Since we got our court date, I’ve got the worst pre-date anxiety ever. I can’t shake the fear that we’re going to get stood up somehow. We’ll be standing on the sidewalk in front of a cosmic movie theater, checking our cell phone, and, despite all the plans, we’ll be seeing that movie alone. A lot of people don’t make it through court the first time, but I hope we do.
I’ve been kicking away some other negative thoughts lately. Some of it related to the politics of international adoption (people who think all adoptions should be within a country, not outside) and race (people who think transracial adoptions are naive and doomed) and age (an author who is big on the idea that toddler adoption is filled with attachment issues).
In this huge dogpile of pessimism, the only interesting stuff I’ve heard was in a New York Times article: “An examination by The New York Times of the 2000 census — the first in which information on adoptions was collected — showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children.”
I would have thought this number was way higher.
Anyway, the article points out the difficulties in transracial families –but I finished the piece and thought, “You know what? I don’t care.”
I believe the world is a mystery and good things happen. It’s easy, it’s so easy, to criticize everything. And to think of reasons not to love people. In the end, I love reading and thinking and– to some extent, sometimes, I even love politics. But adoption is about people, not ideas. It’s about children who need love. It’s not naive to believe in transracial adoption. It’s naive to think that your politics are so right, children need to suffer because of them. Who would want to grow up in an orphanage? Who would want to grow up without parents? What kind of person would wish that on kids just to satisfy a smug and vicious belief system?
Life is complicated, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it. People can believe whatever they want, but I prefer to believe that love for a child can’t be the wrong color.
Anyway, I feel all right these days. I look at these pictures we’ve gotten and all the nay-saying becomes a quiet, distant noise like a neighbor’s dog. The photographs (a little boy, teetering back and forth on his tiny legs) remind me that we’re all people and nobody knows what kind of men or women our sons and daughters will become. But we are made for love anyway. Shasta and I are ready to fly to Ethiopia and meet this little boy who is getting bigger every day . . . We can think of nothing else.
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June 1, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Nicola
I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of days now, and I knew that it reminded me of something, your thoughts about how we’re all just people, and kids need a family and love, no matter what the politics. It was a story my grandmother told me years ago, when we were looking at her photos from the 1950’s. She was showing me my father and uncles, and then some people I didn’t know, but had heard of, appeared in the photos. They seemed to have a little boy with them, but I knew they didn’t have a son. I asked who he was, and his name was also familiar to me, she’d talked about this boy (now man), before. I asked how all these people were connected, as I hadn’t realised they were before (they had different surnames), and she explained that after the war there were lots of kids around who had been orphaned, or whose father had been killed and whose mother couldn’t afford to keep all her children; these kids were taken in by neighbours and looked after as their own. There was no legal obligation, no government-organised adoption system, just ordinary people realising that these kids needed homes. And they gave them homes and families and love, without thinking, because it was the right thing to do.
Of course now we need adoption organisations or it would all be chaos, but it’s all the same thing - kids need to be in families, with people that love them, and that’s it. And if some people think that political correctness is more important, well, that’s just sad.
We’ll be singing happy birthday to your little boy tomorrow, and all our fingers and toes (and we have a lot of them between the five of us!) will be crossed for you on the third.
June 3, 2008 at 3:15 am
Jennifer
Amen.
June 3, 2008 at 9:26 am
Chloe'
Hi, Chris! I’ve been enjoying your blog.
I’ve been thinking about that NYT article for a few days now. I couldn’t agree with you more. An adoption - of any a child of any color - could have some challenges. But what doesn’t have challenges that involves people, especially young people who grow and change so quickly? How could a child *not* be adopted because of color? That seems like the worst possible option.
I’m thinking about the two of you. As the Italians say, “forza!” (It means “strength!”
Chlo