A Brief History of My Thoughts on Adoption

Adoption, an Alternative to Childbirth
April and I first met in a carpool ride to a junior high band competition. Later, we went to the same high school and became friends sitting next to each other in band, whispering to each other between songs.

We were a very serious couple, even at 16. April still remembers the first time we laughed, and says it was months into our relationship. While most couples our age spent their time making out on couches, we talked about how April was terrified of giving birth some day. She wasn't sure she even wanted kids, she would say, since she babysat her younger brother and sister every summer, and was no good at it. If, by chance, she did want kids when she was much older, she would adopt.

As was the case with most areas of our relationship at that time, April spoke in ultimatums.

I don't remember April as that teenage girl very much anymore. Sometimes it's difficult for me to put the two together, to say they are the same person, especially since April has turned out to be a wonderful mother and loves the thought of getting pregnant again.

Still, that teenage girl left us with the idea of adopting children some day, even if she was only saying those things because she was afraid of growing up and becoming a woman. She began something then, and it stuck, like gum on our shoes.

Adoption, an Ethical Choice
The idea of adoption became interesting to me in college, where I set about re-calibrating my life around my ideals, turning over rocks, and making lifestyle changes. That was the point when I began making food out of the Moosewood's cookbooks, driving less and riding my bike more, listening to NPR, voting in elections, and reading Wendell Berry. It wasn't until much later, when I got my first real job, that I realized only college students have the time and energy to change all their habits at once. These days I take them one by one.

Anyway, I took a class called Environmental Studies 201 with Dr. Petersen and learned about overpopulation, not just as a word spray-painted on a rally sign held by a young man with dreadlocks standing on the steps of a government building, but as a global trend being tracked by researchers and studied by scientists. The universe was a party, and everyone was crowded in the kitchen.

I also learned about our pitiful attempts at distributing resources like food to starving families, and how many children are abandoned every year because their parents cannot provide even their basic needs.

I wanted to help. Theoretically, at least, I was on board.

Adoption, a Kind of Multiculturalism
April and I got married during our second year of college, and for our honeymoon, we moved to Europe. We lived in Amsterdam in a small one-room apartment with two single beds and a hot plate. We studied some, and traveled a lot. We discovered that there was more than one way to do just about anything, and that human beings were more interesting and complex than we had first thought. As we began talking about having kids, it felt natural to adopt, to invite difference into our family, so we could all learn from it. Our family would be a microcosm of the larger world as we saw it.

Adoption, a Healing Process
The following summer we lived with my sister and her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan. April worked as a receptionist at Bethany Christian Services, an adoption agency, where my sister was a social worker at the time. Adoption and foster care became a normal part of life, and we talked about them often. We learned that the process of adopting a child was difficult, and usually the part afterwards where the child lives with you, was even harder.

I spent some time as a teacher's aid at a preschool in Camden, New Jersey (a city often voted the worst place to live in the United States) and have taken the ferry to Morocco to work in an orphanage there, playing games with the children and helping them get to sleep at night. I've seen where adopted children come from, and even from my limited experience, I've learned that adopting a child is a commitment to helping a child heal, a lifetime of doing your best at mending something that was broken.

Adoption, a Longing for a Child
April and I knew we wanted to have one biological child before we began thinking more seriously about adopting a child, and now here we are. Just within the last week, as if by some mysterious instinctual cue, we both began thinking about child number two.

Suddenly, adoption seems less about easy childbirth, or a college kid's ideology, or even about healing the world. It's about April and I wanting our next child.