Continuing on with Adoption A-Z posts, here are letters P to S. I knew I was long winded, but man, I really need to learn how to be more concise… I can’t just say what I mean quickly? I hope you are enjoying these and learning something about adoption as well. Writing is one of my best ways to process what I am learning, and what I am thinking so this is for my benefit and if you get something out of it, that’s an amazing bonus to me! If you missed out on the first part, just scroll down to the next 3 or 4 posts to find A-O. Here goes!
Plan: We are passionate about adoption as Plan A. This does not mean that I think adoption is ideal. It is always the result of another family being broken and in a perfect world would not exists- there would be no death or sickness, corruption or abandonment, etc. When I say that I think adoption is a great plan A, it means that we have no desire for biological children. There are so many good things about having only bio kids, fostering, adopting or any combination of these, but for us, we love our choice to grow our family through adopting vulnerable kids. Here are some of the reasons: 1. Our adopted children can be confident that their adoption was not a second choice or a lesser than way to join a family, and that 2. We won’t have to worry about comparisons between parenting differently for bio verses adopted children (there are enough ways in which parents already have to treat different children differently!!) 3. We firmly believe that being pro-life means doing something about it- adopting, foster care, and supporting families so they can parent. 4. We think Jesus makes it clear that we are to care for vulnerable kids. The ways we personally do this are through child sponsorship, supporting single parents and adoption. To neglect this need is to leave out something integral to the gospel. Other ways to be the hands of Jesus might be through micro loans, feeding programs, women’s’ shelters, education, housing initiatives, foster care, income sharing, etc. Again, I think there are awesome things about other families’ plans, but I am certainly glad this is the path we’ve been called to.
Questions: I love questions (most of the time…). I am pretty passionate about adoption and I really love being able to help people get started on adoption (which always starts with a million questions) and I believe more good parents NEED to adopt and foster. I also love to educate people about adoption. There are a lot of misconceptions about adoption, so unless people are obviously just rude and unnecessarily nosey (we can tell who just wants some juicy details), I really want to help them learn about adoption appropriately. I also think that when adoptive parents use their voices to bring more truth into conversations about adoption, it helps alleviate the pressure from adoptees and birth families having to do all the educating. Let’s raise their voices up when we answer questions.
Race: Issues of race and racism are extremely prevalent to transracial adoptive families. Racism is devaluing someone based on their race or valuing a person or group of people at the expense of others based on their racial heritage. Therefore, refusing to speak out against racism, or neglecting to evaluate our own racist tendencies, shows that we value the voices that preach discrimination over those who are being discriminated. By choosing not to offend the racist or choosing not to challenge their behavior, we choose to value them over those they are hurt by racism. You can choose the oppressor or the oppressed, but you cannot choose both- because choosing the oppressor values them over the oppressed. When we hear racist or xenophobic language and excuse it as pandering or give them a pass because “that was normal when they were young” or give them the benefit of the doubt by trying to understand what they “really” mean, we choose the offender over those they are offending. Our kids of colour need to know that we will always defend them on this point.
Sisters: Sisterhood has been rough coming for these two. They both are so fun and have their own unique qualities. They are good at what their good at… and we won’t talk about the rest. It is very safe to say that both of these girls have gone through trauma to become family. The last 18 months have been stressful for both of them as their lives turned upside down, and it hasn’t always been pretty. But I am starting to see sweet glimmers of hope for their friendship. Lucy is becoming protective instead of ignoring or antagonistic and Cora is becoming more comfortable playing on her own. These two are polar opposites in a lot of ways, and I pray it makes them besties one day!!
Lanaya – November 2017
