Blogging About Adoption: Adopter's Guilt

I'm ready to admit that I struggle with blogging about adoption, and the struggle surprises me. I have no mixed feelings to get in my way... no ongoing grief or frustration to impede me. In fact, I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. Twice-blessed with healthy newborns adopted domestically after meeting their birth mothers, who are two of the most fabulous young women on the planet, and an adoption attorney who is compassionate, wise, and professionally impeccable. No drama. No trauma. No hardship worth counting, other than financial, and that burden is universal among adoptive parents.

So, what's my problem? I've thought about it a lot, and I finally realize my "problem" is exactly that I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. I call it Adopter's Guilt.

My "problem" is that when I go on the website of the adoption agency we used, I see faces and faces and faces of people waiting to adopt, eager to adopt, some desperate to adopt. Some of these faces I know personally, others I know from reading their profiles online. Though their smiling pictures beam, "Notice me! Pick us! We'd be great parents!", I know that as day after day slips away Doubt plods in with a heavy step and whispers, "Why has no one noticed you? Why has no one picked you? Perhaps you're not meant to be parents after all. Ever."

My "problem" is that adoption has brought people into my life. People like Michelle, who of everyone I know is among the most full of love and life and promise, yet she waits and waits and waits, with growing despair. People like Charlene, who waited 7 years for an adoption match and has suffered - since the day she brought her daughter home - with debilitating depression and self-doubt. People like Dara and Jeff, whose post-adoption experience has been a devastating legal nightmare. People like the birth mothers who write to me about feeling remorseful or inadequate or shut out.

My "problem" is that adoption means gain for some and loss for others. There are winners and losers, chosen and unchosen, the triumphant and the defeated. Some of us are made whole by adoption and others are broken apart by it.

My struggle to blog about adoption is really a struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable. Why me? I have no idea. Why not you? I have no idea.

I can't change anyone else's timeline any more than I could have changed my own. I do believe that everything happens in the right way at the right time (whatever that means), and that we almost never understand that until we're looking back.

I'm supremely grateful to be one of those looking back. I trust that you will be too.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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Sally Bacchetta's YouTube Channel

Foster Care Families - Genesee Valley Parent Magazine

I've been reading the Genesee Valley Parent since before I was a parent. It's a great resource for all things parenting.

I wrote the feature story for the May 2009 issue - Foster Care Families: Safety, Support and Care for Children in Need. I hope you'll check it out!

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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Sally Bacchetta's YouTube Channel

Adoption Nativity

Last night Miss Little One disappeared shortly before bedtime. She's mastered the art of making herself scarce around that time every night, so I didn't think much of it, until I noticed the shepherd, the infant Jesus, and a donkey missing from the nativity.

I found Miss Little One in her room and she informed me (with an unmistakable tone of authority) that she couldn't go to bed just yet. "I'm very busy adopting them."

What does it mean to adopt them, Sweetheart?

"It means they grew for me in another mother's tummy so I can be their mother. And Daddy and I love them bigger than the moon."

I let her stay up way past bedtime. Wouldn't you?

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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Sally Bacchetta's YouTube Channel

"You Can't Imagine Me!"

One of my favorite things about three year-olds is their absolute conviction when using words incorrectly. A recent example is when my daughter - whose paint-the-refrigerator-door-with-ketchup plan I thwarted - planted her hands on her hips and shouted, "You can't imagine me!" and stomped out of the room.

She has no idea how right she is. All the time I dreamed of a child, all the waiting and anticipating, as often as I pictured myself in moments with our child... none of it even comes close to the reality of her.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
My Google Profile+
Sally Bacchetta's YouTube Channel
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