Continued from Part One…

As I mentioned in Part One, it doesn’t matter how used to intrusive questions or comments one gets, you can and will still have times when you are thrown completely off-guard.

In the past couple of years, we have become accustomed to hearing comments about our family size more often than adoption-related questions. We still get plenty of them, but they are usually harmless ones, and most often kind remarks about our “beautiful family”. So I was not expecting to have two negative encounters in a row recently (on the very same day, no less).

Experience # 1: We were at Sears, buying new shoes for my two older daughters and myself. At the checkout, the cashier pointed to my kids and said, "Are they yours?" Then she looked at my Asian daughter, and said, "She's not yours, is she?" I responded, "Yes they are all mine." She looked at them and dubiously repeated, "They're all yours? Well, none of them look like you at all." I stared at her and bluntly answered, "That's because I adopted them." She says, "Aaahhh!" Then she paused for a moment and added, "OK. I see. They're adopted. So, you wanted to adopt five kids?" (My son, Ryland wasn't with us.) I responded, "Well, I actually have three more kids, and yes I wanted them all." The cashier about fell over at that point, and said, "You have eight kids?! How do you do it?"

She then asked a bunch of ridiculous anti-large family questions, to which I gave pat answers to (or laughed off). I was relieved to leave, and was thinking that after that experience, we were surely “good” for at least a few weeks in the rude comments arena. I was so very wrong. Our next stop was Wal-Mart, where I was also bombarded by the cashier.

Continued…