Overwhelming Questions

Like any other part of life, adoption seems to crop up a tremendous amount of intense questions that you must really ask yourself  seriously. As we began the process we filled out tons of paperwork and among the paper work was a checklist of characteristics that we would be willing to accept. At first glance I thought to myself, I feel like I'm filling out a questionnaire for my "dream child." The humorous side to this is as awful as it sees to go over all these variables and say, "no, not a child like this," or "yes, we will consider," these characteristics are important. Mostly with the health concerns and whether we would be able to truly accept the responsibility of a child with a severe disability or health related issues. When you "make" a baby you do not have these choices, you just trust God to bring you a healthy little baby. In adoption you have to consider if you want to join the team of amazing parents that have the ability to handle severe disabilities and health issues. Keith and I went down the checklist and went with our gut. The characteristics we didn't know or didn't understand well enough to decide on we Googled, so we would be informed. It was difficult, but we got through it and made the best decisions as best we could.

On the other hand there are less intense issues of race and gender. Now this is for many a very understandably difficult decision to make. It is unlikely that any child we get will look like either one of us and we are both fine with that, but understandably others are not. If you think about it hard enough you realize that by adopting a child of another race you are basically opening up the curtains of your adoption and throwing out any plausible deniability, and sadly we live in a world that is less than reasonable at times. You will have to deal with racial issues and nosy questions from others. Especially as both Keith and I are Caucasian, we have never had to deal with racism in our lives directly. I have unfortunately seen my best friend go through it and your left in a kind of "did that just happen" kind of moment. It did and you feel very helpless and angry you didn't do something. In my Undergraduate course work I studied American history in depth and our nations history has not always been beautiful, at times its been quite ugly and brutal.

We both wholly understand and respect that our child may come from a completely different racial, and thereby, cultural background from our own. To Keith and I we are open to any race or gender of our child, simply because to us race is not a factor in our love. We have friends and family from a variable of backgrounds and we love them all just the same. It is a deeply personal decision that we thought about long and hard. I feel that God knows Keith and I and has a child in his plan already. We are fully prepared to, if necessary, deal with any problems that might come along the way stemming from any diversity issues. What is important to us is that our children learn from us, their parents, that in the past and in the present race is a particularly volatile subject; but not something you should back away from. Our cultural background is the soul and root of any society. If our children learn anything from us, I hope and wish it will be that they should take pride in their ethnic background, in what people like them have gone through, what being Hispanic, African American, African, German, Welsh, or Scottish really means.  It is imperative that a person understand their cultural identity and respect their roots and pride themselves on who they are.

This is a very important lesson we are prepared to share with our children. The question that pangs me is how much do you intertwined that into life, without overwhelming the child with to much information.  Thoughts? Discussion time: