Is It Enough?

Because this is our National Adoption Awareness month, I have thought a lot lately about my family's adoption journey and how much it has changed my views on so many things. How, along this winding road, I have learned to question things I never would have thought of and I have learned to rest in that which is simple and true to us all.

"Love is not enough," You told me when I first began to ask about adopting a child from you. "It takes so much more than that." But you never did elaborate on what the more than that was. And I've realized that it is an elusive thing, created by your states and your agencies, by your therapists and your judges. Your laws have changed to make it easier for some families, yet the doors remain shut for others - others who have done nothing wrong except not fit in the box designated for what adoptive parents are defined to be. Why?

The Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994 gave my son the opportunity to have a family. Not too many years ago, it would have been almost unheard of that a black boy from North Carolina would be adopted by a white family in Colorado. Yet, you realized what the numbers were; that older black boys made up the largest segment of children available for adoption and that white families made up the largest segment of those who would adopt. You realized that black boys like my son might very well wait too long in your system if the laws were not changed. This arrangement can work, you declared, because I can teach him of his culture in so many ways. It will, you reminded us, always be the second best solution. But it will work just fine.

Yet, you told a black friend of mine that the biracial siblings she wanted to adopt could not go with her. She can teach them to be black, you told her, but she cannot teach them to be white. Their needs will not be met with her for they will only know one side of the coin. Their needs will be better met with a white family that can teach them of their black culture in so many ways though it is the second best solution. Why?

You never asked my husband and I how how we demonstrate our love for each other, or how we present the subject of sexuality to our children. Yet, the adoption of a boy in Florida was denied, because the couple who had raised him as a foster child for most of his life happened to be gay. It was ok, you reasoned, for this couple to foster the child for years, as the state was always in need of committed foster parents. But to make this a permanent thing - well, it just wouldn't be "in the child's best interest," you said. Why?

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