Adoption Or Biological Children
By
on
April 8th, 2008
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This past weekend I was swimming with my kids at an indoor facility when an older guy struck up a conversation in the locker room. Maybe he saw me struggling with undressing what seemed like two slippery worms and wanted to cheer us up. He asked me something I've never been asked before.
"You're here for a little swim with your adopted kids?"
"Ehh, yes, but my kids are not adopted."
"Ahhh, really? I just thought they didn't look like typical Swedish kids"
"Their mother is Mexican so they've luckily got some of her features."
I don't even know why I told the guy my kids weren't adopted. What difference does it make? He was just making polite small talk but when Foxy Wife heard about our conversation at home she was upset. She though the guy had been rude and it was none of his business if my kids were adopted or not.
Before the kids were born I sometimes thought of adoption but never liked the idea. This will sound terrible but I wondered if I would love adopted kids as much as my biological children? My feelings say no but I know reality would be different. If I adopted kids I would love them "like my own".
I don't take offense at someone wondering if my kids are adopted but I know many do. My BIL's wife freaked out when someone asked about her adopted kids on a flight once. They've got twins, girl and a boy, where the boy looks "neutral" while the girl looks Korean or something similar. My kids are a bit of a mix and have a little darker skin than Swedes and of course dark eyes. But it's irrelevant to me if someone believes my children are adopted or not.
SpainDad has been talking about adopting a child with his wife April. I find his views and opinions incredibly mature, insightful, and refreshing. You see, what's different about Kelly and his wife is that they already have one biological child, adorable Alleke, and could have more if they wanted to. But they are thinking about adoption for their second child. The possibility of adopting was apparently raised already during the teenage years(!). He says:
Adoption is not about a parent's right to have a child. Adoption is about the right of every child to have a family.
The goal is to protect children. The best case scenario for any child is to stay with her family in her own culture. Adoption is a last resort, when a child has been abandoned or cannot be cared for by her biological family.
Suddenly, adoption seems less about easy childbirth, or a college kid's ideology, or even about healing the world. It's about April and I wanting our next child.
I sometimes wonder if I would be mature enough to think that way? Lets pretend we couldn't have biological kids, how would I then feel about adopting? If that was the only way to have children?
I always thought about adopting but again i keep thinking if i will be mature enough to LOVE the child as my own. My husband has always said he would not adopt. We both love children and adoption is something where both the spouses have to be 100% sure of.
At the same time i think if i was not able to have children biologically then i would think differently. I have always wanted children and if adoption was the only way then i would go for it. A friend of mine can’t have children so she has adopted 2 kids and even with a very hectic career for both of them they spend all their free time with kids and are doing a great job!
My daughter is our biological child and she looks like my husband and me, but someday we may consider adoption or foster parenting. I don’t think I would’ve been so offended by someone asking if my child was adopted, but it would have bothered me a little for them to phrase it as my “ADOPTED children.” That makes no difference. They are your children, period. You wouldn’t go around with one biological child and one adopted and introduce them as “my son and my adopted son,” would you?
I read a magazine article in which a fair-skinned, fair-haired lady had married a man with Asian features. Their daughter looked most like him, so when the mother would take her places people assumed she was adopted. Some people even had the gall to say “What a beautiful child! Where did you get her?” This is a child we’re talking about, not an exotic-looking puppy! She started telling people she got her “from her uterus.”
Funnily enough, my spouse is the Swedes but has dark hair and brown eyes. Whenever we travel to Sweden people assume that I am the Swede because I have blonde hair and blue eyes. I do not have a drop of Scandinavian blood in me, but people fall into that stereotype so easily.
With the many international adoptions in Stockholm , I think that many Swedes just assume adoption over the possibility of marrying a non-Swede. Quite naive considering the number of non-Scandinavian immigrants living and working in the city. I can’t decide if it was open and “comfortable” of him to have asked that question or not. I feel better to ask the question openly and learn than make assumptions in private. Though I guess if you are asked the same question 500 times a month it would get very old very quickly.
I think a more interesting question would be to ask your wife what exactly it was that made her feel so angry. This sounds like a hot button issue for her to have reacted so strongly. This will happen again, I am sure. Better to come up with a strategy to handle it now. It will give the kids a positive way to handle strangers asking questions or making comments like that in the future.
We adopted our first child from Vietnam over seven years ago. A year later while we were planning our second adoption we were granted an unexpected pregnancy. All the way up to the birth, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to love this baby as much as I loved our first son. Of course I found that I did. It’s all about our different experiences coloring our perspective. When you love deeply, I think it’s normal to wonder about your capacity to love another child - no matter how the child would enter into your family.