“If Mommy gets a baby in her belly, will you send me back?” she asked him, with nervous eyes searching the floor, inhaling the shame of those words as if they were her indictment.
It’s often near the surface for this one — not the year she was “chosen” and a mommy and daddy flew all the way across the ocean to look her in the eyes and call her daughter — but the too-many, earlier years that still seem to weigh heavier. These days, she lives buoyant and giddy. Her eyes have found a sparkle and we see them more than we see those hands that spent nearly a year awkwardly covering them. My little girl laughs. A lot. And this week when I hugged her I could tell her body wanted to melt (not stiffen) in my arms.
But just within her reach is the shame she feels about her life on the other side, when her given last name tied her to no one. One phrase or question or hint of her past and I watch those eyes, which just harnessed a sparkle, go dark.
Adoption saved her and it haunts her, because of its open-ended definition to her. It’s still a question.
She, like many of the rest of us, has yet to reconcile the power of this one act.
I hadn’t even kissed their foreheads or tickled their feet and this stranger’s words about them stung.
“Oh, you’re adopting? Just you wait. Once you have them at home I’m sure you’ll be able to have children of your own.”
A phrase I’ve heard a hundred times, and it never ceases to give my heart pause. Children of your own, words that expose a subconscious understanding of adoption as charitable affection versus primal love. As if these, once-adopted ones, were somehow, not truly … mine.
There is a distinction in our language about those children, once adopted, and their biological counterparts that reveals much {continue reading over here on Christianity Today –>}
