Proponents of adoption are right about one thing. Adoption links you to people and countries you never dreamed you’d be connected to. Sometimes this connection is difficult, and thus easy to ignore. In fact, sometimes we have to push this awareness into the back of our minds so we can enjoy our children and the family life we’re blessed with.
But the fact is, we can’t just ignore the reality of life in our children’s birth countries. I recently blogged about sending countries’ efforts to reach out to adoptees, and said that the best way for the sending countries to make our children feel valued is to improve conditions for their peers who remain in their birth country. The same could be said of us as adoptive parents. We need to show our children that we value all children as human beings, not only those who are part of our family. To do otherwise gives the message that we have chosen them as our children, so they’d better fulfill our expectations; that they are lucky, so they’d better be deserving; and that they narrowly escaped a bad place, so they’d better not look back.
I’ve written about how watching a Memorial Day concert jolted me into realizing that if it were not for the U.S. and U.N. veterans my daughters could have been among those children starving in a North Korean orphanage with no hope of adoption. I have been surprised how young children are sometimes quicker to make the connection.
My son saw a nonprofit appeal listing the price of antibiotics to save one child, and immediately asked me who paid for Meg’s medicine when she had pneumonia in Korea. (I replied, “I don’t know. We’re lucky someone did, so I guess we’d better try to help somebody else.”)
When Meg was four, we hosted two girls from an orphanage in Mexico who were in the U.S. with their dance troupe, performing at churches to raise money for their orphanage. I thought Meg was too young to understand what an orphanage was, and I myself hadn’t even thought of the connection with adoption—Meg had been in foster care, not an orphanage. But she knew—she asked us if she’d have been in an orphanage if she hadn’t been adopted. (Probably yes. Korea tries to keep babies in individual foster care until about age 2 ½ years. The older children are usually in group homes/orphanages.)
We find our eyes drawn to mention of our children’s country in newspapers. Sometimes we find ourselves writing to officials of a foreign country on child welfare issues. Probably none of us grew up imagining ourselves doing that. But as I said, adoption has a way of making the whole world seem very close to home.
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Book Review: There Is No Me Without You