My happy adoption story

I haven't blogged in almost a year, but today is the Joint Council's We Are the Truth Adoption Blogger Day. So much bad news in the wake of the tragedy of Artyem, the young boy sent back to Russia by his adoptive mother, that JCICS asked parents to blog about their adoption success stories.

So here is mine.

Owen Loc has been home with us for a year and a half, and he is a happy, bright, beautiful little boy who brings tremendous joy to his family. We're blessed to have him. Every day is an adventure -- an exhausting but thrilling ride. I love the little person he is becoming, with his own opinions and likes and dislikes and worldview.

He's doing great. Doing well in preschool, happy most of the time, smart as a whip. He's growing (finally), healthy, and extremely active. He's incredibly verbal -- he has no problem expressing himself.

He's a mommy's boy right now, and I wouldn't have it any other way. We have a bond that feels ancient, not a year and a half old. Neither of us can bear to be apart from the other. And the three of us -- me, Ray, and Owen -- are such a happy trio. For the first time in my life, I truly feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself.

I don't profess to know what Torry Hansen was going through, but when I think back to our first six months with Owen, it wasn't a piece of cake. I went into this with my eyes as open as they could be. I remember an adoption medicine doctor telling us bluntly, "Kids don't end up in orphanages because they've been well taken care of. You've got to be ready for problems." It's so easy to forget, as you're pursuing your heart's desire to become a parent, that this whole process isn't about you.

So when I accepted the referral of a boy in the 0 percentile height and weight-wise, with little medical information and no knowledge of what he might have gone through before entering the orphanage at 15 months, I repeated my mantra, what I always come back to when I'm in a high-anxiety state and in danger of fear getting in the way of something I want. "I will move forward," I tell myself, "come what may."

We had a lot of challenges to overcome. He was terrified, waking up screaming and taking hours to calm down those first six weeks or so. He got out-of-control anxious indoors, particularly in small rooms. He spoke no English and didn't understand us. It started to get easier, but we had a lot to overcome. He had been in starvation mode for so long, he didn't know how to eat enough to be full. He was on such sensory overload that he bit me several times a day minimum, sometimes up to a dozen times a day. For the first 9 months he was home, he never slept more than 4 hours at a time.

But we hung in there. We worked hard. We got the help he needed, and the help we needed. We loved him like crazy, but we also knew it would take more than love to help him make the transition. I'm grateful for the therapists and other professionals who helped us, and all the professionals and fellow adoptive parents who prepared us.

Today, he bears so little resemblance to the frightened, underweight, nonverbal little boy I brought home. He's thriving beautifully.

I don't know what the future holds for us. Maybe there are challenges lurking under his placid, happy surface that will only reveal themselves as his world becomes more complex with school and friends and growing up. But I'm in this for the long haul. That's the promise I made to him when I accepted the referral.

He's brought us so much joy.

More popular than Jesus?

The Social Security Administration just released its 2008 list of most popular baby names.

Owen, No. 58.

Jesus, No. 79.

You know you're an adoptive parent when...

I've seen this on various adoption blogs...definitely can relate!

You Know You're An Adoptive Parent When . . .
1. The fact that there are 143 million children without a parent to kiss them goodnight has made you lose sleep.
2. You realize DNA has nothing to do with love and family.
3. You can't watch Adoption Stories on TLC without sobbing.
4. The fact that, if 7% of Christians adopted 1 child there would be no orphans in the world, is convicting to you.
5. You spend free time surfing blogs about families who have experienced the blessing of adoption.
6. It drives you crazy when people ask you about adopted child's 'real' parents.
7. You have ever been 'pregnant' with your adoptive child longer than it takes an elephant to give birth (2 years!).
8. You had no idea how you would afford to adopt but stepped out in faith anyway, knowing where God calls you He will provide.
9. You have ever taken an airplane ride half-way around the world with a child you just met.
10. You believe God's heart is for adoption.
11. You realize that welcoming a child into your heart and family is one of the most important legacies you could ever leave on this earth.
12. You know what the word 'Dossier' means, and you can actually pronounce it!
13. You have welcomed a social worker into the most private parts of your life.
14. You shudder when people say your child is so lucky that you adopted them, knowing full well you are the blessed one to have him or her in your life.

Bunnymen

Happy Easter!

Owen and Kyle suffer through the obligatory picture-taking while thinking, "We better be getting some good candy for this humiliation!"

Thunder 'n lightning

We had our first spring thunderstorm this evening, right at bedtime, and Owen was scared. I had to hold him and sit in the rocking chair until he fell asleep. (Yeah, tough job).

The thing is, I love thunderstorms. Or maybe I should say I find them fascinating. I surely haven't loved a flooded basement, or the time lightning struck my pear tree and took part of it down and I had to borrow a chainsaw, or even this evening's, when I only had the storm but most of my family 50 miles south was under a tornado watch...but I digress. It's just that I could sit at the window and watch the weather for the duration of a good storm.

I thought Owen might share my enthusiasm -- "Look Owen! Lightning!" Wrong. Instead, he cried and demanded "Up! Up!" out of bed, and hold me, Mommy, because I do not like this!

Madonna, Malawi and adoption madness - Los Angeles Times

Madonna, Malawi and adoption madness - Los Angeles Times

Another great article. Here's an excerpt:

The concerns about Madonna's latest adoption request seem to focus on such superficial aspects as what she was wearing when she toured the orphanage, her wealth, her race and her celebrity. What difference could these things make when weighed against the reality of the life the little girl she sought to adopt might face if left in the orphanage?

The questions that should be asked -- "Does a viable alternative to the orphanage exist for this little girl in Malawi, and does it exist now? Is there someone there who is willing and able to give her the love and care that is needed by all children?" -- are subsumed by ridiculous snarking about clothes and statements about what Madonna "should" do instead of adopting this child.

Meanwhile, a flesh-and-blood child waits for someone to come to his or her senses and consider her legitimate and immediate needs.

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Well said.

My adoption agency director posted this on Facebook today:

International Adoption Editorial
Barbara Adde
February 19, 2009


I entered the world of parenthood much later than most.

At the age of 42, in a stark, unfamiliar orphanage in a small, poor town, not even a dot on the huge mass of land on a map of Russia, I had the great joy of handing a dark-eyed infant girl I had just met to my husband and introduced our daughter.

By the time she came home with us 3 months later, she had gone from stranger to dearly beloved daughter. By the time she was 2, she could repeat with me that Mommy and Daddy would always keep her "happy and healthy, safe and warm."

Julia, and 4 years later, our son Benjamin, have become the light of our lives. They are as different as the 2 continents they were born on -- Julia from Asia and Benjamin, with his blond hair and pale grey eyes, from just over the border Russia shares with Europe.

Julia at 7 reminds me of a cat -- feline grace, mysterious deep thoughts hidden behind sleepy eyes, only to open with a sunny smile. At 4, Ben is a happy-go-lucky puppy, bouncing everywhere, stopping only to eat (often) and get a pat on the head.

Somewhere along the way between Russia and now, they stopped being adopted and became a part of me. They are clearly etched into my chromosomes -- each on their own, of course -- their internal continental divide.

And so it is with great pain that I read stories of children stolen from their birth parents to be sold to Americans, so desperate to become parents, supposedly, that they will look away from what is happening.

Perhaps this is true in some places, and it absolutely needs to be stopped, but these stories are affecting the lives of the hundreds of thousands of true orphans who will lose their one chance to know a family, because the fear that is being created by these stories is all but stopping international adoption.

Has anyone writing these articles stopped to look in the many, many orphanages that exist around the world, looked in the eyes of the children whose childhoods are passing them by? These aren't someone's living warehouses, storage for future sales. These are children whose parents, for whatever reason -- poverty usually, illness, personal crises we don't know -- have handed their children to the State to raise. And the orphanage women who struggle to do their best to keep these children fed, clothed and housed with the limited resources available to them.

Some of the children in these Russian orphanages are visited by parents and extended family; these lucky ones are identified as not available for adoption. The majority are never visited. These children exist -- or as one orphanage director told us -- "they do not live, they survive" -- until the day they are released to the street, with no home, no family, no hope. No past to give them roots, no future to look forward to.

Julia and Ben were among these children. It scares me how close we came to missing them. In fact, any one of these children could have been the one assigned to us by the Russian Ministry of Education. So each one is in some way mine also. And I had to leave them behind, with no mother to hold and comfort them, as I hold and comfort Julia and Ben. It is impossible to forget the children I met there and the multitudes each represents.

We can't leave them behind because of misinformation and politics. Those children who are truly without parents and family deserve their chance for a happy childhood too. Being born in the right place and time should not be a prerequisite for knowing a parent's love.

I don't know why my daughter and son had to be born to other parents on the other side of the planet -- I don't really think there is an answer. I don't know if there an answer to the pain I can only imagine those parents must still feel from a decision they felt they had to make -- or the pain my children will one day learn when they truly understand what they lost very early in their lives.

But I do know that the four of us are a family, bonded for life by much more than the pieces of paper that transferred their lives to our care.

I hope that the many waiting children reach the arms of the parents who can keep them happy and healthy, safe and warm.