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

What Goes Around Comes Around

I don't often weep with strangers, but I did with Cheryl and Jason. I watched them watching the rest of us, those of us who had successfully 'crossed over' to parenthood, and the carefully arranged look on Cheryl's face tore through me like a hot knife.

I have to say something to the two of you, I began. I remember... how you feel right now. I remember listening to other people's stories and feeling really angry and resentful, and smiling politely and passing the pretzels and wanting to scream at them to shut up! about how wonderful it was to meet their baby's birth mother, and how it was all worth it in the end, and how I should "Hang in there!" and trust that God brings families together at the right time.

As Cheryl's face crumbled I told them I know it doesn't seem fair and it doesn't make sense yet, but when you're waiting to adopt, there is nothing else to do but hang in there and trust God.

That was thirteen months ago, and Cheryl and Jason's amazing daughter is now six months old. Truly, what goes around comes around, because here I am, frustrated waiting for our second child. Here I am, anxious and doubting and awake at 2:00 a.m. And here is Cheryl's blog:

When we were in the waiting period, I always thought that this adoption would never happen. It was taking too long, we had been hurt and were spending more and more money each month. I have to say that what everyone told me was true. I was told that the "right" baby would make its way to us and she has. This is very difficult to see when you are in the midst of the waiting period, when a potential adoption plan falls through or when everyone around you has children and/or new babies. God's plans are always greater than our own. The reason I was never able to have biological children is now in our home. All 6 pounds and 5.5 ounces of her. It was meant to be that I become her Mother.

I feel at peace again for the first time in a while, and I think I can fall asleep now. Thanks, Cheryl.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
My Google Profile+
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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