Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Your Child Must Be So Happy Now...!

A lot of times, especially when encountering someone who is unfamiliar with adoption, we bump into folks who make the following comments, or some variation of them.

  • Oh, your son must be so happy now that he has a family!
  • What you're doing is so great; you're child will be so thankful for all the opportunities you're giving him/her.
  • I bet he/she just loves being in America now!
If I'm honest, I have probably made them without even realizing it myself before we grew our family through adoption.  But I really wish people would STOP because it perpetuates an ethnocentric attitude and eliminates a respect for our children's past and their hearts and memories that we really ought to have.


My son grieves his family, almost daily.  We do something that reminds him of his aunt or his grandparents and he has a moment of sadness.  Yes, we want him to be a part of our family.  And yes, we hope one day each moment of joy isn't shadowed with a moment of grief.  And yes, every day we see progress as he becomes more and more entrenched in our love and our life.

But I don't want him to forget
.  And when we adopt our little Eastern European angel in a few months, I won't erase his/her past either.  And I certainly never want to come to a place where I forget that where they come from has shaped who they are, and who they are is my child that I love completely -- ever single part of them, even the parts I often wish I could have spared them (read THIS).  There is a great blog post HERE about what it must be like for children who are adopted and how we respond; I hope you'll take a minute to read the wisdom that this woman shares.

Our children are gifts to us, but I often wish we were unneeded.  I wish that they had a life with the family that they started with that was healthy and beautiful.  I wish that hunger and pain and neglect were unknown to them.  I wish, I wish, I wish.  And because I care, I love them enough to embrace even the parts that make me uncomfortable.

I don't expect gratitude.  I don't expect worship.  I just want to love them until they hurt no more, until they can remember with shaking or crying, until the nightmares are distant memories.  And I want to tell people about where they come from and what a difference adoption makes, but I want to do it in a way that softens their hearts to this country and these children instead of embittering them.  I want to embrace and share the culture of my children; we are now a duo-ethnic family and we celebrate that!

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