- All right, so why don't you just start by telling us.
- Do I have anything in my teeth?
- Nope.
- No.
- Do I?
- Nope.
- Do I?
- No.
- Okay good.
- Did you really look?
- Yeah, you look great, you're teeth look great.
- Angela Tucker is an internationally recognized
speaker on adoption issues, a transracial adoptee,
and just an all around badass.
We brought her on as a consultant for the series
to talk about fostering and adopting transracially,
but she had something else she wanted
to discuss with us first.
- I'm thinking about diving into the fact
that you know I don't love the title foster to adopt.
- Oh you're just going to start right there.
- She went on to explain that the term foster to adopt
was created by parents who decide to foster a child
so that they can eventually adopt them;
however, the primary goal of fostering
is to reunify the child with their birth family.
It is our hope to adopt J, but we understand
that using the phrase foster to adopt is wishful thinking
and not a true commitment to foster care.
So we asked her if The F Word - A Foster and Adopt Story
would be a better title, and she said yes.
- We have to wait for him to wake up.
What do you bet he's down for?
10 minutes, 20 minutes.
- He's already been down for 10 minutes.
- Okay.
There's not much to do until he wakes up.
So what do we have to talk about besides the baby?
We still have other things in common right?
- Mm-hmm.
- But what did we do before?
- He's up.
Little panda's hungry, nom, nom, nom, nom.
Peek-a-boo.
- Do you have any dance moves?
- Oh my god.
- Nicole has a really great dance called The Window.
- All right, let's do a dancing competition.
- Oh, like a dance off?
- Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
- Ooh, ooh.
- [All] Yeah.
- So how long were you all fostering
before you moved on with an adoption plan?
- A full year.
- We've been calling that phase the limbo stage.
That's really hard because you have this tiny person
in your house, and you're loving them and supporting them
every day.
- It was kind of hard to kind of like okay let's do this
and then know that if its a baby at six months,
if its an older child that's a year
before you can make 100 percent guarantees that
nothing's going to happen to tear your family apart,
because no one could tell me that I was going to love
this individual as much as I do.
- So, here's your little home binder.
- Okay.
- Okay, this is your certified home agreement.
And what this is, this shows you who you are
in relationship to him.
- Mm-hmm.
- That says you are a foster parent, licensed foster parent.
- Whoo.
- And so you both need to sign.
- It might seem a little early for a road trip,
but the last time I saw my 93-year-old grandmother
she made me promise to put a great-grandchild in her arms
as soon as possible.
- So where's my baby?
Hey sweetie.
- Cute kid.
- So we figured, well we've got this kid.
Maybe they don't need to know the whole
complicated situation.
- Can I have him?
This is all I waited for, yeah.
- Wanna hold my finger?
Wow, what little fingers.
- Can you say 'grandma'?
- I don't think so.
- What should he call you,
because you're the great grandma.
- What are they calling mama, your mother?
- Banana.
- Banana? - Nana Anna Banana
- And my mom is mee-maw.
- What is she?
- Mee-maw.
- Just plain Mable?
- Mee-maw.
- Oh, mee-maw.
So what do you want him to call me?
- It's up to you grandma, you decide.
- The old broad.
He'll call you the old broad.
- The old broad.
- I don't think this is going to come out.
It's just pink.
Oh wait a minute.
- I think your finger's on the lens.
- Is this it up here?
- There you go.
- And I press the screen?
- Uh-huh, the big white button.
- Things came up, messages and mails and cloud photos.
Oh there we go.
That was a good shot if I got it.
- I love you so much.
- So clearly I won the grandparent lottery,
but I have to be honest.
Sometimes when we're surrounded by our family members,
all of whom are white, I think back
to a scene from the film I made about transracial adoption,
Off and Running.
- I don't feel like they understand who I am,
how I feel, or anything about the world
that I'm in right now.
I think I'm growing into my own person,
and I am beginning to identify with the African American
side of me.
- I grew up in a small town up in the Northwest corner
of the United States, almost near Canada,
and the population when I was growing up
was primarily white.
Growing up with it, it was normal.
Didn't mean that it was comfortable.
The stares, the comments about how exotic I look,
how athletic I look.
People often talk about how smiley I am,
I smile all the time,
and I think it may have been a coping mechanism,
that it softens me.
Smiling really helped other people not see me
as that angry black woman.
All the deep implicit biases that we have
can be softened.
- What should white parents adopting children of color
spend some time thinking about or doing?
- Listening to voices of transracially adopted adults.
Thinking about white supremacy and their role
that adopting transracially plays within that,
and being able to clearly state why you want to adopt
a child of color.
Taking the temperature of your friends and community,
because it's really a matter of safety for your child.
That it's not safe to be around somebody
who dismisses black lives matter.
Understand racism without feeling a sadness about it,
because you have to understand that your kid
doesn't get the luxury of your privilege.
Okay that's enough.
- When we started all of this,
we were open to fostering a child of any race,
but we knew that African American children
are placed in foster care
at twice the rate of white children.
This is an injustice.
As foster parents of a child of color,
we are committed to dismantling racism
in the all of the concrete ways that Angela has outlined.
- What should we buy at the farmer's market?
Strawberries?
We could get avocados 'cause that's
what your eating these days.
All right Rocky.
Rocky you gotta give me a little space here, there we go.
- The question we get from friends and family these days is,
"when will you know it's going to be permanent?"
- And we don't have an answer for them,
and we don't have an answer for ourselves.
- I feel like this limbo phase,
our whole life is on hold.
It's like are we two or are we three?
Something that comes with being a foster parent,
we are his caretakers at this point.
We are a roof over his head,
a ride to doctor's appointments.
Honestly I couldn't imagine us not raising him.
- I feel like a hypocrite because I'm on board with this
larger goal of reunification, but I also
am surgically in love with this child.
I feel like he's our child.
I can't imagine ever ever being separated from him.
- I think I really underestimated
how hard this part was gonna be.