When women tilt their heads and say to me sympathetically, "I'm sorry you never got to experience the joy of pregnancy" I widen my eyes and say "I'm sorry you've never experienced the joy of adoption!" I truly am.
To these women pregnancy is the way to have a child. Two people who (hopefully) love each other join together and create an experience that brings a precious new life to both of them. They imagine anything else is somehow less - the life is less of a miracle, the experience is less profound, the parenting is less something... less secure, less bonded, perhaps less "real."
To me adoption is the exponent of the creation miracle. Adoption takes the superlative event of humanity and makes it even more so. More profound. More breathtaking. More incomprehensible. More everything.
It is the ultimate trust - very often forged by strangers who searched without knowing who they were searching for, yet found each other among everyone in the world. Birth parents and adoptive parents trust each other to be who they seem to be. Each trust the other to weigh their decision with the greatest care, and to speak only what they know to be true. Birth parents trust adoptive parents with the gift of a life they created, and adoptive parents trust birth parents to know their own hearts.
Experiencing adoption is akin to receiving an organ donation or being rescued from a burning building by a complete stranger. It is incredibly humbling to be chosen to receive a birth mother's grace. At the same time it is intoxicating to know that you have the power to change her life forever by accepting her gift.
If you think my life is less because I will not experience pregnancy, please keep that to yourself. And I'll hold private my thought that yours is less because you have not been blessed to witness the purest form of motherhood - sacrificing one's own heart for the sake of your child.
I will live the rest of my days amazed and grateful that our daughter's birth mother had the grace, maturity and love to give her child the life and the mother God intended her to have.
Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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1 comment:
This August 3 blog makes me cry. It is everything I feel as an adoptive parent and so eloquently written. I will never be able to fully express my admiration and gradatude to my daughters birth mother. And I will never be able to express well enough to people what a miraculous blessing it is that our daughter was born from another but meant to be ours. Anyway, I just tonight finished reading Chicken Soup for the Adopted Soul, which was so fun and inspiring. I recommend it. Thanks for your beautiful writings. Like you. I truly cannot "imagine" by daughter!
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