the adoption spectrum

Yesterday I was chit-chatting with my friend, Jen. Sometimes I think Jen is as excited about our growing family as we are, and she seems to not only not mind my adoption ramblings but actually encourages them. After mulling yesterday's conversation over, I thought of two things I wanted to post about. I'll do one of them here and then the other in the next post.

First, I want to talk about something I call the adoption spectrum.

One one end of the spectrum we have people who will never ever in a million years consider adoption and don't understand others doing it. For a variety of reasons, they just can't do it. While that makes me sad, I respect those who realize that. A child should not be adopted by those who can't love him/her as they would a bio child. At the other end of the spectrum, we have people who can adopt any child from any situation -- older, special need, transracial, etc. I think these people are made of totally different stuff than the rest of the population. It's like they have been injected with super-strength parenting powers, and I stand in total amazement and awe of them.

The rest of us tend to fall somewhere in the middle of these two ends. Some people are fine with adopting, but only if the child is an infant that looks like them, i.e. a white newborn. Others are fine with adopting transracially as long as we're still talking about an infant. Then, we have those who can stretch the age boundaries a bit a long with the race differences. After that, we come to some very special people. There are some who adopt older kids -- healthy school-agers. These are kids who desperately yearn for a family, but they have to compete with those infants who are so in demand. They have certain challenges, to be sure, but I believe that families who adopt these kids often find themselves rewarded like they never could have imagined. Another group that goes with the older kids are the special needs kiddos. Some may find it hard to believe, but while many of us get nervous at the idea of parenting a SN child, there are families out there who actually seek out children with illnesses, physical deformities and other issues to parent. They, too, find themselves incredibly blessed to have these kids.

So, why I did I bring this up? Two reasons. One, I would like everyone to really think about where they fall on the adoption spectrum and why. I think it can really tell us a lot about ourselves. Please know, however, that one place on the spectrum is not better or worse than another place, which brings me to reason #2. I want everyone to think about the broadness of adoption. Whenever you want to question a family's adoption decisions (and trust me, there have been a lot of families that I have wanted to question but didn't) think about the fact that there is such a wide range of possibilities and what may work for one family won't for another. Adoption is a long thoughtful process, and families put a lot of consideration into their decisions. It is easy to sit back and wonder why a family would adopt at all, much less why they would adopt a certain child or children.

Next, I plan to talk about our own place on the spectrum and how we found ourselves there.