November is Adoption Awareness Month and this year the word “awareness” is really sticking out to me. There have been seasons where I thought of it as “Adoption Positivity Month” and then years later it felt like “Adoption Shame and Guilt Month”. The different circles I’ve been in and the different voices I’ve listened to have influenced my perspective. But this year, I want to take seriously the idea of raising awareness about adoption. But what exactly do I want people to be “aware” of? I’ve got some thoughts after 20 years caring for other people’s children and 16 years as an adoptive parent.
-You should be aware that in your state right now there are kids in need of a family who can support them and provide them with stability. They have no legal parents and that is a terrible failure on so many levels. Their biological family should have gotten the help they needed to be able to parent if they could. Extended family and kinship options should have been pursued. The system should have been working a concurrent plan to make sure the kids were in a home willing to provide permanency while the parents worked their plan. Timeframes should have been established so kids didn’t wait so long in the system. But whatever the reason, there are kids who need a supportive family and you could be that family. (Here’s where you can find more information on waiting children.)
-You should be aware that adoptees don’t owe anyone their adoption story. I have kids who love to talk about their adoption and bring it up first thing when they are Star of the Week at school. I have kids who absolutely will not talk about it and will make it awkward if you ask. There’s a lot of curiosity about adoption, but this can be a very painful or intimate topic that doesn’t need to be explored unless the adoptee is the one bringing it up.
-You should be aware that adopted kids are just kids. They have an extra layer of trauma in their lives and brains because of the separation they experienced (no matter how old they were when they experienced it), but they are also wildly normal. They are on your kid’s basketball team and at their birthday parties and you have no idea. Adoptees are teaching Sunday School at your church, they’re your real estate agents or electricians. Adoption is so often portrayed in movies as something dramatic and it serves as the origin story for so many heroes or villains, it’s hard to realize just how beautifully boring it can be and how many lives it touches. If you find yourself in a conversation about adoption, you may be talking to a sibling of an adoptee, a birth parent, or an aunt of an adoptee without realizing it. Adoptees aren’t always interested in being the poster child for adoption and may not lead with that information.
-You should be aware that adoptive parenting is mostly the same as typical parenting. . . until it isn’t. All kids need meals and schedules and bedtime stories and help learning how to care for themselves and rides to soccer practice. We are adoptive families, but we are also just families and most of the time we think of adoption as a thing that happened one day to give us legal connection. But the part of our parenting that is about adoption. . . it can be brutal. The hardest conversations you can imagine where you realize how deeply this person you love more than anything has been hurt by choices you had nothing to do with. You can’t fix it. You can’t ignore it. You have to help them learn how to walk through it. And a lot of the difficult emotions are directed at you because you are safe enough to be angry at. Or there’s having to navigate life well as a family with multiple racial and ethnic identities. Or dealing with assumptions other people make about your adopted child and their story. Or maintaining healthy relationships with the biological family. Or advocating for your kids to get what they need. Or investing hours and hours in learning how to parent them in ways that are best for them, even if it’s different than what other parents are doing. If you don’t handle the adoption-centric part of your parenting well, it will have massive implications for the other parts of your parenting.
I have no regrets about adopting. Zero. Never for one minute of one day. I am so blessed to be parenting my children. I have such warm feelings about adoption because of what a gift it has been to me. My kids are doing phenomenally well and I know that isn’t a given. Our family is an adoption success story, but I know we aren’t the only story. It hurts to know there are kids just like mine who are still waiting for a family to call their own. It also hurts to know there are kids in adoptive families who aren’t getting their unique needs met or kids who are being pressured to share their deepest trauma in situations where it doesn’t feel safe, or kids who have to carry the weight of adult assumptions about what it means to be an adoptee. I’m hoping a greater level of awareness might be helpful to those kids and families like mine.