As Mo recently pointed out, adoption never ends. The paperwork gets finished, and one day the kids grow up and leave home, but the process is never done. It'll last long after the parents are gone.

This endless process - the fitting in, the explaining, the looking for a place -- was the subject of a recent New York University panel on transracial adoption. One of the key concepts, if not the key concept brought up by that panel is the issue of identity.

The number of transracial families is increasing quickly enough that some are calling it a revolution. And, like every other revolution, it creates a fair amount of unexpected complications:

An important question for international adoptive parents is: "How can I help the kids feel comfortable in their own skin?" said Pertman of the Donaldson Adoption Institute who is working on a study of identity. "From mega-issues it comes down to 'How can I help with my daughter's hair, which is not the same as my hair?'"

Sun Yung Shin, a transracially adopted poet (and co-editor of Outsiders Within) calls the process of discovering or building an identity "a permanent waking dream."

A few months ago, my family had breakfast with a British woman living in Holland who had been adopted from Hong Kong in the 1970s. Aside from being charming and funny on her own merits (which she was -- very cosmopolitan, but had never eaten biscuits and sausage gravy before), she told a couple very interesting stories about her childhood. One that stuck with us was when she tried to rent an apartment in England and the landlord refused to rent to any of those bloody [derogatory term deleted]s. It was, she says, her first experience with genuine racism. But what really stood out was that she genuinely didn't understand what was going on at first. She didn't feel offended because it hadn't registered that she actually was, as far as this buffoon was concerned, one of those bloody [derogatory term deleted]s, and her first reaction was to try to explain that he was mistaken. Then the light bulb went on, she realized what was going on, and she had no idea what to do. Nothing had ever prepared her for this. No one else in her family had ever been through anything like that.

There are similar stories all over the transracial adoption literature (at least the literature written by the people who were adopted rather than those what did the adopting).

For the kids, it's deeper than just being mistaken for the babysitter -- although that's kinda bothersome, too, some days. And, you know, it just never ends.