Sliding Doors

I have this memory of being a boy and my dad reciting The Road Not Taken, the poem by Robert Frost, which starts...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both 

And be one traveler, long I stood 

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

I feel like my life, and that of my family, has been like that of the character in the poem. We tend to take The Road Not Taken. My dad, an American, ended up in West Africa for a big portion of his life; my mom, a Ghanaian, ended up in America for a big portion of her life; me, a who-knows-what, had now ended up in Scotland for the past 6 years.

When I was a university student, I joined a student organisation for students who had some sort of mixed-raced background. I met several trans-racial adoptees as part of this organisation. It was from meeting these people that I decided I wanted to adopt a child at some point, and I feel forever grateful for the friends I made at that time in my life, who were adopted, because they opened my mind up to something I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about before then.

Although I had known a few adopted kids growing up, this was the first time I really got to hear the stories of adopted children; where their lives were before they were adopted and where they ended up, at the time I got to know them.

I often wondered about the lives of these friends of mine. Particularly, I wondered what their lives would have been like if they had not been adopted, or if they had been adopted by someone other than their parents. I never felt comfortable enough to ask these friends (or their parents) their thoughts on this; I thought it was too prying and kept those thoughts to myself.

Now, I find myself on the other side of that coin. I’m a parent of an adopted kid, and over the past 6 months, I’ve thought a lot about our kid’s life with us and what it would have been like if we had not been in the picture.

I hadn’t really thought too much about our kid’s possible ‘Sliding Doors’ lives until we started travelling with our kid, and my witnessing our kid finally getting to see the lives we had lived that she was not a part of before she came to live with us. Lauren and I have very diverse backgrounds (as you can see from our wedding photo) and it’s been interesting to see someone so young exposed to our family diversity in such a short time span.

someone told my dad that this was the most diverse wedding photo they had ever seen

Because of diversity of locations of our family, our kid’s life has been a whirlwind over the past 6 months. She’s made 4 trips to 3 continents in that time; that’s insane! It’s while on these trips that I wonder where our kid’s alternative lives might have taken her. 

Amsterdam

In the past 6 months, our kid has walked over canals in Amsterdam, has been a few feet from meandering Ghanaian cows, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, seen the Grand Canyon. She’s fallen down a flight of stairs in Maryland, eaten freshly roasted tuna from a market woman in Ghana, played in a pool in Palo Alto, and sat on the shoulders of a man more than twice her height in Phoenix.

Baltimore, Maryland

She has received hugs and high-fives from family that didn’t know she existed until a couple of years after she was born. These tokens of affection have come from family and friends who are from all over the world; people that she can say are her family and friends of her family.

Koforidua, Ghana

Our kid is now like the rest of our family. Our kid’s life is like that of the character in the Robert Frost poem. In the end, she has ended up taking a life less travelled by the majority of kids adopted in the UK. And I would hope that ‘that has made all the difference’.

In Antelope Canyon, Arizona