Karen Grabowski
Houston, TX
When I was a little girl, strangers would ask me if my mommy is white and my daddy is black. Now that I’m 27, strangers ask if “Grabowski” is my married name. And for 27 years, I’ve smiled and explained I was adopted from Samoa when I was six months old and, yes, these two people of European ancestry with me are my parents. My real parents. They are the ones who held up a sheet in the ER so I wouldn’t see the doctors sewing up the big gash in my knee I got when I fell on slate stepping stones when I was 9. The ones who took me to their chests and let me sob hysterically into their shirts when my high school boyfriend went to college and broke up with me over the phone. The ones who support every wild and crazy decision I make – from announcing I want to be a writer to almost shaving part of my head to make room for a tattoo to Googling my birth family and sending an email to my birth mother when I was 23. But now, even when I have found answers to my past – why my birth mother gave me up when she was 17, that I have five half siblings, what I’m going to look like when I’m older (eek) – I don’t feel more Samoan and less White or vice versa. Growing up, children and adults asked me often, “what are you?” And honestly, I still don’t know. I still haven’t decided. But it’s not too bad, because the two things I know for sure are that I am a daughter, and I am loved. And that will always be more than enough.
