Growing up I was not the type of girl who dreamed about my wedding day, my Prince Charming, and our happily ever after. Nevertheless from a young age, I believed marriage and family were special, important, and sacred. They were two things in life that needed to be taken seriously and that should be seen as special gifts. When my husband & I got married, we both knew that in the near future we would like to have a family, and we both knew that our family might be a bit different than the traditional family.
When most people think about starting a family, they think about the traditional method: husband and wife get pregnant and 9 months later a beautiful baby is born. As we began talking about staring a family, we both had a desire to birth children, but we also had a desire to grow our family by a non-traditional method. I birthed our first son when I was 25 years old, and I birthed our second son when I was 27 years old. Our daughter was born when I was 29 years old, but I did not birth her. She was born in the beautiful countryside in Ethiopia, Africa. She is our daughter by adoption.
Everyone has a different reaction to our decision to grow our family through adoption. Some people are excited and supportive. Some think we are doing a “kind deed” by helping the poor child. Others are skeptical and wonder if we will love the child the same as our birthed children. Some people feel the need to share some examples of other adopted children who rebelled when they grew up and treated their adoptive parents poorly. Others are in dismay as to why we would adopt a child when I can physically birth children, and they are perplexed as to why we would want a child of another race. Others are against adoption, especially international adoption.
Our reason for adoption is simple: love. We wholeheartedly believe that every child is uniquely created and is deserving of love. We believe that every child, regardless of skin color and special needs, was created to grow up in the context of a loving family. All children were wonderfully and lovingly made, but we also know that this world often times is not what it should be. We have all experienced heartaches and pain. We have all been let down by others or felt the pains of rejection. Some of us have experienced poverty, discrimination, and other disadvantages. Deep down within all of us, we know that this is not the way we were created to live. We were created for more.
