Since spring, we have been working our way through the adoption process. Through most of that period, it has all felt sufficiently distant for me to assume that I’ll probably just be ready for it when the time comes. But now that dates and decisions are getting quite close, I’ve been wondering if I need to be a little more proactive about getting myself as ready, mentally and emotionally, as I can be. So, I’m going to see if writing about it helps.
To be honest, as far as I can tell, it’s all just feeling very ambiguous.
On quite a practical level, there are all sorts of uncertainties, around matching and timing and most obviously around the particular needs of the child who we end up welcoming to our home. We know that this will dramatically change our lives, but we have no idea quite how. We know that it will be really hard, but we have no idea how hard.
Then there are the uncertainties that I imagine all new parents feel around our capacity and preparedness to be the attuned, nurturing carers that this child is going to need. We are bringing all of our idealised hopes of the sorts of parents we want to be, all of the baggage (good and bad) that we carry from our own upbringings, all of reading and learning that we’ve been ploughing through. And we have no idea if it will be enough. We have no idea if we will be up to the task. For two high achievers who struggle with perfectionism, this is all a bit uncomfortable.
And combined with all of those uncertainties is the ethical ambiguity of adoption itself – at once so beautiful and so tragic, so redemptive and so deeply wounding. The more we learn about trauma and attachment, the more cautious we are of seeing adoption as anything more positive than the least bad option for children in dreadful situations. I think we need to sit with the uncomfortable reality that by adopting we are participating in the breaking of bonds that ought never to be broken.
Of course, we remind ourselves, adoption will be the last resort for the child that is placed with us. There are children who need a safe home and loving family – and we hope we can give that. But we’re feeling the brokenness of it all – the cycles of trauma and abuse, the entrenched generational injustices, the chaos, the bleakness, the poverty of love, the unimaginable grief and shame and powerlessness that must come with having a child removed from your care.
Hard as it is, I think it’s right that we sit with all the brokenness and that we look it in the eye. It forces us to interrogate our own motives, it heightens our sensitivity to any hint of a saviour complex and it makes us wary of telling an adoption narrative that is all neat and saccharine and happily ever after.
So, as I say, lots of ambiguity. But right now, sitting at my desk on a grey October Saturday, that ambiguity feels alright. I’m feeling it, for sure, but it’s not heavy or debilitating. It feels contained – tethered and held in check – present but not dominant.
It brings into sharp focus what is probably true of all life this side of new creation – that clunky juxtapositioning of joy and pain, redemption and brokenness, beauty and tragedy. Life is ambiguous, uncertain and mostly out of my control. This has always been the reality, our adoption journey hasn’t altered that. But what getting ready to adopt has done is remove the option of insulating ourselves from that reality. That’s not easy, but I trust that it is good.
Notes From the Potting Shed 