Mea culpa…

I have to start this blog with an apology, to someone I don’t even know but whose blog I admire…Shana of “Waiting for Sophie” has a sweet blog site all about her daughter Sophie, whom she adopted from China, and she also uses my favorite Chinese saying for her blog’s epigraph: “Keep a green bough in your heart, and the singing bird will come.” I love this quotation, which I found a while back in a book of Chinese poetry, so I hope she doesn’t mind if I use it too. In fact, I’ve named the darn blog after it, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this imitation won’t offend.

Anyway, this is the start of a blog that will record our journey to adopt a baby daughter from China. I woke up on New Year’s Day this year thinking about the idea of international adoption in that we-could-really-do-this-sort-of-way and, within days, had several applications sitting in front of me from various agencies. Much talking ensued with my husband, who was already on board with adoption in general. We have spent several years in the quicksand of infertility, suffered a miscarriage last year, and are still unclear about where that other road will lead. In the meantime, however, we are following the road to adoption, and we are doing it through China.

I suspect this choice to pursue both quite actively might be a bit confusing to some people. Often, adoption is viewed as a last resort of the infertile–a “second choice”–an “inferior option.” Even adoption agencies are guilty of asking whether a couple has achieved “closure” in terms of their infertility and their hopes of conceiving a biological child before beginning the adoption process. While I understand the concerns operating behind such questions, I really think this attitude does a grave injustice to the place of adoption in the hearts and minds of potential parents. It implies that adoption is something you move on to, after the possibility of having kids biologically is closed down. While this may be the case for some adoptive parents, I know that there are people out there who only want to adopt or who want to adopt in addition to giving birth. Such is the case for us.

We don’t see adoption as a “last resort” or a “second choice” or any of those other epithets that often get placed on it. Adoption is just another way of growing a family. Adoption expands and challenges the heart. Giving birth expands and challenges the heart, too. We would like to experience both roads, although we don’t yet know if that will ultimately be possible or not. But neither one has preeminence for us. If I were to get pregnant tomorrow, we would still adopt…although China does have a rule that adoptive parents must wait a calendar year between the birth or the adoption of one child and the next. It makes sense intellectually, if not quite emotionally.

I don’t want to imply that adoption is exactly the same as giving birth. It isn’t, of course. That’s, actually, the point. If you’ve decided to become a parent, then why limit yourself to just one form of parenthood, even–or especially–if it’s the more common, more conventional, way to do it? I should mention at this point that I am aware of the debate within the adoption community regarding the long-term, potentially detrimental effects adoption may have on the adopted child, such as feelings of (theoretical) abandonment and isolation within their own family structures. International adoption risks compounding those feelings because it usually adds cultural and racial abandonment to the mix as well. I’d like to speak to these issues at some point in a later post. Stay tuned.

At the moment, obviously, I’m writing from the point of view of a potential parent. When my husband and I try to answer the question, “Why adopt?”, we always come around to the same sort of response: we believe that it’s important in this life to open yourself up. To kick yourself out of that comfort zone. To learn how to be different from what you were before. How else do you grow? In fact, Karen from “The Naked Ovary” (another one of my fave blogs) put it best in a post she wrote a little bit ago on the need to “unlearn” so many misconceptions we have culturally about the subject of adoption, so I’ll just let her do the talking here: “Adoption is like walking into another room and turning on the light.”