That darn MayhemMama goes and writes a beautiful comment and an intringuing question and so I’ll just blame her for the fact that I’m sitting here in my pajamas (at 10am) updating my blog!
I would love to read more of your thoughts on faith and adoption. I like your explanation that your family needed *both* Madison and Jessica, and in that way all of you were meant to become family. However, I wonder about the whole “meant to be” thing. I would not want our kids to think that their first mom’s loss (or their own) was somehow God’s best possible idea… So far my thoughts are that I might hope to say to the boys, “We don’t know exactly how or why you came to our family, but we do know that you have never been unwanted, because we have always hoped for a wonderful son, and you are that son.” Because of our personal religious faith we might also say, “What happened to or around you and your birth family was never out of God’s control, and you were never out of reach of that love.”
I love Love LOVE this: “…you were never out of reach of that love.” I think that’s such a comforting sentiment!
I absolutely get what you’re saying about the “meant to be” thing. Jessica and I have talked before (we just talked about this last week actually) about this. We both think that metaphysical Madison chose to come to us (Jessica, Brett, me, Noah, etc.) in just this way. She chose Jessica to be her first mother; she chose us to be her second parents.
(Did I tell you guys? The energy worker/baby psychic person I saw when Madison was about three months old told me this — that Madison did indeed choose me to parent her — and I needed to hear it because I was grieving for Jessica so hard. And I said, “Why?” Hoping to hear, you know, that I had so much to offer her and was such a swell mom and all that good stuff. And the baby psychic said, smiling, “Because she has so much to teach you!” And you know what that means, right? It means she’s going to offer me lots of “personal growth opportunities” i.e., trouble. But you know, she’s already taught me a lot so I guess I don’t mind so much!)
Anyway, I don’t know how to reconcile this with Jessica’s pain. Kinda like I don’t know how to reconcile the holocaust with my belief in God. (sigh) But Jessica believes this was meant to be so I feel ok saying it.
(Now I’m going to talk about my beliefs in a way that maybe I wouldn’t in person because it’s the kind of topic that makes me shy. Just so you know)
I believe that our soul/energies get a lot of options outside this planet and that one of them is coming around here and trying on different ways of being human. I really feel that Jessica, Madison and I have known each other before and that this is the way we’re part of each other’s lives this time. It’s the only way I can explain the profound love/familiarity I feel when I’m around Jessica.
This doesn’t excuse all the things that made Jessica create an adoption plan — it’s not a shrug-your-shoulders excuse for injustice — it’s just how I feel our family manifested itself. And it doesn’t let me off scott-free either. Like I can’t blithely say, “It was meant to be!” and skip along my merry way ignoring the human consequences of my actions. It’s more complicated than that.
You know Judaism says it kinda doesn’t matter what happens past this life — heaven, hell — it’s not up to us to worry about these things. We have to make our best possible efforts here, now. Our job here is to repair the world. That, I think, is why Madison chose to come here the way she did. I don’t know what meaning Jessica is supposed to make of this or that Madison is supposed to make of this but I can see the meaning she’s brought to my life. (I guess that baby psychic was right — Madison has a lot to teach me.)
This whole point of view, it fuels our openness, too. Madison and Jessica have always belonged to each other, you know? They are having this hard relationship this time around for reasons I can’t understand but their connection is still sacred.
I don’t extrapolate this to other people’s infertility or adoption stories. I don’t dare to assume anything about where the hand of God is in other people’s lives. And I don’t think this means that if Jessica someday says, “It was a mistake. I made a mistake” that it will negate my truth or that my truth will negate her truth. (God is big enough for paradox.)
Possibly related posts:
Wow, Dawn. This may have been hard to write, but I’m glad you did. You may be learning a lot from Madison, but the rest of us are learning a lot from you.
I don’t believe I chose my mother. I don’t believe God had a hand in my adoption experience. I don’t believe God plans for some of us to be abused by our families and others to be adopted and cherished.
Do people think that God decided I would have a crappy childhood and then get pregnant and then have all promises broken and then find her and write a blog and blah blah blah…
Does God pick one and then another like Madonna in an orphanage? I don’t think so.
Believe what you want, you could well be right, I don’t know. I don’t believe God has a hand in adoption.
Thank you for this, Dawn. I so needed to hear this.
My faith plays a strong role in my life, too. And it has offered many opportunities to comfort our children and myself, frankly, about adoption issues.
I’m a firm believer, though, that faith beliefs shouldn’t direct adoption practice and law. But it seems to me that it’s almost impossible for the beliefs of the individuals involved in adoption NOT to do so.
This is how we end up with faith-based adoption agencies that focus more on the religion of the prospective a-parents than the needs of the child. It’s how we end up with laws and practices that punish first mothers, favor adoptive parents, and brand adoptees.
If everyone contained their faith beliefs regarding adoption to their own family and experience, I think we would have a chance to make adoption practice more ethical and just.
But as polarized as this country currently is about religion, I don’t think we have a prayer in the wind. Pun intended.
Wow… Just wow… You’ve put a lot of things very well there! It is amazing!
That’s a lot of food for thought. *Thank you*.
This is a really common “thread” running through adoption stories. I am just going to have to dig through boxes and find the citations from project.
I don’t know that I believe in god. Sometimes I see all the ties between us and look at everything that set Apple’s adoption in motion, and think there has to be some sort of reason. But then I can just as easily see it as random things that we all try to find meaning in.
On my bigger days when I have more faith or mystical ponderings, I think Apple, Noelle and I were supposed to be a part of each other’s lives. I don’t know why this situation was chosen. I don’t why we weren’t sisters or best friends or something else.
I know that there are parts of Apple that are Noelle and parts that are me, and for some reason she has two mothers to make her who she is. I don’t know why this couldn’t be achieved through one of us. I believe somewhere it changed not just Apple’s path of life, but Noelle’s and mine and this was the way these three paths were merged.
Or maybe it’s just random. And frankly that’s okay with me too. On less philosophical days I think it’s what we have all done with the situation, not why it occured, is the important thing.
Can you tell that I am this agnostic Catholic?
Thank you for being willing to tackle a tough question!
For those of us who believe in some sort of reincarnation, there is the belief that souls tend to travel together through time/space in loose, extended families.
Sometimes we travel close, as in spouses and children … sometimes we travel apart, as in acquaintances and co-workers … and sometimes we simply take a break from each other :=)
I like to think that my children’s first families are part of our traveling psychic band, only in this life, we’re traveling further apart. Only to change again in the next life.
But we’re still all connected.
I could write an entire blog on this topic. My piece, “Church Lady,” spoke to the way religion was negatively employed while I was pregnant. Too often, I’ve seen that be the case.
It saddens/angers me when I see a parentally fit pregnant mom encouraged to believe she is nothing more than a “conduit” of Divine intent.
That said, faith … or spirituality … or a belief in something that transcends this life (to me, different from religion) is the thing that sustains me today, in the wake of all of this. That faith has been greatly altered by the adoption experience. I have learned to live, increasingly, with ambiguity and no simple answers.
Yet, there are some things I know: I have known my oldest child (and my youngest) for a long, long time. There is a transcendent connection.
I, too, know she has never been beyond the love and reach of that Higher Source. That, in fact, it lives within her.
How sad that I cannot remind her of this simple thing… remind her of the radiance she was born with. How odd that I cannot stroke her hair and tell her how dearly she is loved. That I cannot assure her of her strength and lovability. That she cannot hear such simple, loving words from me. Surely, that which I call God only weeps over this.
[...] Dawn’s been on an adoption roll lately, and as usual she’s been producing as well as provoking some really good writing. I find that her posts usually get me out of writing slumps. Her latest round of questions involving religious faith and adoption is no exception. [...]
[...] Last Sunday Dawn wrote a post on adoption, faith and the concept of something being ‘meant to be’ that made a lot of things fall into place for me. An awful lot of things, which is why I don’t know where to start from. And Dawn always throws the ball back at the reader at the end (a quality I don’t come across often enough in this world) which got me wanting to write about it, even though, obviously, I have not been involved in any adoption whatsoever. I just think that, when you get down to the essence of things, it doesn’t really make a difference whether it is adoption you are talking about or something else. (In this case, of course — not in general.) [...]
[...] I’m not quite done answering Dawn’s question (of sorts). [...]