It’s National Adoption Awareness Month, which gives me a good excuse to link to stories that two friends have shared with me. One friend is an adopted child; the other is an adoptive parent. Their stories are amazing, full of love and unexpected outcomes. Enjoy, and please re-share (with attribution to the original posts).
From The Harvest is Abundant by Catherine Adair
“This adoption is irrevocable.” With those words the judge pounded his desk and declared to the world that we were now the legal parents of a girl we had taken into our hearts and home almost two years prior. Nothing could have prepared us for the joy that we felt at that moment, as we became parents for the fifth time, this time by way of adoption.
I am the last person I ever thought would adopt a child. I didn’t even want children after my abortion over 20 years ago. I felt unworthy of being a mother. After working in an abortion clinic, where I participated in thousands of first and second trimester abortions, I was determined not to have children. But here I was, married with children, being asked to help a young mother and her baby, and I knew God wanted us to say “yes” to this child.
We became involved in Ava’s life simply to help her parents, who were struggling to care for her. She was only seven weeks old. An acquaintance’s daughter was going to be entering drug treatment and we were asked to take the baby for 90 days. DCF was already involved as the baby had been born early and drug-addicted. We had no idea we would be adopting her almost two years later.
Read the rest of Catherine’s post at The Harvest Is Abundant.
By Marian Ward, as shared in Leaven for the Loaf
I never remember a time when I found out we had been adopted. It was something we simply always knew. My older brother and I were a toddler and an infant respectively at the time of our adoption. My parents were so overjoyed with their new family that I doubt they could have kept our adoption secret, but they went beyond that to actually recite to us a bedtime story that explained how we became that family.
We were adopted together in what I understand was the first dual-state, simultaneous, sibling adoption in the United States at that time. It still amazes me that our adoption ever happened….
Our adoption was evidently discussed often and in many nuanced ways and was demonstrated in my behavior in early elementary school. I used to explain to other students that I had been adopted by telling them that my parents got to pick me out while theirs were stuck with whatever kid they got. Being an adoptee was so intertwined in my core as even a small person that I felt as though my situation was better than those around me.
Read the rest of Marian’s story at Leaven for the Loaf.
Ellen Kolb 