NightLight Inc. Agency

Adopting Black children changed my life dramatically. I know now that it didn’t have to. The reality was that I could have continued my comfortable urban life and expected the children to adapt to where I was. I also know that if I had set those expectations up in my heart, it would have been much harder to experience the growth I needed in order to mother my Black kids well.

When I talk with adoptive families about parenting children of another race or culture, I often have the analogy of my parents in mind. My mother was an American citizen and my father was British. Our home was filled with the best of both worlds and they embraced each other’s cultures as a central part of their life. My father has passed on now, but my mother is still strongly connected to his British relations and the ‘flavor’ of the culture that she married into. From tea time to horse brasses, her home is filled with the beauty of both worlds. One of my strongest memories as a teen is hanging the American flag alongside the British one on our front porch – we were a family with two cultures and both were important to our identity.

But it didn’t have to be that way. My mother could have followed the 1970’s fashions in decorating rather than filling our home with English antiques, she could have stuck to the Betty Crocker Cookbook and I would never have developed a taste for roasted Brussels sprouts, and she might have looked down on my father for not immediately becoming an American citizen. She could have done all these things to force him into her comfort zone, but she chose the harder thing and embraced all the parts of him. I think their marriage was stronger for it and I know that my parenting is absolutely better because I am willing to go into my children’s birth-cultures and experience life with them. Rather than bending my adopted children to fit into my small vision of how life should look, I now have a broader undertanding of how our family culture is supposed to reflect the great God who created it.

It’s been a long week, with more than the usual adoption issues to deal with and more than the expected number of stares and comments from strangers. I sat down on Tuesday to have the ‘Where Babies Come From,’ discussion with my three oldest kids and realized that even there I have to think through and pray over what I teach. We have always discussed the fact that some of our babies were carried in my body and some were placed into my arms after they were born. No problem, everyone in the family gets that one. Just like they understand the basic ideas of genetics and why we have so many different skin tones in the family.

This week we started in on the conception part of the discussion and I found myself stalled at the reality of what my teaching about abstinence might emotionally mean to my adopted children who were all conceived out of marriage. I actually had to stop the lesson because I realized that I needed to speak intentionally so that I didn’t give the wrong messages to my children about their births being a ‘mistake’ or a ‘problem’ while at the same time not endorsing premarital intimacy. When we adopted I never thought about how these basic things would affect our daily lives. Who thinks about pre-teen abstinence talks when adopting a baby or child? Not me! Thank you, God, for revealing these things to me slowly so I can catch up and have plenty of time to pray over them!

Severely disabled, non-responsive, and unknown life expectancy. These are some of the technical words that define children many of my friends have adopted. These are the hard cold facts that fill the endless pages of their medical histories and that would have condemned them to limited lives in hospitals and other such institutions, except that God raised up families to claim them as a precious treasure. In these adoptions race is so far down the list of concerns that the social workers and adoptive parents almost become color blind. I won’t argue that this is right or wrong from a human perspective, but I will say “Thank You God!” for every severely disabled child He brings into a strong, loving, and faith-filled family.

Yesterday, there was a funeral celebrating one of these fragile treasures. He lived a full life, though he was blind and limited in almost every way. For two years he was the treasured youngest child in my friend’s home, and he bound us closer to each other and brought us more often to God in prayer. I am sobered as an adoptive mom who gets tired of the daily grind created by my small children when I spend time loving these treasures that my friends have received. What if I knew that there was no healing after the 24/7 crisis care a sick child requires? What if I knew that I had to pour myself out beyond anything I could imagine because this may be the last day I have to hold this child? And what do I need to change in my own life and heart to have that savoring of every hour, every minute and every breath my children draw? Lord – I long to live like that, I long to live so present in this moment that no hour is ever lost to unnecessary things and no person is overlooked.

Sometimes I forget when I am talking with people about transracial adoption (or parenting in general) to share the happy quiet moments as well as the hard ones. When I stop and watch, I see that my family has them every day. Sandwiched in between the training and the conflicts, the school work and the chores, there are pools of quiet peace that help us re-center even in the midst of our hardest, big issue days. It makes me so thankful when I see the child who has been creating chaos for hours snuggle in beside a big brother as he reads them a book. It assures me, that even though we have many things to deal with in our family, there is an underlying peace that we are able to engage in together. For us it comes when we are not too busy, when our home is in semi-order and when our hearts are turned away from ourselves and back towards Christ. He is our oasis as well as our strong leader.

As the mom to 6 adopted kids I try hard not to be afraid when I need to research Attachment Disorders and all of the psychologically disruptive things that this diagnosis can indicate. Rather than reacting out of fear, I have learned to process what I learn with a sober mind and a prayerful heart. In the daily living with my children, I can see that there is no single answer to the problems we experience. Thankfully, my kids are not wholly defined by the fact that they were adopted, it is just one part of who they are, and just like their racial identity it isn’t the whole.

We have hard things within our family (Gasp! Didn’t you all think we were perfect?!) One child had a sleep disorder of violent intensity, another a learning delay that caused real concern, and a third with physical responses that indicated abuse where there has been none. It has taken a lot of research to figure out how to deal with each issue and each child. Sometimes I find the answers in Attachment Therapy, other times it’s through the medical community, and sometimes its beautifully been solved through prayer. The hardest things are when there is no answer and I just have to live with the issue, pray my way through it and trust that in God’s timing it may be resolved. I know that God made people relational and it’s my job to learn how to connect with my kids, where ever they are at, because that’s a huge part of being a mom.

If you are thinking about adoption or experiencing a hard place with a child, I pray you will not be afraid, but that you will be sober and trust the same God that builds your family to help you work through or endure the hard things that come with each child.

Who would have thought that figuring out how to verbally identify our children’s racial identity would be another one of the hard things about adoption? It seemed simple at first, they are African American and we are Caucasian. Then it got tougher, two of our children are also Cherokee Indian and two have unidentified fathers so they may be anything. So I say we are a multiethnic family, with a rainbow of children. Do you know that some people take offense that we talk about our rainbow? Some hate the fact that we talk about race in our family as chocolate and vanilla while others take offense at the term African American preferring Black. I admit, I haven’t ventured far into the Native American vs Cherokee Nation or Original Peoples designations but I am know there are lots of opinions out there about that as well.

So what do I do? I realize that I am not ever going to please everybody (and some days I think I am scoring closer to nobody) so I pray and use the words that God gives me to communicate the unusual makeup of the family he has built. I call my kids (adopted and biological) lots of things, all in love and respect and I need to be able to stand firm against the tides of political correctness and social awareness that want to tell me what is acceptable and what is not.