Every day, I think about adoption. I read blogs, write articles, and ask and answer questions (at least in my own mind) about it. I love reading family stories and am an eager student of parenting.
Not only was my youngest child adopted almost eight years ago (after spending nearly her first year and a half in Guatemala), but I write parenting columns and blog posts and am currently at work in the publicity phase of my adoption memoir. What this means is that I collaborate with the publicist from my publisher on ideas, press releases, and so on.
The point is, more than almost any other time since my daughter first came home, I am thinking about adoption. I read journal articles, breaking news, and blogs. I start new files, typing a new topic on my label maker and slipping the folder in with the others. ”Attachment Issues.” ”Guatemala.” ”Hague.” ”Questions to Ask.” “Family Stories: Adoption.”
When I connect with those in the adoption process, I empathize with their uncertainty, weariness with waiting, and the hope and excitement with which they anticipate their children’s homecoming.
And then, every so often, I come across something on the internet that makes me catch my breath. (And not in a good way.)
“How can you remove children from their native cultures?”
“There’s no replacing biological ties.”
“Adoption is a fancy term for child trafficking.”
Wow.
But, despite being a proponent of (ethical) adoption, I feel the need to take each of these comments seriously. I need to do so for the sake of my own child. I need to respect the wounds that women and men have endured – in America, especially in the early or mid part of the last century – when unplanned pregnancies have resulted in parents (children themselves, as young teens) being separated forever from their children.
Sometimes, though, the internet being what it is, all the voices (those in favor of all adoptions, those who advocate for open adoption, those who celebrate international adoption, those who voice concern over transracial adoption, those who think all adoptions are unethical) come off, to me, as a cacophony. Blaring noises, clashing cymbals, percussion.
And it’s then when I need to step away from the computer screen and just read a book to my daughter or watch her swing on the playset out back with her siblings – yes, real siblings – or just take a moment to breathe.
I can’t figure it all out. I can’t know in advance all the issues she will encounter as a Latina member of a Caucasian family. I can’t know the stress, the identity issues, the grief she may or may not experience in the future. But I can know that we are family. That, as she sits across the room from me now, and adds to her collection of animal drawings – dolphins and zebras and alligators and ostriches – she is a little girl who is loved, whose gifts are celebrated, whose needs are met, and who lives in a safe home.
Can I answer every critic of adoption, convince him or her that my daughter is just where she is meant to be? No. I can’t.
But I can love her, sit beside her as she pages through the notebook, and watch as her sister grabs her hand and pulls her out to the backyard to celebrate the warm weather and the new, bright blue ball I’ve gotten them from the store.
“Sissy – come play!”
A journalist and mother of four, Jennifer Grant is the author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter, an adoption memoir that will be published in summer 2011 by Thomas Nelson publishers.
