So we wanted to share with you some of the more emotional ways in which adoption impacts your life, beyond the physical growth of a family.
It shifts your idea of family. Family doesn’t have to mean biological, and it doesn’t have to come about in one specific way to make it real or true. When you grow your family through adoption, you expand into the potential of what family can be, and relieve yourself of the expectations of what it has to be. Birth parents and grandparents become close-knit family members, new cultures merge together as one. Boundaries are broken.
It teaches you not to judge. When you sit down with a woman who has chosen to place her child with another family to give them the best possible life, it teaches you a thing or two about judging others. Everyone has challenges in this world. That is not the measure of who they are. Their capacity to love, their openness to others, and their quest to do good is what really matters.
It takes you out of your comfort zone. Adoptive parents have to put themselves and their lives on the line constantly throughout the adoption process. Whether you’re in the middle of your home study or trying to match with a birth mother, you have to face your fears daily and be present, raw, and honest. As a birth parent you have to do the same. You have to trust yourself to do something unfathomably selfless, and confront that decision every single day. There is no comfort zone in adoption.
It makes you part of a wider community. Once you’ve been through the adoption process, you’re part of a global community of adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents who each share a rare, unique experience. You mean so much to those who come after you, in need of advice and encouragement. Those who’ve paved the way show that anything is possible.
You become an advocate. Global awareness and knowledge of adoption is expanded by those who have experienced it. You are the living examples of how this process can change lives. Your advocacy and the stories you share have the power to change the world, and the lives of anyone looking to expand theirs through adoption.
How has adoption broadened your horizons?
