Uh oh…it’s contagious! That negative attitude…that “snit addiction” from Dr. G…it’s spreading…

Or, more accurately, as Adrienne put it, “she doesn't really hate adoption - she just hates having to think about it and write about it and worry about it all the time.” That’s me! I hate how adoption has consumed my life!

The statistics Adrienne cited tell a lot. They point to the fact, as Adrienne correctly surmised, that many children adopted today are not adopted through domestic private adoption at birth. That these children come with their own histories, usually tragic, and these histories have a long-lasting impact on their future.

Time and time again I say (as if trying to convince myself) that I’m pro-adoption. It is a ludicrous statement for me to make if you consider my own personal reality. Here I sit with a child with so many disabilities that any logical person would take one look and declare that she will be disabled for life and the hope of any independent living or survival as a “successful” adult (whatever the heck that means) is slim to none. It has been the ultimate cosmic slap-in-the-face.

To know me prior to our adoption would be to know how pro-adoption I was. I was so sure it was the right way for me to create a family that even though there were no fertility issues involved, I was ready to use it as the only way we created a family. As fate would have it, my then-husband was not equally enamored. So all those Romanian children of the early 1990s came home to other families…not ours. And KayKay was born.

I was smugly confident when that marriage ended and the reports started surfacing about all the problems these orphans were having in families that I had been spared this challenge. But the gravitational pull of adoption surfaced again shortly after Super Dad and I were married. This time it was articles on Chinese adoption, and given the belief down in my soul that adoption – and specifically interracial adoption – was something I was destined for…I was off and running toward China.

I bought the party line…hook, line and sinker. Chinese orphans are MUCH healthier than Eastern European orphans. That lie rings in my ears on a nearly daily basis. There no such thing as a “good orphanage”. But I didn’t know this then.

The ultimate cosmic irony is that now my world is filled with adoptive and foster families who are parenting traumatized children. The numbers of these families get bigger every year. Most of them were far from prepared for the task that is now before them (how can you ever prepare for something that decimates your life!). Sorrow, grief, frustration, anger and the complete destruction of families is something I deal with daily. And when I step back to inventory my own personal situation, I realize that LuLu’s disorders are even more severe than most of the children from the families I support.

Yikes…no wonder I hate adoption. Yet…


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