Last evening Laurie and I sat down as dinner warmed in the oven and read letter a letter lovingly written by a young lady who being adopted herself has graciously offered to help us ‘think through’ adoption by sharing her story and answering some of our questions. First, we want to thank her for sharing. Second, we want to thank her for starting us on a line of thinking that very much helped us to learn a bit more about the nature of love.
This is a ‘piece’ of our story:
We’ve been struggling with our own ability to love, really a form of self-doubt. Some years ago we mentored a young man I’m going to call ‘Sam’, a former client of mine. I started working with Sam when he was around seven, I was a youth advocate at the time and I was assigned to spend 8-10 hours a week building relationship with him and supporting him in both home and school. I worked with him for a couple of years, his family was pretty neglectful, but always on the edge; looking back we probably offered just enough support in our program to keep them from totally falling apart. When Sam was around 9 his family took off for about a year and I ran into him when they returned; they were at our office obtaining some service or another and Sam was playing in the front yard. He was emaciated, gray and pretty despondent so after hanging out and playing with him in the yard until his family left I went in and visited with my supervisor. I reported the family for neglect based on his physical condition and asked that I be assigned as his advocate again.
I worked with him until my wife and I entered YWAM. A few years later we found that we couldn’t get him out of our hearts and minds so we connected with him again through a mentorship program called ‘Partners’. I tell this long story mostly as evidence of the length and depth of our involvement in his life. Sam was/is important to us, we continue to love and care about him.
We were also asked at one time if we’d be interested in becoming his foster parents, and chose not to. We struggled with this decision, but eventually made the choice we did because we wanted our home to remain our home. Sam had come to spend weekends with us, he stayed overnight on many occasions and it was great to have him join us; but there was always a ‘whew’ when we dropped him off and we were back to being simply ‘Kent & Laurie’. We enjoyed our time with him, we enjoyed our time together. We loved Sam and believed that we were called to be a part of his life, just not on a day-to-day basis. We struggled with some guilt over our decision, but as we consider our path over the last six or so years we know it was the right decision.
The other ‘doubt generating’ factor we acquired was through taking Sam to many family events where he was able to play with our nieces and nephews. Sam had been exposed to some rather unsavory events and circumstances in his few years, and some these experiences evidenced themselves in his behaviour around our nieces and nephews. We found ourselves quite protective of our nieces and nephews and I believe at some level we interpreted this protectiveness as love; i.e., we thought we didn’t love Sam as much as our own biological relatives. This ultimately made us question our own ability to love non-biologically connected (adopted) child; did that ‘blood-tie’ really matter?
This has always been a big question for us when considering adoption, and as we read this young lady’s letter last night we found this paragraph…
“I’ve heard some people say that they couldn’t love an adopted child like they could love their own child. I don’t understand that. An adopted child IS your own child. But, if this is how someone feels, they should not adopt. I also hear people say that you can’t love someone like you love your own blood. This angers me. They are saying that my family cannot properly love one another. That is so ignorant.”
…prompted both tears and a realization for Laurie (that she of course passed along to me – the ‘dense’ one). What she realized is that the person she loves and trusts most in the world (me) is not a ‘blood’ relation to her either, yet we are closer and engaged in a deeper relationship than she’s had with any of her family members; brothers, sisters, father and mother, ‘husband’ is much closer. It is truly amazing that we’ve talked about this issue as much as we have and have never come to this realization.
‘Love’ is not connected to biological ties…
