Several months ago I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures--looking at pictures of celebrities on msnbc.com. In honor of Father's Day, which was coming up, they had a slideshow of celebrity dads. I was quite surprised to see that of the 21 dads pictured, five of them were adoptive fathers.
Everyone probably knows of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Sometimes when celebrities adopt I have to wonder how much of it is about publicity. (uh, Madonna?) But, after seeing that 20% of the celebrities in this slideshow had adopted children, I did a search to find out how many other less publicized celebrity adoptive families were out there. The website adoption.com had a list of celebrities who are adopted, have adopted or have placed children for adoption. Besides rocker Ozzy and presidential candidate McCain, the list of adoptive dads includes: Hugh Jackman, Al Roker, George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, Ted Danson, Magic Johnson, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Charles Bronson and Ronald Reagan.
Recently I've been thinking about the fact that adoption is so much more unusual than birth, and sometimes that can be difficult. I am often around pregnant women or new moms, and they usually end up talking about pregnancy, or childbirth, or nursing, or things that I might not ever experience. I don’t usually mind those conversations, up to a point, but I do often wish there was someone in the room with whom I could have a conversation about my different experience of “expecting.”
I thought it was great that on Father’s Day MSNBC decided to highlight adoptive dads. It made me feel a little less lonely and misunderstood, I guess. I often feel so abnormal when I’m around parents who have had children through pregnancy and birth. I’m not sure what this says about me, but I felt a little less abnormal because pop culture, through MSNBC's entertainment section, had acknowledged and celebrated adoption by posting that slideshow.
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