Adoption is not second-best

This is something I found online today. I wanted to share it.

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I smiled inwardly when my friend talked about her plan to have a baby. The baby would be born at the beginning of the summer so that she could finish teaching and be back in the classroom in the fall. She would carefully follow advice about conception so as to maximize her chances of having a girl. The baby, she hoped, would have her curly hair rather than her husband's thin, straight hair. Careful selection of music during the pregnancy and birth would mold the child's taste in music as well as her temperament.I remember having thoughts like that.

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Adoption reminds us that we have less control over our lives that we often think or want. Infertile adoptive parents progress from wanting to determine the sex, birth date, and genetic code for their child to just wanting a child. Along the way, we evaluate all those factors that seem essential to us at the beginning of our drive to reproduce, gradually letting go of the ones that are less important. We examine factors that still seem important to figure out why.Why do we want a child with an IQ at least as high as ours? Why do we want a baby? Why do we want a healthy baby when a biological child could be born with disabilities or chronic illness? Though we know much about a biological child is beyond our control, we hang onto the illusion that we can control enough factors to at least increase the odds of getting what we want. We selectively ignore the risk factors in our own families, or perhaps we are not afraid of them because we have already learned that we can live with them.Ultimately we must confront the question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. Is this a child who is likely to not have something our biologic child probably would have had, or is this a child who will enrich our lives with his or her unique, unknown qualities?

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What we learn when we analyze this is that adoption, for most of us, was a second choice, but that does not mean it is second best. We didn't get what we wanted at first. We didn't get what we first thought we needed. However, we have found our second choice to be as enriching and as satisfying as we expected our first choice to be.

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The drive to become a parent is the human drive to reproduce ourselves. The basic instinct is survival of the human race. Beyond that is the desire to create a physical embodiment of the love that we share with another human being--a child who will meld the best of each of us into one person, and carry that into future generations.When we lose this opportunity to immortalize our love, there is a deep loss which all infertile couples feel. However, when we accept a child with another genetic heritage as our child, and love that child as the unique mix of environment and heredity that he is, we achieve immortality in a different way. This act of love illustrates the idea that when we reproduce ourselves through adoption, our selves include all humanity.When the adoption is international or transracial, that concept is even more significant. We cal call ourselves parent to a child with a different racial or ethnic heritage because all of humanity is ultimately related.
Again, we can take that lesson into the rest of our lives. What we have in common is greater than what separates us. And our capacity to love others, including people who seem to be very different from us, is much greater than we often realize. Blood is thicker than water, but who has water in their veins?"Would you love me more if I have been born to you?"How could any adoptive parent answer that question? We cannot imagine loving our children more than we do. But, more important, we would not be the same had we done through different doors. Our children would not be the same had they not gone through their doors. If it had been possible for the child with his unique DNA to be born to us, we would still not be the same people.

Adoption causes us to examine the cultural notions of family. Because an adoptive family is formed through a legal process, the culture that controls the legal system defines what is an adoptive family according to cultural beliefs. We have seen singel men struggle to be allowed to adopt because the culture expects women, not men, to be nurturers. As nurturing roles for men have become more prevalent in the culture as a whole, men have faced less discrimination in adopting.We have seen Caucasian parents face barriers to adoption African-American children. While much of the resistance has come from the African-American community, multiracial families still seem to confound the culture. Wen parent and child apparently defy the lingering cultural taboo of racial intermingling, strangers feel they are entitled to an explanation. As this taboo breaks down, transracial adoption becomes more accepted.Gay and lesbian parents, women over 40, and unmarried couples face closer scrutiny before being able to adopt because at first glance they do not look like what our culture expects a family to look like. Even families whose relationship is called into questions by different hair color must explain their validity as a family.When we adopt, we must explore how people who are not biologically connected can call themselves a family. If it isn't biology that binds us, what is it? Sometimes we look at the marriage model and realize that when we marry we create a family of two people not biologically related. Surely we can do the same with a child. The difference is that we create a family through marriage after we meet and fall in love with someone.Though couples with arranged marriages learn to love each other, most of us do not want to take that risk. But adoption is an arranged family, with children going to parents in ways that sometimes seem random. It takes a leap of faith to believe that we will learn to love a child when we have not met him and know that we will not find familiarity through genetic traits.Because we know that our relationship with our child is completely dependent on our interactions with each other, adoptive parents tend to put a lot of effort into being a family--into building relationships that some parents assume will be there because the biologic connection is there.We bristly at the term real parents when the implication is that these are the biologic parents. We know that biologic or not, real relationships grow when parents are available--physically and emotionally, when children's physical and emotional and spiritual needs are met, when experiences and thoughts and fears are shared. We know that a piece of paper saying we are the legal parents of a child will not create trust or provide security. If they think about it--and many do--biologic parents realize that DNA doesn't do that, either. The difference is that having never had to examine what makes a family a family, some parents mistakenly assume that closeness is the automatic result of living together.