So… is adoption an institution of saintly parents rescuing abandoned children from orphanages and people who steal Christmas Oranges from orphans?
Is it a multibillion dollar business that exploits young, inexperienced mothers-to-be and pressures them into giving up their babies with tales of how incompetent they are compared to wise and rich parents who have been cursed with infertility but blessed with enough money to buy whatever they want?
Is it a villainous underworld that steals children away from their home countries and cultures? Is adoption a Divine practice? Is it a devil? Is it a sheepskin used to cover wolves?
I’m afraid I can’t clarify those muddy waters for you. I’m just a dad who adopted a few children that didn’t have homes. Several of them (older ones) never would have had a chance at another family. I didn’t do it to be a saint. I did it for my daughters. Everyone that adopts is different and to a certain extent, has different motives. Usually, those motives evolve over time.
Like any institution run by and populated with people, adoption involves good and bad to almost any extreme you can imagine. Most good that is accomplished by adoption is an attempt to remedy a tragedy. Even if adoptive and birth parents completely agree that adoption is the best thing for the child, even if they become best friends and the child has access to both sets of parents and the whole truth, you will never convince the child that not being with their first mother is not a tragedy. Sorry. I should probably sanitize if for you. But the truth is that adoption exists because of pain, tragedy, ugliness and more tears, depression and disorders than can be measured.
Adoption isn’t necessary in every case where it is used, and that is a real tragedy
Why don’t we crush it, then? Why don’t we make it go away? Why don’t we stop the pain? Why don’t we put an end to the suffering? The answer is tragic but simple. Adoption is necessary.
Adoption isn’t necessary in every case where it is used, and that is a real tragedy. I believe that first families should be preserved whenever children can be safe. Poverty in today’s world of monetary excess and global access should never be the reason that a child is slashed away from its mother and given to someone else. But when children can’t be safe in their first families, they need new families of their own. Institutions fail miserably in their attempts to teach children how to lead families of their own.
I come from an engineering background. I have been more fortunate than anyone deserves to be because I was good at running numbers through my head and plugging them into a computer. In most instances, numbers bring me comfort. They give me an understanding of whether something will probably work, or if it isn’t worth the effort. Numbers tell me to invest, or to be afraid. Numbers cause me to act or to refrain. I used to turn to the old cliché and say that I loved numbers because they don’t lie. Whoever came up with that worn-out phrase wasn’t familiar with the world of adoption and orphans.
Adoption is necessary because there are children who need to have their own families and who won’t get them any other way.
Pro-adoption, anti-adoption and adoption-reform camps wield their favorite numbers like swords in a war of evangelism and proselytizing in which Torquemada would have been proud to have participated. That has caused me to learn to hate numbers when it comes to vulnerable children. I don’t know how many true orphans there are. I don’t know how many children in systems could safely be returned to their first families. I don’t know how many cups of coffee would need to be given up to allow first mothers to feed their children.
Adoption is necessary because there are children who need to have their own families and who won’t get them any other way. I don’t know how many there are and neither does anyone else. But I know they are there. My wife aged out of the U.S. foster system at eighteen, before her senior year of high school was half-over. Her support became her own problem before she even got out of high school. She still doesn’t have a family from the past to call her own or to turn to on difficult days when there is simply no substitute for the kind of love, support and understanding inherent in the shared history of such a group.
The adoption of that unfortunate woman when she was a child would have reduced the burden on “the system” by seven in the next generation
The world needs adoption because the first mother of my daughters was “raised” in orphanages until she was thrust into the streets with only the clothes on her back, no skills, and only one thing to sell. Because of the violence and deprivation that came as a result of her using chemicals to mask her own pain, she eventually had seven of her own children being “raised” in the same system that failed her. The adoption of that unfortunate woman when she was a child would have reduced the burden on “the system” by seven in the next generation. It also would have eliminated the immeasurable pain and suffering that her children experienced because their mother never had a mother to teach her how to be a mother.
When I met some of my children in an orphanage, I came to understand the other reason that adoption is necessary. Each time we visited my daughters-to-be, a hoard of children swarmed our adoption coordinator. He would speak with each child, individually, and then they would walk away. When I asked him what they talked about, he told me they always asked him the same thing. Then he said: “They want to know if I found their new mamas and papas, yet.” Even children know that children need families of their own.
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