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I Will Not Apologize For Adopting
I Will Not...
1. ...apologize for adopting my sweet daughter. You can not convince me that her life would have been better in an orphanage or foster care.
2. ...make politically correct excuses for why we chose international adoption over domestic. It's none of your business.
3. ...apologize for refusing to blend our daughter's religion of birth with our faith and maintain with certainty that she was brought out of darkness and into Light. Amen.
4. ...apologize for the amount of money that was spent on the adoption process and would happily do it again.
5. ...apologize for raising my daughter as an American first. Her nationality is a part of her history but her home, her freedom and her opportunity come from here.
I Will...
6. ...love my daughter with every fiber of my being not because she was adopted and fragile, but because she is my daughter and a gift from God.
7. ...raise her to define herself not by her circumstances, but by the freedom she has in Christ Jesus.
8. ...pray for her that her adoption into the Kingdom of Heaven becomes her greatest joy.
9. ...encourage her to ask questions, seek answers and heal any wound that is a result of her adoption experience.
10. ...share in her tears for the loss she has suffered.
11. ...hold her hand for the moments that matter...her wedding day, the birth of her first child, meeting her birth mother...I will be there.
14 comments:
This is a beautiful post! Thank you for your thought-provoking words!
April - this is great. I hope nothing happened to provoke it. So much truth!
Hannah,
No, it's just me being sassy :) What else is new?
Lovely, April.
I love it! Well said.
e
Wonderful post--thank you for sharing this!
PRINTING THIS OUT! So good. And, for the record, I like sass.
AMEN!!!! LOVE this post! Thank you so much for posting what I have not had to courage to post!!! Could I post a link to your wonderful post on my blog? Thank you to TM for directing me here:)
Annie,
Of course! Thank you for linking me to your blog!
April
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I do appreciate your declaration of love for your daughter.
Also--and I mean this with all respect & simply as a way to add another voice to the ongoing dialogue between adoptive parents & adult adoptees--I can't say that I completely share each sentiment you shared. But that's okay--that's what makes the adoption community so complex and so diverse. There are so many different experiences that compose the adoption experience & journey.
As a Korean adoptee raised in a White American military, that is, Navy, family (whom I love deeply), some of the ideas and/or attitudes you express represent what have made being an international adoptee in America such a difficult & tumultuous experience for me (and many other adoptees) personally...
I love my family here in America, but I also love my family in Korea (with whom I reunited in Korea last year for the first time in 30+ years...). I feel torn between two nations, two people, two families, because ultimately I am not American first, nor am I am of one family first, but I am of both equally...and this truth only becomes more evident...
And the losses I have experienced and continue to experience are often aggravated and magnified because of these conflicts and push-pull I feel from an implied division of loyalties...
And particularly, after learning the truth about the circumstances surrounding my adoption (the info in my original paperwork was falsified, which is unfortunately very common in Korean adoptions specifically), my heart breaks for both my Omma & Appa (Korean mother and father).
I wish my Omma had been given more resources & support so that she would not have felt so forced & so trapped into making a choice that no mother should ever have to face...
Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts, even if I don't necessarily agree with the message behind all of them...
(P.S. I don't think that anyone, AP or adult adoptee, would ever try to convince you or anyone that any of us would have been better off in an orphanage. Honestly, I don't even know why people ever assume that adult adoptees or anyone else would ever think such a thing--to me, it's an irrelevant point, because no one thinks we adoptees would have preferred to grow up in an orphanage. However, it is a worthy point to discuss what changes can be made to PREVENT folks like us ending up in orphanages in the first place, because many adoptions occur as a result of preventable and ameliorative issues...For the record, so there is no misunderstanding, I'm not anti-adoption, just a believer in approaching the issue from all sides...because it's SO complex.
Also, just for added knowledge & clarity, I do know of very loving foster families in China & Korea who have wanted to adopt the children they fostered, but the laws did not or do not allow them to do so...just another perspective, that's all...)
Melissa,
Thank you so much for your comment and I appreciate your point of view even if we do share some differences but like you said, each adoption experience is so very different.
As I am not an adoptee I can not begin to imagine what you have gone through. It sounds like you have been conflicted regarding feelings of both loyalty and belonging to one family or another.
I have to say that I believe our experience to be a bit different because we are already a transracial family. My husband is from Vietnam. He left as a result of the war at age four and grew up in Africa until coming to this country for good at age 12. While he is not adopted he has had the experience of leaving his home country and all that that entails and I do believe that his experience will be a positive influence in our daughters life, especially as she grows older and possibly begin to confront those same conflicts of feelings and emotion that you have described.
I agree with you 100% that I wish my daughter's family would have helped support her biological mother so that adoption had not been an option. I have blogged about my feelings on this particular subject a few times. It saddens me that there is such a stigma on unwed mothers, especially when the circumstances of their pregnancy can be out of their control.
I wish you the best Melissa and pray that God gives you peace about the two families that you love so very much. Remember that first and foremost you are His daughter first. Many blessings, April
I'm peeking in from TM's site and I appreciate your thoughts on these complex issues.
In a few important ways I needed to read this and I thank you for that!
I also read with great interest the insights that Melissa shared and feel that I am benefitting from reading this a few days after the fact and with the broad perspective shared both by your post and her comments in tandem.
You both shared with incredible presence of thought and eloquence. Most of all, you both did so with mutual respect ~ fundamental towards maintaining open dialogue.
I thank you both.
Thank you Lisa and I hope to see you again here soon!
The thing about adoption is that it is SO very personal and this blog post was in response to so much animosity and ugliness I have read lately in regards to adoption. Judging each other in our experiences is not going to help the root cause of adoption and abandonment. When we begin lifting each other up, especially as women, instead of pointing fingers and proclaiming the other wrong, then we will begin to change the attitudes that persist throughout the adoption community.
Well done.
Although I have recently become convicted that we need to be adopting alot more of the children in our own back yards, that is not IN PLACE of foreign adoption, but in addition to. And convictions are personal and between each of us and God.....
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