Our family construct
Last Christmas I took a photo of Tin and I dressed up in Santa outfits. I sent one to a client and friend of mine and he said, “You have the same smile.” A couple of months ago, I took a photograph of Tin sitting on the front porch eating raisins and a friend wrote, “He looks like both of you.” It’s amazing what you see when you are looking. I was sitting a long time ago in a client’s office and he had a photograph of his three kids on the side table. I said, “What a lovely family.” And he told me they were all adopted. He had also been adopted and had such a wonderful experience that he and his wife opted to adopt rather than conceive. When I looked closer at the photograph I began to see the glaring differences in the way the children looked from light to dark. But on first glance I just saw his lovely family.
Everything we humans know, we know because we construct it.
Our nightly ritual consists of telling Tin we are going to Mr. White’s party (what my mother told me as a child) and of blowing a kiss to (my mom) Mimi’s photograph and thanking her for bring him to us, then there is a nod towards the Russian tapestry of the Prince on the Horse (we ask Tin who is our Prince and he taps his chest), we also look at the drawings of Mama that Kim Frohsin did in San Francisco, and then we have a good chuckle about the photograph of Loca on the beach.
In this house we run light to dark and we all fit together to make a lovely family portrait. And that’s a good thing.