After my first adoption orientation meeting, I overheard a fellow attendee talking to the counselor. He was trying to weigh the pros and cons of large versus small agencies, but what struck me was his statement, “Our goal is to get a baby. So maybe it is more to our advantage that…”
I was surprised to hear him put his objective so bluntly, but perhaps the counselor was not so surprised. I never mentioned to her that I had overheard this statement, but in a later interview with me she remarked, “You know, so many people talk about getting a baby. What I like about you guys is that you talk about raising a child.”
It is easy to get caught up in wanting a baby. Couples struggling with infertility go through great pain. It is easy to imagine how yearning for a child to love can consume one’s thoughts. After all, other people have babies without struggling, without having to justify themselves to birthmother, social worker or anyone else. This includes people who we deem, rightly or wrongly, to be less deserving than we. Surely we deserve the joys of parenthood too!
Although it may seem obvious, it cannot be overemphasized that children, birth or adopted, do not stay babies forever. They will not always be cuddly. They will talk back and have fits and embarrass us in public. They have totally different personalities, likes and dislikes. They may have special needs that we never anticipated. They must be loved for their own sakes, not because they fulfill us, or qualify us to join the lives of the majority of people around us who are parents, or give us a chance to show how children really should be raised.
My deepest fear is that the man’s statement seems to convey an attitude, so prominent today that it may be completely subconscious on his part, that children are owned by their parents, not entrusted to them. None of us deserves a child, for each child is a gift. Even a birth child that we “chose” to create is so much more than the “sum of our parts”. Neither nature nor nurture explains each child’s soul. As the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote long ago, “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.” While we have the responsibility to teach and discipline our children, with neither birth nor adopted children can we ever totally control the outcome. We must all ask ourselves if we are prepared to do our best and provide unconditional love at all stages of a child’s life, recognizing that, though adopted children are absolutely just as much “ours” as a birth child could be, every child’s soul is his own.
See these related blogs:
When Infertility Becomes an Issue
Moving Past Infertility to Adoption