Back at the beginning of National Adoption Month, I started thinking about and writing about what adoption is to me.

So far I have said that adoption is a business, expensive, hope, life changing, love, complicated, a roller coaster, risky, a choice, making connections, necessary, something to be thankful for, hard, beautiful, and family.

When you put all of those pieces together, that is what adoption is to me. For many reasons, adoption is one of the things I am most passionate about. Because adoption is hope, is love, is something to be thankful for, is necessary, is life changing, is beautiful and is family, I believe that it is a very good thing and I believe that it is worth advocating for.

On the flip side, because adoption is also a business, is expensive, is complicated, is a roller coaster, is risky and is hard, I also think that it is important that adoptive parents, prospective adoptive parents and adoption professionals work at educating others and always strive to keep ethics a top priority.

And because adoption is only necessary and only exists because of social, personal and economic hardships that exist in this world, I think that we also need to work at trying to make a difference in the world and trying to make things better, so that less children have to suffer the trauma of being separated from their first parents. Fighting against hunger, poverty, social stigmas and preventable and treatable illnesses will lead to less orphans being created.

In a perfect world, adoption would not be necessary, as every child that was born would be born unto parents who were ready, willing, desirous and able to parent him. Since we do not live in a perfect world, adoption is a wonderful second chance for many children.

This November and every National Adoption Month I hope that we all can be aware of the millions of children across the world who do not have families to belong to. I hope that we can be aware of the tragedies that are causing these children to be orphaned in the first place. I hope that we can find ways to promote ethical adoption. I hope that for as long as there are children in this world that end up orphaned and alone, that adoption will be an available option to unite those children with new families.