Lucky

Since being matched with the child we will adopt, people quite often tell us how lucky this little boy is going to be to have us as parents.

They are always well-intentioned words spoken with great kindness. I am grateful for them. And yet, they jar a little.

Flannery O’Connor described sentimentality as ‘a distortion … in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.’ I think that’s what I struggle with when people tell me that our little boy is going to be lucky. It’s an overemphasis on innocence.

It wasn’t long into the countless pages of reports, set on pale, austere paper that the option of sentimentality departed us. In the bleak assessments of wonderful, overworked social workers we encountered the world of chaos and pain into which this boy was born.

His being placed for adoption – that genealogical aberration, that ultimate severance – may be many things, but please don’t call it lucky.

I mean that as a gentle plea, not as an angry accusation.

To describe adoption as lucky does not honour his story. It ignores the unimaginable pain of separation that he is still too small to understand but feels all the same.  

It also places a burden on us to be the heroes that we know we cannot be. I know that’s not anyone’s intention. I know people just want to affirm us and encourage us as we adventure into parenting – we certainly need that! But we are not heroes. We happen to have the stability, health, space and energy that makes adoption possible at this stage in our lives. We haven’t earned any of that. We are just doing what we think is right with what God has given us. If that’s heroic then we should be celebrating many thousands of other heroes who do the long, patient and unseen work of imperfectly attempting to be faithfully obedient to Jesus.

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It’s going to be strange, in a few weeks, when we bring our little boy home for the first time. Beautiful, I’m sure, but unavoidably strange – to meet the one we have so far only known through pictures and words, to transition so suddenly from total strangers to closest relatives. We’re not expecting it to be easy.

I hope we will be the parents he needs. But he will not be lucky to have us. We will be the lucky ones – lucky to be entrusted with his care. Or maybe luck just isn’t the most helpful word – it’s too impersonal. We approach this not as entitled owners asserting our rights to this child, but as reverent recipients of a gift. We do not deserve him, but he is a gift which we will steward with gratitude and awe.

Woven in with all the bleakness and ambiguity, pain and challenge, there is an irrepressible thread of grace.

May we have eyes to see.