Imagine you are married, madly in love your best friend and soul mate. Then one day you beloved partner dies. You grieve heavily and for a long time. Eventually you meet another person and you fall in love and get married and build a happy life. Then one day they say to you "It was God's plan for us to be together" You know that had it not been for the death of your first partner, you wouldn't be together. How do you interpret that statement?
So I recently spoke an a panel about adoption. The panel included an adult adoptee, first mothers and adoptive parents. And one of the adoptive parents was speaking about her journey to parenthood and made a reference to something that I hear all the time from adoptive parents.
"They were meant to be my children"
Sometimes also worded as
"God knew we were supposed to be your family" or
"It was God's plan for us to be a family"
Think about what that sounds like to an adoptive parent. To an adoptive parent it is warm and fuzzy thought. A sense that the child is right were they should be- right where they were meant to be.
(Of course, recognize also the inherent judgement implied in it (whether consciously or not) that "here" is a better place then where they could have been.
Think about what it sounds like to a first mother. Your whole reason for existing was to give birth to this baby solely for the purposes of placing them with the adoptive family. It implies their whole destiny and purpose was to produce a baby for someone else. It relegates them to being little more than an incubator and minimizes the fundamental role they have as the child's first mother. Not to mention first families are so much more than just the people who "made" your baby.
Now think about what it sounds like to a child (especially when you drag God into it) God allowed (or worse, caused) the reasons that my first parents couldn't raise me. God meant for me to be born into this other family so He separated me from my first family to put me here. And for children removed due to violence or death- "God allowed my first parent to hit me so that I could come here" or "God allowed my first parent to die because I am supposed to be here with this family" There are two huge issues with this. The first is that it means that being born into their original family was a mistake. The other is that now the child believes that God would deliberately cause the issue that pulled the first family apart. While I am not an overly religious person, I can't imagine how you would come to love/worship/respect a God that you thought deliberately and consciously orchestrated the painful events in your life in order to get you into another family.
And because someone will bring it up- while I do believe that there are a few adoption stories so full of coincidences and "karma" as to wonder if there wasn't some sort of divine intervention pairing a certain child with a certain family, the difference is in those situation the child had already been separated from the birth family. In other words the child was already in an orphanage or foster care. The "karma" is how the child and family connected- NOT in how the child lost their first family.
I will never accept that God planned on my children's first mother's having to relinquish them- it is too cruel to think that God orchestrated that loss deliberately so that I could parent them. I can't believe that a mother relinquishing her child, no matter the circumstances is the universe's Plan A.
Plan A was that my children were meant to be in their families of origin.
It is only when plan A couldn't happen, for whatever reason, that you consider Plan B.
Adoption is Plan B
4 comments:
Thank you so much for this. Every time I hear that line--meant to be--I feel that my life has been a worthless slog of pain--because "god" decided that I would be the vessel of a child for another family.
This was timely for me to read. We chose not to try any fertility treatments, so we say, "for us, adoption was plan A," and we mean, we didn't want our child who joined our family through adoption to feel like we only chose to pursue them because we couldn't have biological children. However, we also want to convey to our child (always) that we are 2nd best. We refer to her birth mother as her first mother. We know and want her to know that (and we are Christian) we don't believe God just put her first mother on earth so we could adopt her. It is a crappy world with crappy circumstances. Yes, we are grateful to her first mother for the opportunity to parent our child, but we fully recognize that in a perfect world, she would have been able to remain with her first mother. Such a hard thing to reconcile all of the facts and facets of adoption. I just needed to read this post as a good reminder of another complexity. Thank you.
Wonderfully said (as usual). I've always wondered how someone can tell me all about how G-d is inscrutable, beyond human comprehension, outside the bounds of the explainable -- and then (sometimes in the same breath) go on to tell me exactly what His plan is and what He intends. Gaah.
That the Pipsqueak is my beloved and loving niece is wonderful beyond words, but I know that somewhere in China there is a woman who gave birth to a little baby she will never know (and abandoned her in a way that demonstrated she actually did care about her child's welfare), who is missing out on a truly wonderful little human being. I cannot believe that what most humans refer to as the creator of the universe set all its myriad parts in motion specifically to bring my family such joy by inflicting such pain on another.
I don't care what name anyone calls their version of G-d... but I do care when they use that name as some kind of celestial stamp of approval on events in their lives. Adoption can be -- and I'll venture to say often is -- a truly beautiful thing... but it is by no means a simple cut & dried process entirely free of pain.
Very well said! I found your blog on RQ, and I am so glad I did.
I completely agree, and I hate it when people tell me (or worse, my daughter) that she is lucky that we got/saved/rescued/adopted/took her in.
Have you seen this new film called rescued? It's a documentary done by a family in CA that has adopted two children. I haven't seen it yet, but the name itself makes me cringe. I would be curious as to what you think of it...they have a website with a lot of video interviews...
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