One of the most difficult things a person will do is understand how they perceive themselves in this world, Claude Knobler’s son may have a leg up thanks to his dad.

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Here at GMP, we thrive on stories about manhood that break molds and tear down walls. Claude Knobler has done that with his life experience and now his writing. His new book More Love, Less Panic: 7 Lessons I Learned About Life, Love, and Parenting After We Adopted Our Son from Ethiopia is about his experience in adopting their son from Ethiopia.

As a parent who has adopted a child, I know the struggles that go along with not only the process but the dramatic change the child goes through. The largest difference between Claude and I’s experience is that my son was my stepson prior to the adoption.

This is an excerpt from his new book, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Look for my interview with him tomorrow!

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“You Know He’s Black, Right?”

I can’t say that the fact that Nati is a young black man being raised by a white mother and father won’t be a problem for him some day. He is now nearly sixteen years old and yes, there are times when I know it’s an issue for him.

And yet . . . meh.

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As in, so far, so good.

True, early on, when we flew to New York for my niece’s bat mitzvah, one of my uncles, and not one of the brighter ones, took Nati aside and asked him, “So, are you going to grow up to play basketball in the NBA?” In fact, Nati used to get asked that one a lot. Sometimes, for some funny reason, it happened even when he was wearing a football jersey. There are just some people who look at him and for some reason assume he’s a basketball guy. Generally, those same people would walk up to Clay, shake his hand, and say, “Nice to meet you, Clay,” and then turn to Nati and say, “Nati! Give me a high five,” as if they and Nati had just been cast in the remake of Shaft.

Once, Mary and I took all three of our kids to dinner one night after Nati had been here about three months. A woman holding a baby walked up to our table, stood in front of us, and stared for about thirty seconds. Thirty seconds doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a pretty long time to have a strange woman stand in front of your table watching you eat. After Mary and I started staring back, she finally wandered away.

But, honestly, the whole multicultural-family/sensitivity/embracing-the-differences thing hasn’t really been much of a thing. Nati has been relearning Amharic, the language he came to America knowing. He might stick with it too. Then again, he might not. He’s a teenager. Stuff changes. As a family, we eat Ethiopian food now and again. When he wants a raise in his allowance and I say no, Nati will without fail look at me and say, “Really, Dad? You know I’m from Africa, right?” And when I say no when he wants me to buy him something, whether it’s new clothes, a car, or a controlling interest in a Fortune 500 company, Nati will almost always reply, “Really? Is it because I’m black?” to which I always reply, “No, it’s because you’re Jewish.”

Meh.

An issue we’d been utterly confounded by has so far turned out to be worth nothing more than a giant shrug and a meh. Once, years ago, I played a song in the car by the Dixie Chicks, and Nati bent over and began howling until I played something by Kanye West, but other than that, meh. Nati is still black, and Mary, Clay, Grace, and I are still not. Sometimes that has been an issue; sometimes it’s not. It’s never been that big a deal.

Look, I don’t want to imply that race isn’t important. It is. Nor am I dumb enough to say that Nati won’t be affected by the fact that he so clearly looks different from the rest of his family. We have talked frankly to him about how different people will perceive him sometimes, and those conversations are painful in different ways to both Nati and Mary and me. It’s a complicated and, at times, cruel world. I get that. That will all affect him.

That Nati is the only black person in his family does certainly mean something and will, without question, affect him in a myriad of ways. I have had to awkwardly ask friends of mine who are black if I was right to think that maybe I should be preparing Nati for a world in which some authority figures, from police officers to store owners to school administrators, might treat him as someone to watch warily based on nothing other than his skin color, and I have felt horribly saddened as those men rushed to assure me that yes, that conversation was one I had to have with my son. That Nati is a young black man being raised by white parents is important and significant and something he will always carry as part of who he is, for better and for worse.

I know that race factors into every part of our lives. I see that a good deal more clearly know that I ever did before.

But—

One of the most remarkable moments of my time in Ethiopia picking up Nati took place in the small room that functioned as a classroom. I was speaking, as best I could, to a group of kids who had been adopted but, owing to the vast amount of paperwork involved in international adoptions, had not yet been cleared to go home with their new families. There was a map in the room and one by one the kids told me where they were going to be living. A tall boy, older than Nati, told me that his new family lived in a place called Minnesota. I smiled and pretended to shiver. “Cold,” I said. “You’ll go skiing in winter.” I pantomimed skiing as best I could, and they all laughed. A girl told me she would be moving to Georgia, and I tried to tell her about how hot it got there in the summer. Another child would be living in New York City and, as best I could, I described tall, tall buildings, bigger than any she’d ever seen in her life.

Each of those children was going to be plucked almost at random from the place they’d always known so they could be raised in circumstances totally alien to them. Where they lived, how many brothers and sisters they were about to have, what their new parents did for a living: all of those things were going to have an effect on them. I have never been so consciously aware of what words like destiny and fate meant. Obviously, being a part of a family he doesn’t physically resemble will have an effect on Nati, just as being adopted by a family in Utah instead of Miami would affect any of the kids I was with in that schoolroom that day. But being affected by something is what life is about. It’s how we grow, form, and evolve. Nati is affected by issues of race. But all of the fear and well-meaning anxiety I had about race, about how it would affect Nati and Clay and Grace . . . meh. As in, it comes up but not nearly as often as we talk about what we’re having for dinner.

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So yeah, maybe I could have worried less about that one. Or you know, not at all.

Excerpted from More Love, Less Panic: 7 Lessons I Learned About Life, Love, and Parenting After We Adopted Our Son from Ethiopia by Claude Knobler. © 2014 by Claude Knobler. Jeremy P. Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Penguin Random House LLC.

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Photo credit: Flickr/Rod Waddington