Our Adoption Learning Curve: Perspective

By Randee

Perspective is an interesting thing. Two people can look at an identical situation and see and interpret it in opposite ways. Perhaps not surprisingly this often happens in how people view adopted children.

Adoptive parents often hear comments like: “He is so lucky that you adopted him!” or “This child is so blessed to have you as her parents!” or “Wow- you saved him from such a terrible life!” While well meaning, and no doubt mostly heart-felt, these very statements do not recognize the reality that brought a precious child to an adoptive family. The child lost their birth family through circumstances they had no control over. I’ve heard it said that adoption is God’s redemptive response to tragedy and this definition resonates with my heart. While immensely beautiful, it is sobering at the same time because adoption itself exists because not all is as it should have been. In a perfect world, parents would love and nurture and be able to care for the children they were blessed with, but our fallen world contains sickness, poverty, death and sin that sometimes separates parent from child. Lovingly, our Heavenly Father redeemed the situation so that orphans could still have a family to call their own. That, is beautiful to me!

I am thankful for a different perspective today than when I started on this adoption journey.  As Trace and I raise our son if anyone comes up to us and proclaims that our child is lucky to be adopted, we will most likely answer, “WE are the lucky ones! Our son is a blessing to US, and we are thankful God trusted us to raise him.”


You can read the Introduction to this series here

Our Adoption Learning Curve: Introduction

So, we have been thinking long and hard about writing a “series” that includes posts containing what Trace and I have been learning as we prepare to parent our adoptive child from Ethiopia.  I read or hear information repeatedly and think. “I wish I could share this with my family and/or or close friends to help them understand (fill in the blank) better.”  You see, there are MANY things we plan to do differently with our adoptive child than we would if we had a biological child: some obvious (we are going to be dealing with African hair people- I’m going to have to learn how it’s done!) to the not-so-obvious (alterative discipline styles).  While we are a bit terrified of "putting ourselves out there" because we still have much to learn, we also think this could be helpful to a few people and decided to humbly move forward.

I (Randee) am from a family that is deeply touched by adoption, and I have one birth sister and three adopted sisters (one via private adoption, and twin sisters via foster adoption.)  Although I do not plan to relate the stories of my adopted sisters on our blog, I will say that I know that children who have been adopted do have unique emotional needs (at the very least) and should be purposefully parented and nurtured in order to help them heal.  Families touched by adoption should not expect that a “one size fits all” approach will work for biological children and adopted children alike. This may sound pretty basic to many people, but I can assure you that it was not too long ago that social workers advised adoptive parents to “just love your adopted children and treat them like you do your biological children and they will be fine.”  Very, very sad.

In this series of posts we are going to attempt to communicate what we are learning, but please know, that we know, what we share here will NOT be exhaustive and not every person (adoptive parent or otherwise) will agree on all things we mention.  While it is not our intention to be controversial (rather we want to be informative and helpful) we do welcome discussion, questions and comments on anything we post.    We freely admit that we are at the beginning of a life-long journey of learning how to best parent the children that enter our family through adoption, and we sincerely seek out wisdom from those that have gone before us.

With all that said- we hope you enjoy this little series we are calling:

Our Adoption Learning Curve J

Me with my sisters Faith, Rebekah and Hope