Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there—adoptive fathers, prospective adoptive fathers, biological fathers, adoptee fathers, birth fathers, grandfathers, uncles—all kinds of fathers!
As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes men are reluctant about adopting. But I’ll tell you a funny story about an exception.
As I wrote in my blog, Somebody Meant This to Happen, I’d fantasized about adopting since I was a child. When I began dating my husband while we were young college students, he found the idea rather foreign at first (as he admitted to me years later).
Nonetheless, by the time he proposed to me he had accepted and in fact warmed up to the idea. So much so that he created a bit of a stir during our marriage preparations.
As part of the preparation for a marriage in the Roman Catholic Church, the couple meet with a priest or delegated deacon or lay minister. Then they each have a short private meeting with the minister to discuss whether they have had prior marriages or children (that doesn’t rule out a Church wedding, but there may be annulment process to go through first) and whether they can accept Church teaching on marriage.
When my husband and I met with the pastoral associate at our parish, the form we signed was that we acknowledged that we understood that the Church taught that “the purpose of matrimony is to be life-giving, through furthering the mutual good of the spouses and through the procreation of children”.
I had already decided, first, how I defined “life-giving”; and secondly, that God knew how I defined it. I signed the form and was in and out of the office in about three minutes.
My husband, on the other hand, seemed to me to be in there forever. As I waited in the hallway, I thought, “I’ve known the guy since we were seventeen and eighteen; how many wives and children can he be confessing to in there?”
When he emerged and I was
invited back into the office, it turned out that the cause of the delay had been Charles’ insistence on changing the wording of the above-mentioned form to read “through the procreation or adoption of children”.
Charles had simply crossed out the original wording, written in his addition, initialed it, and pressed the minister into signing her initials to his emended text.. She was rather flustered being asked to approve the alteration of an official document used by bishops’ offices all throughout the region and possibly the nation!
This incident presaged my husband’s future job as a contracts manager. Apparently it didn’t cause a problem for our pastoral associate either, or at least not enough of one to affect our friendship.
Although my husband did feel more of a drive than I did to create at least one birth child, the above incident shows that he was fully committed to adoption as well.
I’m a lucky woman, and I know that my husband considers myself to be a very lucky dad.
Check out the Fathers’ Blog here on Families.com by clicking here.