Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates

I have heard several people say that they are not sure about adoption as a choice for them because “you just don’t know what you’re going to get.” Obviously, to some extent, that’s true no matter how you end up with children. I could argue that as adoptive parents, we have more say in what we get than parents through pregnancy. If you get pregnant you have little choice—you will bring home a newborn baby who will probably have physical characteristics and personality traits from both or at least one of the parents. If your child is born with physical or mental disabilities, you find a way to deal with it. Mark and I, on the other hand, got to (had to?) fill out a six-page “Child Characteristic Checklist.” It doesn’t seem quite right, but this list asked us to pick the age, race and even personality of our child. We could say whether or not we would consider adopting a child with any number of diseases or disabilities.

Filling out this list was excruciating for me, because whenever we started to check “no” on any choice, I felt like I was telling my own child “I can’t love you if you have this problem.” I had to pray through this process. Years before I met Mark, when I first started thinking that I wanted to adopt, I pictured myself adopting an older child, possibly with special needs, probably of a different race than me. A main reason for wanting to adopt at that time was that I felt (and still feel) compassion toward kids caught in a broken foster care system. It seemed like that was where the greatest need was. Adopting a “healthy white baby” somehow seemed like cheating. Everyone wants a healthy newborn—I wanted to give a home to a child no one else wanted.

That was the ideal. The reality was that when Mark and I sat down to fill out this checklist, we had to prayerfully consider what we could really handle at this point in our lives—emotionally, financially, spiritually, socially. In the end, our completed home study said we were approved to adopt “one child of either sex ranging in age from birth to one year with mild needs”.

Of course, even after all that, we still don’t know exactly what we’re going to get. We do know that we are having a newborn baby boy, and that his birthmother is white. We’ve met her several times, so we know what she looks like. We know that she hasn’t smoked or drunk alcohol since she’s been pregnant, and she has had good prenatal care. As far as we can tell, she and the baby are both as healthy as can be.

There is still a lot we don’t know. We don’t know what his voice will sound like, or whether he will be an introvert or an extrovert, or whether he will like team sports or individual sports or no sports. We don’t know if he will be strong-willed or compliant. Or if he’ll get into trouble at school. Or if he’ll have a lot of friends. Will he be good with his hands and love to work in the garden like his father? Will he be a thinker and love math like his mother?

Do parents through pregnancy really know much more than we do about what they are going to get? I don’t know. The fact is, it doesn’t matter much what we do or don’t know about this little boy. God already knows everything about him, and everything about us. And all the evidence we have so far says that God has meant for us to be this child’s parents. That’s all we need to know.