoscopic adoptive family from children who bureaucrats label “special needs.” They are usually multiracial siblings and veterans of foster care who, in an era where many adoptive parents still prefer healthy Anglo infants, remain among the hardest to place.
As multiracial children are the fastest growing of any racial group, the Weisses offer a progressive model, not only for their willingness to adopt but also for helping their children to respect their multiple identities, according to Nancy Brown, past president of Multiracial Americans of Southern California, a nonprofit support group in Los Angeles. In the past, she says, parents who adopted a multiracial child would either act as if race didn’t matter or raise them with only one racial identity--the one that matched the child’s most predominant characteristics.
To Sharon Weiss, a former adoptions worker, the racial issues are constant but sometimes seem the least of the challenges. When children have spent their first years moving from home to home, much of a parent’s task is to restore their trust in adults and to help them learn again how to be children, she says. What it takes, Sharon believes, is honesty, realistic expectations and a commitment, expressed over and over, that no matter where they came from or what they look like on the outside, they are a “forever family.”
“We all look alike on the inside,” she tells them, “where we love each other.”
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Both only children, Leonard and Sharon, 52 and 50, bought their three-bedroom house soon after they married in 1978. They set aside one room for a child. But then Sharon had a car accident that left her with a painful back injury. After being bedridden on and off for years, she knew she would never be able to lift a baby.
When she turned 40, she began to consider adoption. As an adoptions worker for the state of California, she knew where the need was and what she wanted--children past the infant stage but still young enough for her to enjoy their toddler years. And she wanted to adopt siblings.
“As a worker, I’ve learned it is so important for these children to have somebody who looks like them around them. Otherwise they feel so different,” she says.
Sharon was well aware that she and Leonard would be treading politically sensitive territory where transracial adoption was seen as a threat to the survival of minority communities. She even shared those fears.
“I’ve seen people who mirror the reason why the National Association of Black Social Workers want to prohibit interracial placement,” she says. “I’ve seen people who deny the ethnicity of the children, people who deny how important it is to give a racial history to children, give them friends and other people in their lives who reflect their appearance and their culture.
“I’ve also seen families who know what to do.”
Sharon says her understanding of other races began in 1974 when she made friends with Monique Savage, another adoptions worker. For three years, the two sat at desks only three feet apart, making the difficult decisions about placing children with parents and talking about their pasts. “From her, I learned what it was like to grow up African American in this country,” she says. “From me, she learned what it was like to grow up Jewish.”
Because of her friendship with Savage, she says, and her relationship later with her own children, she says she takes racial slurs personally. “When I hear comments, they’re not talking about other people,” she says. “They’re talking about me.”
Leonard says it was Sharon who educated him about adoption issues. He had known foster parents, he says, and was sure it would be too heartbreaking for him to have children come into his life and then leave. Like Sharon, he didn’t need to have children who looked like him; being Jewish increased his empathy for children outside the mainstream, he says.
At first, they found no siblings. But an adoptions worker told them about James, a 3-year-old surviving twin from a premature birth. They met him on a Thursday. The following Tuesday, he came to them for good.
More than a year later, they learned he had a brother. Kevin was 2 and had been languishing for six months in an emergency baby shelter, his third placement. A photo taken in the shelter shows Leonard and Sharon smiling giddily with a shellshocked Kevin in their laps.
The day in 1991 they took James to pick up his brother from the shelter, Kevin told them, “I’ve been waiting for you all day.” James, then 5, replied, “I’ve been waiting for you my whole life.”
Two years ago, they started thinking about a girl; then they heard twins were available. “After I met them, I fell in love with them,” Leonard says. “They took my heart. I would have hated to see them split apart.”
Sharon says she felt “sheepish at our age, still doing this.” Then, the old feeling kicked in: “Omigoodness, isn’t this wonderful?”
The girls had been in five placements before the age of 3. Angry and aggressive, they bit and kicked and threw things “to protect against things they have no control over in their lives,” Sharon says.
As a licensed psychotherapist, Sharon knows that attachment--the feeling it is safe to connect with others--is difficult to make in any adoption because children who have been moved from place to place often feel they are not worth keeping.
“Their constant fear is, ‘How long is this place going to be?’ ” Sharon says.
James would sometimes yell at them, “I don’t have to listen to you” or “I want to go home.”
Kevin would wander off with other adults at the park. She said they had to explain, “We are your Mommy and Daddy. You stay with us at the park. We play with you. We take you somewhere. We bring you home. We will never leave you.”
The girls were asked not to return to the private preschool where Sharon had enrolled them, two months after their arrival. “They have to learn,” Sharon says, “and it can take years.”
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On a recent Sunday morning, the Weiss dining room is an exuberant scene of family multi-tasking. While James, 13, a serious young man with an emerging mustache, cooked the pancakes, Kevin had made cinnamon biscuits and the girls, with Sharon’s soft-spoken help, had made brownies.
The brunch, including bagels, lox and cream cheese, is passed around on flowered paper plates. Orange crepe paper and Thanksgiving decorations adorn the walls.
Brianna stands on a chair. She tests the smoked salmon, first with the tip of her tongue, then with a short foray into her open mouth. Finally she takes a tiny bite. “The lox taste like chicken nuggets,” she announces.
“I want more lox,” Keana says.
Multicultural foods are the couple’s least significant effort to help define themselves as a multiracial family. In their rooms, the girls have Barbies and other dolls in various gradations of brown; they all have storybooks with African American characters or fables from around the world. They take advantage of the wealth of ethnic festivals and fairs Southern California has to offer. The girls are learning Spanish from Sharon’s helper, Dalia Meija.
It’s often a matter of trial and error. An attempt to interest James in Hawaiian hula dancing failed, even with a male instructor. James thought it was too girlish.
The family celebrates Hanukkah as well as Christmas, Easter, birthdays and court days--the days their adoptions were finalized.
There have been the expected stares on the street and the times when Sharon or Leonard had to go to school because racial slurs were made. The boys often are mistaken for African American. A teacher once asked a bewildered James to explain the African American holiday of Kwanzaa to the class.
If anything angers Sharon, it would be the frequent times she and Leonard are mistaken for their grandparents. “It makes a public statement to my children that the world questions our connection,” she says. “It’s saying we don’t look like them. It makes them question, are these people really my parents?
“We’re continually working on attachment.”
The older children have come a long way, she says. They are proud of James’ scholastic achievement: He is an A-minus student and has been honored for his citzenship at school. They are proud too of Kevin’s collection of trophies for basketball and soccer and his outgoing personality.
“He used to be real shy and withdrawn,” Leonard says.
He says he pushes the children to do well in school and takes Kevin and Brianna to art classes once a week. He’s less worried about their future than those of some of his own high school students. “They don’t have a lot of skills. They just see themselves living at home for a few years with their parents.”
Meanwhile, everyone is practicing patience with the girls.
But, on the brink of adolescence, James finds his patience sometimes wears thin. “It’s hard to have so many kids and get attention most of the time you would want it,” he says. His mother says he’s stuck with having sisters and sometimes, he says, “I wish I wasn’t really stuck with it.”
Sharon knows she and Leonard are not perfect parents and make mistakes. “You always wonder, is this working? As long as our commitment is here, I don’t see how it’s not going to work,” she says. “It’s one day at a time. We’re always working on ‘We are a family.’ Let’s get through the day.
“For right now, we’re making it. We’re a family.”
She and Leonard felt especially hopeful not long ago, when the entire family was in the car and one of the girls started to complain she wanted to live somewhere else. Then they overheard James explain: “This is your forever family. We are here together. Forever.”
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Lynn Smith can be reached by e-mail at lynn.smith@latimes.com.
