For Megan, Quinn, Laura and Ben
“Adopted.
Big Deal; so was Superman”
–Chris Crutcher, Whale Talk
The Sanctuary of Adoption boasts some famous figures: Superman, Moses, and hundreds of thousands of Cabbage Patch boys and girls. And then there are the adoptees of the REALLY special sort. Being the mother of two of these, I can testify to all that makes them special.
If the Sanctuary of Adoption is grace-filled, however, the infertility that frequently precedes it is not. Basal thermometers, ovulation charts, painstakingly plotted months that look more like a child’s drawing of the Sawtooth Mountains than ovulation’s slow curve-small dip-then spike pattern. Agonizing hours in doctors’ waiting rooms surrounded by pregnant women–some who, regrettably, whine to anyone who will listen: I just don’t know what I’m going to do with another one . . . Just when I thought I would have some time to myself . . . And even more agonizing moments during which you bite your tongue, lest you offer to mother these babies.
In his poem, “Elegy for a Still-Born Child”, Seamus Heaney writes:
Birth of death, exhumation for burial,
A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram, And parents reaching for a phantom limb.
Infertility is surely a still-born place. Dreams live only to die, and day after day, you reach for the phantom limb of the son or daughter whose ethereal shape shimmers briefly, then vanishes into the shadows.
After suffering through years of infertility, adoption threw my husband and me a life-line: the prospect of parenthood. It was this prospect that buoyed us through months of home studies, paperwork, and waiting. Although cautiously optimistic, our caseworkers ended most conversations with gentle warnings: I don’t need to remind you that this can all fall through. Still, our hope was stronger than our fear. In hope, we measured our days with preparations: assembling the crib, buying blankets, sleepers, bottles, and diapers. In hope, we prepared as if, one day, we would bring home a son or daughter to fill our empty cradle and arms.
Miles away in other homes, two mothers gave birth–one to a daughter and one to a son. In sacrificial love, these birth mothers and fathers offered up their babies so that we might parent. And humbly, gratefully, joyously, we accepted the gifts of their love and labor.
Tragically, we live in a world in which adoption has often been silenced or criticized. How could she give her baby away? Poor kid, how can he survive not knowing who his real mother and father are? With all the government aid available, why didn’t she keep her baby? In forty years of teaching–and countless pregnant students–I have only had one young woman who chose adoption. Ridiculed and misunderstood by her peers, she stayed the course, choosing a life she believed best for her child. Her selfless choice was a gift to her son and to his adoptive parents who, like us, were wholly at the mercy of a loving birth mother and father.
In a poem my father wrote for my niece, Aanya, he writes:
In the fury of this world there is no stronger verb
than love. It is the root which lives through drought.
Aanya, my small noun, may you find it out.
Adoption is a strong verb of love. It is, indeed, the root through which drought lives. This root penetrated the dry ground of our childlessness and brought forth life. And love, much love.
And our children, small nouns in the fury of this world have been beneficiaries of a love stronger than circumstance or genes. They are loved by birth and adoptive parents whose roots entwine in a family braid that spans miles and years. Our wish for them? That they find it out, that they return again and again to this root, and that they find strength in the strongest verb of all: love.
In truth, the Sanctuary of Adoption is a universal and inclusive one. It matters not whether we having living or loving mothers and fathers, for we have been chosen, predestined as children of God. In Ephesians 1:4-6, we read:
For He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in His presence. In love He predestined us for adoption as His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the Beloved One.
As a writing teacher, I have read too many painful student narratives of neglect, abandonment or rejection. As words of loss spill out upon the page, I have shared the orphan’s plight. Without a living or loving parent, the orphan cowers or rails against the fury of this world. With no one to model the strong verb of love, the orphan seeks a weaker version, often in all the wrong places and from all the wrong sources.
In the Sanctuary of Adoption, though, all are loved and claimed by the Father: the orphan, the childless, the broken and hopeless, the seeking and yearning, the faithful and faithless.
My wish for all who have yet to enter the Sanctuary of Adoption? May you find it out. It is only a prayer away.
