We walked, side by side. Slowly. A close friend was going through a divorce when he sighed and said, \u201cI think God meant for children to be with their biological parents.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heartbroken at being separated from his daughters, he\u2019d become keenly aware of the inherent\u2014seemingly unavoidable\u2014wrongness<\/em> of the bind in which they\u2019d all found themselves.<\/p>\n His personal musing struck a deep chord in me, as an adult who was adopted as a child.\u00a0 Could it be true?\u00a0 I\u2019d never heard the narrative of separation and loss and belonging narrated in quite that way.\u00a0 That was really God\u2019s good plan?<\/p>\n The statement unnerved me a bit.<\/p>\n Reflecting on it, later, I came to suspect that those born into mostly-secure circumstances must know this intuitively.<\/p>\n To me, though, it came as an entirely radical notion.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n The story I\u2019d been told growing up was that my biological parents had \u201cgiven me up\u201d because they loved me. It was a very good story.\u00a0 It worked for me.\u00a0 It was a story that allowed me to construct a world in which I wasn\u2019t loved by just two parents\u2014like all the other kids\u2014but by four.\u00a0 When my adoptive parents divorced and remarried other people, I was loved by six.\u00a0 Then, later, seven! I had no idea, in my deep places, that the love of six or seven parents doesn\u2019t necessarily trump that of two.<\/p>\n As I was about to graduate from college, my precious friend and roommate became pregnant, out of wedlock.\u00a0 I knew she loved her child.\u00a0 Had she chosen to relinquish him for adoption, my optimistic worldview could have stayed in tact: that I <\/em>had been deeply loved.<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t, though. She decided to keep <\/em>her baby, to raise him.<\/p>\n I would quickly come to discover that there was more to the story I\u2019d been told.<\/p>\n The protective shell with which I\u2019d guarded my heart suffered its first, irreparable, rupture.<\/p>\n Holding Geni\u2019s precious son in my arms during his earliest days awakened a deep wondering about my own beginnings.\u00a0 Just a few months after his entry into the world, when I contacted an international registry for lost kin, my birthmother and I were\u2026again\u2026connected, for the first time since the week my umbilical cord had been cut.\u00a0 We came to know each other, in a different way than we once had, when I was twenty-two\u2014exactly the age she\u2019d been when she bore me.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Welcoming baby Isaiah into the world, coming to know my birthmother, and her deep unwavering love for me, had opened up this space where I could at last face the real losses I had endured, in both my biological family and my adoptive one. \u00a0I could finally be real<\/em>, acknowledging both the blessings and losses of adoption.<\/p>\n Like the Velveteen Rabbit, heart broken a little bit, I got my fur worn off in the process.<\/p>\n Had I been given the choice, I wouldn\u2019t have chosen to face the hard parts of my story.\u00a0 I would have continued to live with the candy-coated illusion that the singular story of my life was that I had been \u201cchosen.\u201d\u00a0 I had<\/em> still been chosen, of course, but before I was chosen, I was relinquished.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve come to believe that the two stories cannot be pulled apart.<\/p>\n Per my friend who was divorcing, I think God did mean for children to be secure in the love and daily presence of the parents who conceived them.\u00a0 When that\u2019s not possible, I think that children need to hear from the adult faces they trust, \u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to be like this.\u00a0 I\u2019m so sorry, baby.\u201d\u00a0 That is not to deny the fullness of life a child can have with adoptive parents, or with a single parent, but it is to recognize a child\u2019s loss.\u00a0 It\u2019s to reflect what is deeply true<\/em>.<\/p>\n It is a gift to a child.<\/p>\n Margot Starbuck is the author of The Girl in the Orange Dress: Searching for a Father who Does Not Fail<\/a>, her memoir about adoption, among other titles. Visit her at margotstarbuck.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We walked, side by side. Slowly. A close friend was going through a divorce when he sighed and said, \u201cI think God meant for children to be with their biological parents.\u201d Heartbroken at being separated from his daughters, he\u2019d become keenly aware of the inherent\u2014seemingly unavoidable\u2014wrongness of the bind in which they\u2019d all found themselves. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-family"],"yoast_head":"\n