Adoption!!!
We want to adopt. But, there are so many decisions and it’s hard to know the perfect exact one to choose. I’ve been gobbling up blogs, books, podcasts, and conversations, but still it’s hard to make the decision about what’s the right step for us. No, we haven’t officially submitted our application for the Home Study and all the rest of the things we need to do to qualify to adopt, but I need to ‘talk’ about all the hopes, dreams, insecurities, and realities going around in my head even before that step is taken.
So, let me just start at the beginning…
I was born into a family that was in the midst of an adoptive story. My oldest brother is adopted – and not ‘out of birth order.’ He was literally my parent’s first child. On their missionary journeys they docked in Indonesia and within 3 days my parents had visited an orphanage, chosen my oldest brother, got all the necessary paperwork signed, and took him home to the ship they were living on. After that, they lived in Belgium for 8 years where they had my 3 biological siblings. Then, after moving back to the states, they had me. I am the only one of my siblings born in the USA. My mother really fell in love with her travels and named me for a province in France, Brittany, as a tribute to their time in Europe and a constant reminder of these years.
Choosing to Adopt…
I have my own musings about what it must be like to adopt a child, what it must be like to be adopted and from my own experience, what it is like to be the non-adopted sibling in an adoptive family. Because my brother was in the family since before I was born, I never thought twice about how he was different from us. That is, not until I came of a more knowledgeable age. But what did my brother think? What do all adopted children think when hit with the reality that they are not biologically linked with the people they call parents and the children they call siblings? I wonder if every so often, the adopted child has to ‘choose to adopt’ the adoptive family as their own. How many times did my brother choose to love in the face of our differences? I don’t know the answer, but I know there were times when he whole-heartedly loved me and called me ‘his own.’
We all Choose…
Aside from adoption, we all have to/get to choose. Every moment, we choose to say, ‘Yes’ to the family that we’re a part of and we choose to know those around us and be known by those around us.
Brittany M Putman 