The reason I breezed over it is because it was an easy decision for us. But understandably, for many, it's tough to wrap your head around it. When one of my good friend's was struggling with infertility I naturally, and maybe naively, asked if they would consider adoption. Her answer both surprised and offended me. It was because her husband didn't want "someone else's kid." Over the last 10 years or so I've often thought about that and I think he's not alone in not wanting someone else's kid. Maybe not that they wouldn't want someone else's kid. But rather the uneasiness with taking on a child who is not biologically yours. For us, the concerns are practical. We worry about baby sister's medical needs and that she may have attachment disorder and the road to becoming fully bonded may be a long and tiresome one. And an expensive one. But there's no question or concern about our ability to love her. It hasn't even come up and the only reason I'm writing about it is that I know for many that concern is real. How can you love a child who is not "yours." I think we all have an immense capacity to love. I don't think that's at all the issue. If you were handed an orphaned child today and you were the only option the kid had, you would end up loving him/her. I don't think it's an emotion you can turn on or off. From the outside, from people who will never consider, or have never considered adoption, they simply wonder. But on the inside, for those of us choosing to adopt or thinking about doing it someday, we hope or we pray for a child. A child to love.
The question is probably deeper rooted. Rather than it being an issue about loving a child who is not yours, it's probably more about accepting a child whom you know nothing about... you don't know their ancestry... their genetic or medical background... you don't know what has or has not happened in their life... how messed up their parents may have been. Too many unknowns make people uncomfortable. I get that. But guess what folks, even if you and your partner get together and make a baby, there are a thousand combinations of unknowns that may manifest in many different ways in that baby of yours. Yes, you can test for this or that or the other. But for all the things you can test for, there are many that you can't. You also can't account for natural occurrences that happen in utero. You may not know that you and your partner are both carriers of some mutant, recessive gene that is a volatile combination when it comes together in your child's DNA. And for us it's even simpler. Our kids could have come out with some really messed up stuff given we knew nothing about what may be going on in this body of mine. We got lucky. They're perfect. And they didn't even get the webbed toes that we know run in my husband's family! We knew going into it that it was a crapshoot. Now we're rolling the dice for the third time, but this time, we're doing it with a medical file in hand and our eyes wide open. And like I tell the boys a thousand times a day "you get what you get, and you don't get upset!"
This subject also brings me back to something that occurred in junior high. Catty, immature, ridiculousness. I was at a sleepover and a few of the girls taunted me with "how does it feel to know your parents didn't want you?" Much like the question that started this post, I had never given this one a thought either. IT doesn't feel like anything because IT is irrelevant. I think it feels pretty much the same to be adopted as it does to be biological. At least in my case. I'm sure other cases are different because every child is unique as are family dynamics. When I got home from school I didn't greet my parents with "Hi adopted mom. Hi adopted dad." Nope, my parents were just plain old mom and dad and they're all I had ever known or remembered. They loved me from the moment they met me and I'm sure I fell in love with them pretty quickly as well. Infants needs are pretty simple and if you meet them, it's just a natural progression of feelings. We will be coming at it from a slightly different angle this time by becoming parents to a little girl who already has established relationships and feelings so we have our work cut out for us but at the end of the day it comes down to creating a comfortable, safe environment in which all of her needs are met. Consistently. Rinse and repeat.
And I'll share something funny that my dad said to me in response to the above situation. It was supposed to be a sleepover, so he knew something was wrong when I called to ask him to come pick me up. When I got into his truck he asked me what happened. It took me a while to say anything because I didn't want to cry and I really didn't want to make him feel bad. When I finally got the nerve to tell them what the girls had said, his response was "You tell those little brats that at least we got to pick you out. Their parents got stuck with them." How do ya like them apples? I know it was a totally inappropriate response but it made me feel better and we both laughed about it as a result. And if you're wondering, no, I never told my friends that because the next day we were all back to normal, passing notes, swapping clothes, ratting our bangs, typical, junior high stuff. I probably said something equally as catty, immature and ridiculous to one or all of them within a few days. Teenage girls! I'm sure baby sister will be sweet and drama free as a teen. As if....
I also think there are a lot of you out there who have never even really thought of adoption and that's why you wonder wow, how in the world did you guys come to the decision to adopt. Maybe you don't want kids at all. Or maybe you have enough bio kids. Or maybe it's simply never come up. Some of you have pondered adoption a bit but maybe not knowing how to even begin the process or being an adoption outsider altogether makes it that much more overwhelming. I think this is where the majority of the interest comes from. It's sort of a fascination with a process that has such low visibility in the mainstream. We often get "I know someone who knows someone whose cousin adopted a child from Mozambique." And then the litany of questioning begins.
So for all of you the long and short of it is this. We were both fortunate to grow up in small towns where we spent a lot of time with our families and enjoyed big family celebrations for birthdays and holidays. Some of my fondest memories were of being crammed into my grandparents home with all of my aunts and uncles and cousins... stealing olives off the little crystal dish on Mamo's table while we waited for dinner to commence and sneaking as much cinnamon and sugar lefse as our bellies could take, and acting surprised when my same age cousin and I got the same gift, in different colors, year after year, after year. We want nothing else than to give our kids those sorts of memories, but since they don't, and probably won't, have any cousins, we need to add some more kids to the mix. We also realized that we love being parents. It's made us better people and a stronger couple. To us kids = joy. And when we're old, kids = company! So we set out on this path to our forever knowing we wanted a big family and that we (Parker) would consider adoption after having our own bio kids. Parker wanted to test the parenting waters first, and I don't blame him. He's a boy. With boy brains. I can't make him think like me. 1. I'm a chick. and 2. I'm an adopted chick. It's like we're from two different galaxies, not just two different planets. So it wasn't really that something made us decide to adopt or that we had in depth discussions to help us come to this decision, but rather that for us, it was really just a question of when. Every adoptive family arrives at this place in a different manner. I think it was easier for us than most because I am adopted and to me it's second nature. For others, maybe it's God's calling. Maybe it's because they've exhausted all other ways of having a baby. But I guarantee, none of us ever worries about loving a child who is not our own. Because orphans don't have parents. They don't belong to anyone. They are simply children who are waiting for someone to love them and call them their own.
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