National Adoption Month?
I suppose public recognition of the importance of adoption in our world is a good thing. Certainly celebrating the notion and formation of families is always a tribute to the best of us and that’s worth doing.
I wish we didn’t trivialize it so much. I wish the sentiment lived up to the experience more often. Mostly I guess I wish it was unnecessary. Fact is however we dress it up some children will always find themselves unwanted, unwelcome and just plain unlucky. Individuals sometime fail and our covenant with them is broken.
Seems the older we get more and more we lose sight of what family means for us all as tribes and as a nation. Our roots and connectedness forms the fabric that supports everything that we endeavor to make for ourselves and our children. Family is more than one’s name or genetic make-up. It is where we place all our collective societal chips and the springboard from which we launch ourselves into the future.
We can bestow no greater tribute of love to another than to call them like family. Yet for many of us our blood relationships have not always lived up to the ideal. This sad fact begs that we do more than send a card, wear a ribbon pull out our colorful tee-shirts or write a check to another institution.
November starts off the holiday season chock full of idealized family unity that has become more about ritual indulgence than a true expression and glorification of the importance of our kinship. It is the spirit of love that weaves magic in our hearts when we see stories of adoption played out on stage, screen and television. The screen plays focus on the happily ever after without once glimpsing the struggle and sacrifice that also defines our bond. Like so many elements of the wired in world we want to plug directly into the good stuff without doing the work.
Instantly I want a life size dose of appreciation and struggle free love/adoration. I want to be loved without having to be totally loving. I want my needs met before I will show that I too am in need of salvation therefore supremely lovable. I want what I didn’t have, that you my child were supposed to bring. Still I search when all I get is everything that you have, I yearn for that piece of me that is not missing. Still, I am too hurt to see.
Adoption is not perfect as family has flaws and failures. Still it endures and insures that collectively we are all safer, stronger and better for our tribe.
November is national adoption month and all of us have a stake in a future that cherishes our willingness to cling together when everything around us has fallen apart. True love means accepting that all you have to give is enough when I have chosen you to share all I have.
Adoption and all parenting is a selfish decision steeped in biology, mythology and bombast. We are compelled to procreate and that compulsion will not be denied. Adoption is not a second class detour through the back alleys to semi-real parenthood hidden away lest others might know. Adoption is instead a conscious decision to provide for the common good while tending to one of our most primal needs in a manner that our culture has misguidedly maligned for generations.
Adoption honors that spirit that urges us to take up arms often against the most strident opposition. We come across a situation where something at our core makes it impossible to turn away. This resolution is not the residual effect of bright eyed cherub faced orphans smiling soulfully. Each adoption story begins where needs collide and the irresistible force meets the proverbial immovable object; sparks fly and either commitment is cemented or both parties limp away a little bit more broken and permanently scarred.
National Adoption month needs to be about the celebration of our individual decision to embrace the fact that we owe it to our human tribe to provide the most basic security that is every human being’s birth right. Membership in the tribe must be wedded to the tribe’s responsibility to provide each member with a safe, nurturing and positive start.
Adoption is not perfection alas a great wrong lies ever pressing at every adoptions very core. At the crux of what has brought our lives together stands a giant stone tablet upon which etched is all that has come before us. At this alter we often expect our children to sacrifice their past as payment for an uncertain future. We wish to ignore the essential truth that our child is also the child of another.
Your offer to love me like you know me has thorns and jagged edges that cut us as we admire the budding flower.
I am here now and I have come from others before you.
Honor that and we might be family.
Honor that and I may grow to love you.
Honor that and you may grow to love me.
Honor that and our adoption might make US ALL free.
