Let me start by saying that I am sorry that there have not been posts for a while. While it feels like nothing exciting is happening, I know that it is all exciting if it gets us closer to bringing our baby home. So, if you look at our timeline you will see that we are finishing up our homestudy. We've had 4 meetings with a social worker, which felt a more like going to the shrink than being checked out as prospective parents. The last couple months have been spent ordering documents such as birth certificates, marriage license, insurance policie and employment verifications. NOT a ton of fun, but must be done.
One neat thing we are getting to do is our adoption training. We've really enjoyed this and are learning so much from it. The training is designed to help us be prepared for any issues that may come up, such as bonding/attachment, medical, trans-racial family questions and talking about adoption with our child.
Our training that we went over tonight covered the importance of being open with the adopted child about them being adopted. This has been an area that I have felt pretty strongly about for a while and I'm so thankful that we are being forced to review it. One of the things talked about is how even just a 10-20 years ago adopting parents were told to not discuss the details of the adoption with the adopted child. It was thought that closed adoptions were best and files were closed to prevent the adopted child from trying to find out information about their adoption and birth families. The adoption world has since learned how destructive and harmful this process can be and has been to adoptive families. Families have been destroyed because of the bad advice they were given on how to handle their adoptions. I grieve for these families who had to go through this hurt when if adoption professionals had just told them what we know now they might have been spared.
The training talked about the importance of openess. Open adoptions (where some form of communication between birth/adoptive families is kept) are now encouraged. You're encouraged to tell your adopted children as much as you can about their birth families instead of keeping it secret. As Christians I find it interesting that we have had to turn to professionals to tell us what God has made clear through scripture for centuries.(2 Cor 4:2 by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.)
One of the most important things they recommend is a Lifebook. This is an adoption scrapbook in place of, or along with, a baby book. The idea is that you scrapbook and journal about the adoption process that you went through to bring home your child. You also include in here pictures and info of the birth family if possible. This part might be harder for us due to possible circumstances around our child being sent to an orphanage in Ethiopia, but we are hopeful to be able to have this information. They also recommend having the birth mother write a letter to the child that goes in the Lifebook. The idea is to have the Lifebook available so your adopted child can look through it as much as they want. The hope is that your child will grow up understanding the circumstances surrounding their adoption, and that it is a joyous event that so many people looked forward to. The hope is also to lessen the hard questions that could come later in life about the birth family because you have had years of telling the adopted child their story.
Our hope is to be able to have these things for our child. Our prayer is that we will be able to have the birth family information so our child will be able to have knowledge of their heritage, because ultimately we understand that our child will look different from us and understanding why that is will play an important role in our child's perception of himself. We are learning through this training, and life experiences, that it doesn't matter how much we love our child, whether they are the same color as us or not, that child will at some point wonder whose nose or ears or eyes s/he has, and that when the questions come we shouldn't feel like it's becuase we're not enough for our child or didn't love them enough, but just becuase it's human nature to be curious about such things. We want to be prepared at that time to respond in a way that's unifying and uplifting to both us and our child and glorifying to God. Now, in 15 years one of you reading this might have to remind me of the last couple sentences I just wrote, but hopefully these thoughts stick in my heart.
I promise you all that it will not be 2 months again before we write another post. Sorry again about that. Thanks for all of your continued support and prayers.
-amory
