Adoption – Notes From the Potting Shed

Cynicism and parenting

‘I’d rather be gullible than cynical’

Sometimes you hear a phrase that feels a bit like a punch to the gut – striking unexpectedly and leaving you reeling. I had that sensation a bit over a year ago, listening to Pete Greig reflect on a podcast about the Asbury outpouring. It has stuck with me since.

The slow dismantling of a weary cynicism was a major arena where I experience God’s gentle grace during my sabbatical last summer. It was a fight I then carried into the months that followed as I returned to ministry with all of the frustrations, stresses and tensions inherent to all meaningful work this side of new creation.

I long to be more buoyant and less reserved. I long for more delight, laughter and play. And I long to worry and brood a whole lot less.

I want to live with the unspeakable, effervescent joy of someone who believes in the resurrection. But all too often, I live deflated, turned inwards, pre-occupied by my little concerns and hurts, frustrated at things that don’t go exactly how I want them to, or just a bit scared and worn out by so much in our world that is not right.

I grow cynical.

I grow old.

Now, there is a type of growing old that I long for – a maturation, a softening of hard-edges, an uninhibited intimacy with God and others, an eroding of ego, a confidence in who I am and a disinterest in trying to be anyone else, a depth of peace and poise – the kind that comes not from comfort and ease, but from the long obedience of showing up and giving yourself away. Some people call this sort of holy aging a ‘second naivete.’

But holy aging is rare. It does not seem to be a given. More often, growing old seems to come with unresolved baggage, festering wounds, a narrowing of horizon and a raising of drawbridges. A turning in on oneself rather than out to others. Cynicism.

Right now, parenting feels like it presents me with a daily choice. Which sort of aging do I want? The way of cynicism, or the way of the second naivete?

It could wear me down, I could despise the monotony and seek refuge in escapism, I could lick the wounds of my exhaustion, cultivate self-pity, fantasise all the ‘what-ifs’ of different life decisions, and see these years as a struggle for survival. Honestly, this feels like the pull of the tide.

Or… or I could see these precious days before the routine of school as opportunities to nurture attachment, to attune with and delight in this awesome gift of a boy who God has entrusted to our care. And I could see the monotony itself as a deep invitation.

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father in younger than we.

GK Chesterton

Another punch to the gut.

But a good one. A welcome one. One that I need to hear over and over.

I don’t know if it will get easier over time. Perhaps. But right now making this choice to become the father and the man that I want to be, not the one that my apathy and lethargy drag me towards, is hard. I’m very much not nailing it.

But if being clear on the destination is a big part of the journey, then I am at least progressing. As always, it’s a long obedience in the same direction.

Adoption and the End of the Idol of Competence

Our son has been with us for just over a month now and so far adoption has felt a bit like jumping into a plunge pool – I knew intellectually what we were getting ourselves into, but no amount of thinking can prepare you for the gasping shock of going under the water.

Teething, a virus, and now all three of being down with covid has amplified what was always going to be a rough ride for the three of us. I feel stretched beyond limits I‘ve never really pushed before. To be ill when your child is ill, I have discovered, is brutal – especially when the double-whammy of building attachment and covid remove most possibilities of outside help. We’ve battled, with fevered and aching bodies, to help him sleep, knowing that the only chance of getting the rest we also need is in the fragile bursts where he is able to sleep through the pain he is too small to understand.

I don’t want to be overdramatic. We are ok. I think we are through the worst now and we have had moments of real joy too. I am sure that what we are experiencing is relatively normal for new parents, and far less complicated than the start of many adoptions.

I wonder, though, whether this is a bit of a purgation for me. Being ill, sleep deprived, and desperately trying to get this tiny stranger to stop screaming has dredged up the ugliest parts of me. I am confronted with the truth that for all I can present a kind and compassionate image – there remain deep areas within me that I am scared and ashamed of. I teach my students that the real test of character and leadership is who you are under stress and when no one is looking. I am not passing that test with flying colours.

All of which is bringing me face to face with the idol of competence. As idols go, it’s relatively benign and highly rewarded – it drives me to work hard and serve others. But the truth I can no longer avoid is that I have constructed a large part of my identity around being good at coping, at solving things, at producing good work. Which is all fine until I find myself – as I do now – pushed beyond what can be achieved by effort and planning and technique.

Which is why I am not desperate to move on from this stage. I’m looking forward to things settling down and to us all getting a bit more sleep, for sure. But I think, ultimately, this is good for me. I trust that God can use this time of pressure and stretching to do some deep, refining work to form me into who he has made me to be.

Painful as it is to have those ugly parts of my character exposed, I know that ignoring them won’t help or heal anything. Humiliating as it is to confront the idol of competence, like any idol, it is obstructing me from full, flourishing life in Jesus. So, it’s good to name it, and good to break its power.

But here’s the tricky bit. How do I break an idol of competence without relying on my own competence?

If my issue is an overreliance on my brain, strength and will-power in achieving my own self-improvement, how do I change that without relying on thinking, or working, or willing my way into change?

What does growth look like when my tried and tested methods of growth are the problem?

I sort of know where I want to get to: dependence on God – surrender to his will – a total reliance on Him and not on my own capacity, capability or creativity. But how do I get there without treating it like a problem to fix or a project to complete?

Surrender could mean something passive – just leaving it up to God to sort me out. But I worry that a passive understanding of surrender can become a sort of spiritual cop out absolving me of any responsibility for my own discipleship. I think God wants to involve me in the process rather than just zapping me into conformity.

My guess is that what I’m after is a sort of active surrender. I don’t know yet what exactly that means. Maybe some good first steps will be things like taking the small, daily decisions to yield, and to acknowledge my need, my dependence. To own the humbling failures and the new limits that come with having reduced capacity for work. To be present to God in the joys and anxieties of caring for a baby. To choose over and over to trust in God’s goodness and not my competence as the bedrock of by being and doing.

It’s funny, I have prayed for greater dependence on God for many years. I’ve been acutely aware of how easily I can make this whole discipleship thing a self-help project that relies too heavily on my own competence. I’ve made my bed, so I’d better lie in it. Painful and disorienting though this exposure and idol-shaking is, I want to seize this moment – not primarily with grit and will-power – but with gentle, humble embrace.

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.

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.

Adoption and Ambiguity

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.