Thanks for all the comments on yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read them, you should. There’s some good stuff there. It meant a lot to read what you all had to say about an issue that has been on my mind for some time.

What I thought was interesting was how much of the conversation gravitated toward the issue of love for the child. I see now that I did set it up that way, but that just proves that I’m not as effective a writer as I’d like to be. The love issue is certainly an important one, but what was in my head was more about the excitement and acceptance of my adoption desires. Maybe it’s naive, but I’ve never really doubted that I’d love my children more than I can imagine, no matter how they came into my life. I accept and embrace that adoption is different than procreation, but love has never really been a concern for me.

I even believe that most of my family will love adopted kids as much as biological ones because my family is full of big-hearted people with lots of love to give. And if they don’t, well maybe they’re not the kind of people I want in my children’s lives anyway.

Once the kids are here, they’ll be loved. I’m pretty confident about that. But why is there so much excitement around pregnancy that doesn’t exist so much around adoption? Why is everyone cool with the idea of adoption but THRILLED when they think for a second I might procreate? It feels like procreation is this exciting milestone that everyone wants to be involved in, and adoption is just…something else. Maybe it has something to do with what Kt said:

“I think unless someone has witnessed a family adopting a child, that hearing about adopting is new. They know what it’s like to witness someone pregnant and have the child.”

Just about everyone knows someone who’s had a baby biologically, so they know how it goes, what to expect, how fun and exciting it can be. They know how and when to throw the showers, they know what questions to ask, they know what things should look like and how things should happen. It’s familiar and they know it’s exciting, so they can get behind the idea of others giving birth.

But adoption, for many, is new and foreign. What does it look like? How does it happen? What should we expect? How will we be involved? How will we feel about this new child? How will the parents feel about the new child? Will it be as exciting as all those times someone I know has had a baby?

So I guess what I’m saying is maybe I need to cut people some slack, not let everything I wrote about yesterday get to me, and trust that if/when adoption becomes real for us, everything will be as it should. You guys helped me come to that conclusion, so thanks.