Adoption

Never in my life had I thought I would end up adopting a child. I knew one family who had adopted a few, but I never looked at them and thought that my family might look like that someday. I always believed that life would take its typical course, few variations if any. So I guess you could say that that the adoption process that I now find myself in the middle of constitutes one of life’s good curveballs.

I can’t even remember when the talk started, but I’m certain it came from April. I’ve benefited from a wife who was raised by an adopted father. Adoption must have been talked about as normal in their family. Because it was never spoken of in my family, my resistance to adoption at first could be expected. I always thought of fatherhood as biological.

Slowly, my resistance began to wear down. It’s not that I was ever flat out anti-adoption, but I needed some convincing. My wife started to think about Ethiopia early on, gathering bits of information over time. She started watching adoption videos to see how other families experienced it. A while after that started, my sister adopted a baby from Tennessee. Not so suddenly, it became acceptable and even desirable to me. It was no longer about giving up and settling for an adoption. It started to be about giving a disadvantaged child a chance. Then it became more a question of children’s equality in God’s eyes, and our responsibility to start a family no matter the method. It’s really a mix of both those things. Now when I think of adoption versus other methods we could have tried with a fertilization specialist, all I know is that there is 100% certainty that we could bring a child out of a poverty-stricken nation and give him a better life here.

I’ve been at this point for a while now. We won’t be a family who couldn’t have “our own”. We will have our own. Like I wrote above, parenthood isn’t about DNA – it’s much more than that. I hope people get that. My sister who adopted last year has told us of people who don’t. They stand in grocery lines, seeing the attention that the little black girl gets, and feel they have to make snarky remarks about how Brangelina has made adoption trendy now. I’m sure we’ll get a few of those, but you can bet I’ll speak up if I need to. It’s just one of those things not everybody understands fully, but that’s ok.

My wife and I will be posting updates throughout the process at TheRealBlairFamily.com.