I distinctly remember when I learned that before being allowed to adopt, we were going to be required to attend a two day crash course on adoptive parenting. I recall being so excited to adopt, so ready to bring a baby into our home, and so annoyed that I had to jump through more hoops to get there. I remember thinking it very unfair that everyone else got a free pass at parenting. After all, no certificate of parental competence was required to give birth to a child. Why should potential adoptive parents have to go through such trials and tribulations to prove their worth? I was sure that adoptive parenting would be no different than parenting a child who I had conceived and carried and was beyond frustrated that the professionals were telling me otherwise. But as grumpy as I was about the "educational experiences" in which I was being asked to participate, they were required. So off I went. To be educated.
And you know what? I'm so very glad I did. It turns out they were right. (Damn, I hate it when that happens). Adoptive parenting is different, and in some very important ways.
Don't get me wrong. The vast majority of the time, our family just chugs along like any other family with two kids. Our lives revolve around school and soccer, play dates and T-ball, morning routines and bedtime stories. And the love our little family shares? It's beyond words. I always knew that I loved Joseph just as much as if I'd given birth to him, and then Baby Girl was born and what I had long suspected was confirmed. I've experienced both ways of building a family, and now I can stand here and tell you without a moment's hesitation: there is simply no difference in my love for the two children who have stolen my heart.
But I don't confuse the fact that my love for my children is no different from the fact that my parenting may need to be. Adoption begins in loss. Before becoming part of our family, Joseph had lost the mama who carried and gave birth to him. He had lost his first father, and his first country. By the time he arrived in my waiting arms, he had been cared for by many different people and uprooted many times. All the love in the world will never erase the fact that his little life began with such profound loss and uncertainty. While I don't know how Joseph will process his adoption--that's his to find out as he travels down the path of life--I do know that there are things I can do as a parent to support him along the way.
When he was first placed in our arms, I was very aware that he had been through much in his short time on this earth. Because I hadn't carried him for nine months in utero or fed, touched, and loved him through his first few months on earth, he didn't have any reason to trust or love me. So we shrank our world to just the three of us: Joseph, my husband, and me. We asked for no outside visitors for two weeks. We carried him in a carrier all the time, did skin-to-skin feedings, slept with him, massaged him, and responded to his every need. He grew to trust us quickly, this little boy of ours. And we fell in love with him.
That wasn't the end, though. It was only the beginning. As our journey together has unfolded, I've been constantly aware of the ways his life beginnings might shape how he processes himself and his place in this world. When I conceived Baby Girl, my first thought (after how the hell did that happen?) was to worry about how the experience of having a sibling who was born into our family would affect him. And when he started up with some challenging behaviors after she was born, I realized it called for a multifaceted approach. To help curb some of the behaviors, we implemented Love and Logic and we were very clear in our expectations for his behavior. But this wasn't enough. I also took a step back to our beginnings. I picked up my long 4 year old, folded him into my arms, and rocked him to sleep again for nights upon nights upon nights. And touched and hugged and snuggled with him, in an attempt to show him that my love for him would never be usurped by the new little being who had arrived in our lives.
And as he grows, I'm tasked with the challenge of helping him understand why he was placed for adoption. We've told him his life story for as long as I can remember, but his ability to process it changes as his little mind matures. We revisit his story often to give him a chance to ask more questions. As he gets older, I'm guessing there will be more questions and perhaps there will be more pain. This is hard to take as a mom- to know that my baby will experience pain and that, no matter how hard I try, I can't prevent this from happening. But while I can't take away his pain, I know that all I really have to do is walk next to him as he walks through it. And that I can do.
I'm also called to help him understand why his skin is a different color than ours. To help him learn that he is every bit as good and worthy as a person with "peachy" skin despite a world that bombards him with messages otherwise. To teach him about racism, both overt and subtle. To help him explain to his classmates why he looks different from us and how he came to be part of our family. To teach him to navigate the tricky terrain of curiosity from other people; to help him to know when to answer questions with humor, when to provide information, and when to just walk away. To help him learn about his birth culture while he is living in this American one. To help him process all of this while also helping him through the mundane tasks faced by any child as he learns to read and write and do math and be a kind, giving, self-confident person in a world where it's often anything but easy to do so.
Does all this overwhelm me? Sometimes. And sometimes is scares the pants off me. But when it does, I return to the quotation I hung on my fridge during our adoption process. It says, "For anyone who is in fear of the monsters that may be lurking around the corners of adoption, yes, as with anything, there are monsters to be conquered and there is that potential that they could gobble us up, which makes our actions so much more important. But please consider for a moment that as you are reading this, there is a child who is battling very real monsters alone. And imagine that when you make a commitment to take up arms, side by side with the child, how many unnecessary scars you, as a family, can prevent." Despite all the challenges we may face as a family, we are better off facing them together.
In retrospect, then, those adoption professionals were pretty smart. They spurred me to learn how to be the mom Joseph needed me to be, and for that I am very grateful. But you know what they didn't tell me? They didn't tell me how becoming an adoptive mama would change me.
They didn't tell me that how much guilt I would carry for not being the perfect mama I had envisioned. Parenting is a humbling experience for any parent, but even more so for an adoptive parent. I am ever so aware that the gift of parenting Joseph comes at the expense of another mother's loss. And so when I snap at him or send him to his room because I'm simply feeling grumpy, or engage in any other number of parenting missteps, I feel the weight of his first mom's loss on my shoulders pressing down, reminding me how lucky I am to have him in my life and how I should never, ever take it for granted.
And they didn't tell me how adoption would so swiftly erase the lines between "us" and "them." They didn't explain how I would suddenly feel so deeply connected to Africa, how I would see my son's face in the suffering of the people that he left behind, or how his presence in my life would deepen my understanding that so many people aren't given the chance they deserve at life simply because of where they are born. And they didn't teach me how to navigate the chasm between this understanding and the reality of everyday life in this country, where everyone goes about their lives as if none of this is happening.
And they didn't tell me how adoption would open me up. How it would teach me that life was messy and how, no matter how hard I tried, life would never have been perfect anyway and so I should stop trying so hard to make it so. Or how despite my young and rather naive conviction that I knew how my life was supposed to go, adoption would teach me that there are multiple paths to happiness and I only had to let go of my preconceived notions for those paths to be revealed. And how understanding all of this would free me from the constraints of trying to be the person I thought I was "supposed" to be and allow me to be the person I was meant to be.
And they didn't tell me how many people I would meet along the journey of adoption and how those people would go from strangers to fast friends in the blink of an eye because they understood. And how, looking back, I would marvel at the idea that these amazing friendships would have been missed had life gone another way.
But mostly, they didn't tell me how much I would learn about love. They didn't tell me how my Joseph would teach me that love doesn't come from blood, that blood is not thicker than water, that nothing could be further from the truth. They didn't tell me that I would see my mom in my son, even though the two have never met and share no genes. They didn't tell me how it would bring tears to my eyes to watch deep love develop between siblings who were not born to the same mom.
And they didn't tell me how, despite anything we face along the way, our adoption journey would be full of more beauty than I could have ever imagined.
Adoption is beautiful. Pass it on.
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