As we were leaving speech therapy last week, we mentioned our plans to have corned beef corned beef for dinner (for St. Patrick’s Day).
Meg’s therapist said,
“Are you all Irish?”
“Sure. Every last one of us.”
Except that, like most witty responses, this came to me after the fact. It’s probably a good thing anyway. Emphasizing the difference would have just made her feel different. She’s also getting to the age of being embarrassed in talking about herself and being adopted, although she seems much more ready to talk about being Korean since we had a Korean student stay with us for nine months.
I think I started to say something about Charles and I both having some Irish, and our last name possibly being French, and I don’t know what. I have no idea if Meg thought this was an odd answer or not. She was more interested in choosing from the prize box for completed homework.
Mainly the incident goes to show two things:
1. Meg’s therapist definitely sees her as part of our family.
2. I myself forgot my carefully prepared answer in the spur of the moment and with a mind wandering to how long the corned beef could stay in the slow cooker.
(My carefully prepared answer—I might as well give it to somebody now that I remember it—is to emphasize the family rather than individual origins. “We are a French-Canadian, Irish, and Korean family.” (Depending on the situation, I might go into the other four heritages in our family as well.)
We never did make it to any of the Irish Week events. I’ll try harder next year. I want Meg and Regina—and Patrick too—to celebrate all the heritages in our family. I don’t want to overemphasize Korea to the extent that it makes Regina and Meg feel different from the rest of our family. (We are more diligent in incorporating Korean heritage, though, because their heritage is apparent to others from their looks, so we want them to feel positive about it.)
In that spirit, we also would have refrained, should we have gone to the festival, from something we’d considered when Patrick was younger and an only child: entering him in the “Most Irish Face” contest.
To read my first blog of Musings, click here.
Please also see these related blogs:
Trying Too Hard?