With families, no matter what kind you inherit, at some point you want to announce you belong to it.
I had the opportunity yesterday to spend a few minutes talking with Kaui Hart Hemmings, the author of The Descendants. She was very candid about her family history. That wasn't at all surprising. I have read some of what she has written, including the 2008 article from which the above quote was taken where she shares her feelings about being adopted at age eleven by her famous step-father. She speaks about family. She writes about family. But, because her father is a well-known athlete and politician, most of what has been written about her family since her novel was made into an award-winning movie, references him. Kaui told me that her mother has joked, "You'd think, reading all of these articles, you didn't even have a mother." So, I asked about her mom. "My mother and I are extremely close. She lives just down the street and is helping me raise my two children." Kaui's mother is a descendant of the Wilcox family. She traces her ancestry to a native Hawaiian who married a descendant of one of the Protestant missionaries who came to the islands from New England in the 1830s. She has a rich Hawaiian heritage. "My mom's parents...," Kaui says. "They were very concerned with nature and being connected to the elements and to each other. My mom was actually adopted by my grandmother. My daughter is named after that grandmother." Her mother was adopted. Kaui was adopted. And, Kaui revealed, her son was also adopted. She seems to know so much about the families each of them were adopted into, I asked her if she ever feels compelled to trace her biological family tree. "I think, for me, I'm interested in my biological heritage for curiosity sake. The more knowledge the merrier. I didn't have the emotional pull or need to learn more about my biological heritage, neither did my mother. But, I think it is interesting, following the clues and the process. I've collected what I can about my son's heritage, his mother's side anyway. But, we've almost had to remind ourselves that these people we call family aren't our biological people, that we were adopted, that the prints of our DNA come from somewhere else. These families we've inherited are our family."