Is Adoption God’s “Plan B” for a child?

I remember the emotional gut-punch I felt the first time I heard someone refer to adoption as “Plan B” when it came to God’s perfect will for their child’s life. I didn’t feel like a second rate parent. I didn’t think of myself as “worst case scenario” but that’s what this kind of adoption language felt like to me in the moment. Like my child’s life would have been better without me.

Photo by Renae Morehead

It seems ridiculous to me that this language bothered me so much when I’d been using a variation of it with our group home kids for years. When they were grieving the choices their parents had made that had negatively impacted their ability to be safely raised at home I would validate that pain. I would talk to them about how in the Garden God didn’t create Adam and Eve and two houseparents to raise their children. God’s design for families was for moms and dads to care for their kids in a healthy and loving way. When that breaks down, other people may step in but that is sad and it’s okay to grieve it.

I understood all that and could articulate it for my group home kids, but my heart longed for my adopted children to not feel that same grief. I was giving them permanency. I was going to love them and they’d never have to leave me. Surely their grief wouldn’t be the same.

And you know, it’s not totally the same. My kids do have the benefit of safety and permanency with us. They know how very wanted they were and are and they don’t have to carry the same scars of abuse and neglect as children who spent years in unsafe environments (although they have their own struggles with their unique stories, too). But my heart has been tendered toward the “Plan B” language as I understand what it means to my kids. And what it means to me.

If I try to “spin” the adoption narrative so that I was always Plan A, I communicate to my kids that they don’t have a right to grieve their losses. Telling them that this is best and God’s plan for them means that God meant for them to be separated from their birth family and their birth culture, which can be a very painful loss for them. It can also communicate that God did that so that I would be happy. I don’t want to put that weight on my children– to be the ones responsible for making me happy and at their own expense. I don’t want them to think they have to minimize their own feelings of loss and sadness because they don’t want to question God or hurt me.

I know how it felt when I was grieving our infertility and people tried to hand me the “just adopt” band-aid. While adopting was a beautiful way God worked healing in my heart (and I was always open to the idea), I also needed to grieve the losses of infertility. My kids need that freedom too and will experience it in different ways over the years as they understand the levels of loss involved in adoption.

What I want my kids to understand is the concept of redemption– that God takes hard things and makes them beautiful. This is a concept all through the Bible, but again my mind goes back to the Garden. God knew Adam and Eve were going to sin and he already had a plan ready to save them. I don’t think he was scrambling at the last minute to try and figure it out, but I do think he was grieved. I think of Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s tomb, with all power and authority to raise him from the dead. Jesus felt the sadness of sin and then used it to show God’s power. This is how I think of the “Plan B” nature of adoption. It is about the power of redemption to trade beauty for ashes, to take what was intended for evil and use it for good.

I think my infertility grieved the heart of God because he created in me a desire for children. I think he knew exactly how he was going to use that desire for motherhood in beautiful ways, but I don’t think that means he glossed over the grief. I think the breakdown of my children’s birth families grieved the heart of God, but I also think he had a plan to make something beautiful out of that pain. And I believe that for the birthmothers of my children, too. Their pain is no less real to God or grieving to him. We pray that they will see a redemption of that pain in their own lives. My (maybe too idealistic) hope is that by giving their children safe and beautiful childhoods where their birth families are spoken of with love and honesty, we may someday be part of the redemption story of their relationship.

Ultimately my kids will have to decide how they view their own adoption stories. My job is to support them and do my best to help them work through their own feelings without inserting mine. If I feel defensive about my role in their lives and don’t give them the space to grieve their losses, I’m not being a safe person for them. I’m failing to remember how I needed time to process my own sadness at my life not going the way I imagined it would.

My hope is that my kids will eventually come to the same conclusion I have– that I wouldn’t trade this family for the world. That God’s plan has been good and ultimately an act of kindness. And that when I get to heaven there will be more answers and comfort that I may not find in this life. I don’t think my kids will come to this conclusion because I pushed them into it by requiring they only think happy thoughts about adoption. My hope is that it will be something they freely choose because they’ve been able to openly processes the hard parts. And if they don’t come to that conclusion, I want to love and support them anyway because that’s what moms do.