Today I want to share part of my personal journey as an immigrant. I hope this will be useful to other expats, to people living in a multicultural family. I believe this post is a good read also for parents in transracial adoptions and I have included a section with some reflections on the matter.

My cultural identity

I was born and raised in Italy and I’ve been living in Finland for over 10 years. In the process, I’ve formally become a Finnish citizen. I speak Finnish, but not fluently.

For years I have been wondering what am I. Am I Italian? Frankly, I didn’t feel Italian even when I used to live there 😅. Am I Finnish? By observing immigrants like me for years, I realised that even if I mastered Finnish, I would stay a foreigner in the eyes of most. For a long time I felt I didn’t belong to any culture or place, floating in an undefined space in the middle.
Until I realized two important things.

1. I am the only person on earth with a right to define my own cultural identity. I should stop expecting others to define who I am.
2. There are no definitions of “Finnishness” or “Italianness”. It’s not that I belong to neither culture, I belong to both. I am Finnish and Italian. And proud to be both.

We keep blabbering how there’s value in diversity when we are hardly allowing it for ourselves. I know immigrants spend tons of energy trying to win a feeling a belonging. Stop doing so at the expense of your identity and of what makes you unique. I conclude with Eleanor Roosevelt’s wise words: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Expat parent grief

Like we decide on our own cultural identity, so our children do – that’s only natural and fair. I wish speak out about this peculiar form of grief many expat parents experience.

It can be painful to witness our children reject certain aspects of our culture of origin, including language. It can be even scary, as we struggle to relate with those new cultural aspects and we wonder if they will hurt them.

The most important thing to remember is that when our child rejects some cultural values, they are not rejecting us personally. This is valid also for parents in transracial adoptions. Forcing children to identify with our own beliefs will only push them away.

Language is the only thing worth fighting for, simply because it’s an essential part of a relationship. You cannot afford to fail to communicate or to lack an emotionally charged language.

Despite the pep talk, I often struggle when my children reject Italian values or things that are dear to me. It takes intention to remind myself they are their own people and our different cultural identities will prevent us to connect on certain aspects of life, and that’s okay.

In transracial adoptions

Being an immigrant myself, I had had an opportunity to reflect on cultural identity, its importance and what efforts are required to cultivate it long before our son came home through international adoption. It’s not easy to balance three cultures in one family, one of which we are distant learners of. After speaking with several other adoptive parents, I am also aware that many identify their child’s longing for their original country or culture as a rejection.

Centering your own feelings on the matter is a terrible mistake. I hope reading my reflection will help you grasp how conflicting it can be to balance more than one culture inside yourself and to identify with more than one “label”. I hope you will hold space and even create opportunity for your child to question and choose their own cultural identity. And above all, I hope you will internalise that their attraction to something you don’t share and possibly don’t understand is not rejection of you or of the life you have created together. Lean in and walk with them through this journey and I promise you will find yourself too in the process.

Featured Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash