The Grief

If you've read my previous post on money, you know that when it comes to adoption the money never caused me pause. But something else did, the grief. What if it made me too sad? What if adopting a child was too hard, the process, the waiting. What if, God forbid, the child I got was a bad apple (I mean after all it wouldn't have my great genes).

What about the months or years of my child's life that I will never be a part of? What about the fact that I will not get to feel this child grow inside of my body? What about how I will not get to nurse this precious baby and have that wonderful bond that I did with my first child? What about the trauma this child will have in his short life, losing the only mother/father he has ever known and being taken to a new country to start a new life?

Those are hard questions, and I would be selling you short if I didn't tell you that they are all part of coming to the decision of adoption. I don't really have the answers to the questions (not specific ones at least), but they are still important questions to ask, to give a voice to.

Grief is a process, eventually it becomes more of a sad memory than a constant pain, it is not always so big. So go through the process. Trust. Trust God in the journey He's placed you on, even if it doesn't make sense. Trust yourself that you are strong enough to go through the process. Trust your child that although someday the things that were hard for you will be hard for them, the unknowns, the what ifs, they will love you and you will love them.

Parenthood has rivers of grief running all through it. Perhaps the griefs of adoption are different, but grief would still have been there once you became a parent. Children have disabilities we didn't envision, they don't get the grades we think they should in school, they decide they "hate" us, they go to college at UT :) But if your signing up for this job of parenthood you had it coming. And in the end it was all worth it, the joy outweighs the grief, it was the time of your life, and you accomplished the most important job there is. The grief makes us stronger, it makes us cling to our God, and it makes the joy that much more special.