Mindless Juices

(I wrote most of this in Korea while the comments were made.  I was caring for my son and never got a chance to post this until now.  See next post for details, I hope.) 

For those people who really know me, they know about my strong beliefs in the concept of “choice.”  The fact is, my wife and I *chose* to adopt.  Now, as Christians, we believe this choice was influenced by God.  For those of you who don’t believe, I hope you can put aside your own self for a second and consider the position from a believers point of view.

The point is: we chose.  This wasn’t a fall back position.  It wasn’t an accident.  It wasn’t because a circumstance.  We sat down and made a choice and started a process.

Throughout the process there were plenty of moments we could have chosen to stop.  However, we chose to keep going.  We chose to sacrifice many different things throughout the process including our time, money and emotional investment.

But all of this… this is our story, not our son’s.  However, the choice we made to adopt him *is* a part of *his* story.  It doesn’t matter if you’re adopted or not, your story is important.  For iBastard (I haven’t had a chance to read as much of his blog as I’d like, as you can imagine, I’ve been busy), I think he’s only just realized the importance of knowing his story and, more specifically, of having the whole story and telling it.

I believe that’s what a lot of people use their blogs for and it’s a huge part of why blogs are so popular today.

My main point is that my son is not “a chosen one.”  He was a choice.  Just as if my wife had chosen to birth a child rather than adopt, that child would have been a choice.  If my wife gets pregnant tomorrow and it’s not a choice (it wouldn’t be), then my child would know that, too.  Because it’s a part of their story!  To help you understand how this works, just like I’m going to tell my son that I believe that God had a plan for him and for us and that plan meant we’d be together forever, I would tell my child who wasn’t planned that God had a plan for us to get pregnant because He wanted us to be together forever.  More specifically, God had His own timing and rather than clue us in, He wanted to surprise us for His own reasons.  But, I digress…

I don’t think the concept is that hard to understand, but I know that some people struggle with the God aspect of it, especially if they aren’t believers.  Even if you’re struggling, focus on the concept of making a choice, not being chosen.  These are different concepts.

Lastly, I’m not a big fan of generalizations.   So, here are some issues I have.
     1.) Most adoptees who might be blogging in today’s world should be about 20+ years old.  In the past 20+ years, I believe there has been a lot of forward thinking in the way that adoptive parents think about their kids.  Did you know I had to have 30+ hours of educational credits for my adoption agency?  These weren’t English or Math classes… these were classes on child rearing.  They ranged from child psychology to adult psychology, from diaper changing to CPR, and from book reading to webinars.  Your parents and most parents, including birth parents, probably never put in 30+ hours of time educating themselves on raising you.  My wife also put in these 30+ hours.  And that’s not including the hours my wife and I spent in conversation discussing *our* philosophies of parenthood… as we discussed what we read and we thought about it and how best to present it to our child before we even knew who he was… actually, before he was even conceived!
     2.) Just because you’re not happy with the way your parents raised you, don’t put that on other people.  Just own it.  No one’s happy with the way their parents raised them!  Adopted or not!  No parent is perfect.  We all say things that aren’t quite perfect.  Sometimes, even with the best intentions, it still comes out wrong or it’s taken wrong or we say it at the wrong time.
     3.) There are thousands of adopted children out there.  For anyone to make a generalization, I believe there would need to be at least a 10% polling in order to make an accurate representation.  Even then, it would need to be qualified with ages.  Simply talking to a few people, even a hundred, doesn’t cut it.  Especially because it’s likely that the people “polled” are likely already in the same “community” and share the same beliefs.  It’s like polling the football team at a single high school and assuming that every teenager today and in the future will feel the exact same way those football players do.