I have three grandchildren, one pictured here, that I’ve raised since they were infants, now they are 6, 9 and 10. Sometimes my other children, so bound up in their own grief, express resentment at this three, much the same way I’ve seen adopted children treat birth children, with extreme jealousy.

When the six year old, Jack, was a baby, I adopted a sibling group of seven children, then aged 3-13. A middle daughter, age 10, in that group particularly resented “the white kids” as she so insensitively described the trio. Their birth mom, my daughter, is Hispanic, we’re not sure about her birth father, there was some talk back then that he was an elderly white man, but we’ve never known for sure. The three babies here were fathered by a white guy so they are definitely more light skinned than others in my house.

That middle daughter, Vanessa, is also very light skinned. She’s lighter than I am, lighter than everyone here…and it really shouldn’t matter, but it does to her six siblings. She physically resembles a friend of her bio mom, a man the lady was accused of having an affair with, resulting in, and from, a good bit of domestic violence in the family’s household.

It’s taken many years, nearly seven, for Vanessa to come to terms with everything, thanks to therapy. She’s a beautiful teenager, bubbly, usually happy and curious about adoption issues. She read An Unlit Path this week, she’s read many of the adoption, social work, mental health, criminal justice and family topical books that are here in our house, all this also contributing to her eventual understanding of the consequences of her birth family’s choices that ultimately led her here to be my daughter.

She is attached, affectionate, loving and helpful, but we went through several years of her fighting at school, failing subjects, and spewing hate all over my house, more lethal than a mist of venom, resulting in her Viper Girl nickname for quite some time, which she thought was hilariously appropriate.

She’d even quit school last year, or rather I withdrew her to head off other fistfights there and I home schooled her for the next several months, academically not all that successfully, but emotionally she graduated from immaturity to self-confidence. It gave her an appreciation, and an understanding, of what all I do to keep this family going on all cylinders, and she somehow cemented her strong relationship with me as the mom. Vanessa had also been the scapegoat in her birth family, the one who’d been severely physically abused, and the angriest one in her sibling group, feeling different and singled out for the reasons given above.

Years of therapy contributed to her understanding of the dynamics of our family life.