A Personal Experience with Insensitivity:

The normal woman who cut my hair had gone on maternity leave so there I was sitting in a chair in front of strange woman who was wielding a sharp pointy object a fraction of an inch from my eyes. Small talk does not come easily to me. I had resigned myself to thirty minutes of uncomfortable silence and an occasional statement of little importance, but as it turned out my participation wasn’t really needed. She was able to maintain both sides of the conversation with little effort and an amazing ability to go minutes without taking a breath.

“Do you have kids?” She asked.

Here was a topic I could handle. Well into the adoption process, I was happy to talk about my favorite subject to anyone who would listen. “No, I don’t. We’re in the process of adopting a baby from Korea,” I told her. I was prepared to answer some of the basic questions that people ask. How long does it take? How old will he be? Do you want a boy or a girl? As it turns out, I really shouldn’t have bothered.

“I couldn’t ever adopt,” she said. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything, but I may have raised an eyebrow because she forged on. “I couldn’t take someone else’s baby. Don’t you want your own?” She kept going along those same lines for quite some time and, at some point during the monologue, I just stopped listening.

I was caught between shock that she would even say these things to me and the knowledge that the sharp pointy object had migrated to just above my right ear. I didn’t want to make any sudden moves. I had received my fair share of insensitive remarks over the course of my life, but never a continuous flow of them. A total stranger was telling me that I was “taking someone else’s baby” like I was a kidnapper contemplating a grab and run. Worse, she had intimated that my baby would not be my own…that somehow adopting a child lessened the bond. I decided it was better not to speak.

Unfortunately, she didn’t take my silence as a hint. “I always feel sorry for the birth mothers. Do they get paid?”

Do they get paid? Because this was sounding too much like buying and selling babies – a lot like kidnapping babies - I refrained from the explosive response that initially popped into my head and opted for the simple “no.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem fair.” Fair? What didn’t seem fair was that I was stuck in a very small space with no way to leave unless I wanted half of my hair to be an inch shorter than the other half when I walked out the door. She continued to expand on the unfairness of the system while she slowly moved to the left side. I continued to create imaginary scenarios that involved shaving off all of her hair and other petty retributions.

After a parting comment to me about dying my hair to cover up the gray that she could see starting to grow, I paid for the haircut and contemplated leaving a five cent tip for giving me the gray hair in the first place. I walked out the door without remembering her name, but knowing what she represented. At dinner, I told my friends about the unbelievable woman who cut my hair and basked in their outrage. With them, I could laugh about the whole event and remember that the woman who cut my hair wasn’t a very important part of the whole picture – just a learning experience.