Hah! We got this one beat!

Interracial Twins
bring a new dimension to the American family

Same age, same parents--born continents apart

By Nara Schoenberg
Tribune staff reporter

June 7, 2006

Jenna and Sam Goering are in the same grade in school, play with the same younger brother and sisters, and live in the same spacious farmhouse-style home in Bourbonnais.

Seven years ago, they entered their parents' lives on the same day.

And yet, Jenna and Sam aren't twins.

He was born in the U.S., the biological son of computer consultants Jody and Addison Goering. She was abandoned six months earlier in rural China, and first introduced to the Goerings through a string of urgent phone calls that started coming from their adoption agency just an hour after Sam's birth.

Together, Jenna, who is Asian, and Sam, who is white, are part of a phenomenon that would have been almost inconceivable a generation ago: the emergence of interracial adoptive "twins."

Born less than 9 months apart, such "virtual twins," as same-age siblings are sometimes called, are often the result of an unexpected pregnancy to a woman with fertility problems and an adoption that was already in the works when the woman got pregnant.

No one has published studies on such twin pairs, experts say. No one knows how many there are. But many veterans in the field have encountered a few examples.

"As a phenomenon, it's not that big, but it's real" and it reflects the increasingly interracial and intercultural nature of American adoption, says Adam Pertman, author of "Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America" (Basic Books) "Twins are historically, viscerally, in a dictionary sense, the same. And now we have twins that are, in all those senses, different.

"That's fascinating, and it raises some questions and issues and opportunities to learn. And I think it gives us some insight into just how profoundly adoption is affecting the American family."

The number of interracial adoptive twins remains very small for a number of reasons, experts say, perhaps chief among them that most parents don't seek out the challenge of raising two babies at the same time.

Some adoption agencies discourage virtual twinning on the grounds -- unsupported by research -- that adopted babies may fare better when they don't have to compete for attention with same-age siblings.

And even those parents who want virtual twins and find an agency supportive of that goal will face significant obstacles in trying to coordinate a biological birth with the arrival of an adopted child.

Still, when determination, inspiration and wild coincidence are present in the right proportions, children of different races can grow up side by side, engaging in the uncanny teamwork of twins.

That's what happened with Jenna and Sam.

"An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance," according to a Chinese proverb that Jody Goering quotes when she talks about the twists of fate that brought her two eldest children together.

"From [Sam's] conception on, they have just been intertwined," she says.

Before Sam and Jenna, Jody, now 42, and Addison, 44, struggled with infertility for three years. They tried fertility drugs, hormone shots and artificial insemination.

Emotionally exhausted

By late 1997, their only remaining option was in-vitro fertilization. They didn't like the cost of IVF, about $15,000 at the time, or the odds of its working, which they were told were only about 15 to 20 percent. But more than anything, they were emotionally exhausted. They had come to the realization that having a biological child, while highly desirable, wasn't essential to their dream of starting a family.

By the end of the year, the Goerings had joined the swelling ranks of American couples seeking to adopt internationally. In January 1998, they sent off their formal paperwork to China.

And on the day in January when their paperwork was officially logged in, Jody found out that she was pregnant.

"I guess we'll have . . . twins?" Addison said.

There was never any real discussion, Jody says: "In our heads, there was a little girl over there that was already ours, waiting for us, we just hadn't been matched to her yet. And how could we walk away from her?"

After a pregnancy marked by the potentially serious complication toxemia, Jody gave birth to a healthy baby boy at 1:30 p.m. on a sunny August day.

At 11 that night, Addison went home to let the dogs out and discovered that their adoption agency had frantically been trying to get ahold of them -- at home, at work, on their cell phones -- starting at about 2:30, or one hour after Sam's birth.

The Chinese government had chosen a baby for them, and a name and a face -- in the shape of a 2-inch square photo -- were available for their inspection.

At 11:30 p.m., Jody started making her second round of joyous phone calls.

"I'm a mom again!" she told friends and family.

At age 8, Jenna is thin and wiry; Sam, 7, is big-boned and broad-shouldered. He is focused and analytical. She is outgoing and intuitive. He is good at math. She is good at art.

Separated in school

And yet it's hard to imagine two children more united than the Goerings' 2nd graders who had to be placed in separate classes this year because, in the manner of many biological twins, they had reached a point where they were helping each other a bit too much.

"She would answer [when the teacher called on] him," says Jody, now a full-time homemaker. "He would answer for her, and it got to the point where it was almost disruptive for the classroom."

Jenna and Sam, who do not consider themselves twins -- "He's littler than me!" Jenna says -- are drawn to many of the same activities. Despite their parents' efforts to encourage separate interests, both take karate and swimming lessons. Last fall, they played on the same soccer team.

Until they were about 5, they didn't know that they looked different. When their preschool classmates tried to figure out who belonged to which racial group -- a well-meaning reaction to a Black History Month program -- they classified Sam as white and concluded that Jenna was white, too, because she was Sam's sister.

"Do you know you guys look different?" a classmate asked them around that time.

No, Jenna and Sam said. They didn't.

Their parents say that they didn't adopt to make a racial statement, but with Sam, Jenna, two younger daughters adopted from China -- Callie, 5, and Sydney, 3 -- and now a 21-month-old son, Benjamin, also from China, they've gotten used to strangers doing double-takes.

Sometimes the questions are insensitive: "How much did you pay for her?" someone will ask, referring to the cost of adoption.

Other queries are just bewildering. "Are they twins?" someone asked when Jenna, with her jet-black hair, and Sam, who was white-blond, were babies.

Another parent of interracial adoptive twins, who asked not to be named, told the Tribune that she has been asked, "Do they both have the same father?"

Ambassadors for adoption

Sometimes the Goerings don't have the energy or inclination to engage in detailed discussions with strangers, but overall, they say, they accept that they have chosen to be ambassadors for adoption.

"You're changing an awful lot of families, and it has ripple effects," Pertman says of interracial adoption, which is on the rise, with the Census Bureau reporting that almost 1 in 5 adopted children live in a home owned or rented by a person of a different race.

"There are Chinese cultural festivals in synagogues. That affects the whole community, [raising questions such as] who's a Jew? What do they look like?" Pertman says.

"The same can be said of a little Hispanic kid who's going to the St. Paddy's Day celebration with his parents. That affects the whole community, which has to start thinking about what it [means]."

Such questions seem a long way away on a typical weekday afternoon, when Jenna and Sam sprawl out on the living room floor, playing endless rounds of a Shrek board game, with Sam periodically brandishing a plastic sword and Jenna enthusiastically enforcing the rules: "You only have one turn, Samuel."

"But!"

"No buts."

Asked about their relationship, Jenna says, "Sam and I like to do sleepovers" in his room, which has a bunk bed.

"And me too," chimes in their sister Callie.

"And I allow them," Sam says, adding, "[Jenna] likes to play games with me, and sometimes I'm annoying. She beats me at most of the games we play, but I beat her at Monopoly."

Later, as they dine with their family at a Mexican restaurant, Jenna rejoices over one of Sam's menu choices -- "I knew you were going to [get] that! You like cheese, don't you?" -- and Sam observes that "she really likes to kiss me a lot, and I like to run away from her a lot."

At this point, they don't seem to care about racial differences, their mother says.

"Maybe they will when they get older, [but] right now it's just, `This is my brother' and, `This is my sister.'"

Well, its good to know it can be done. We just got the Deluxe Version!