It's National Adoption Week. I found out by accident; for my family every week is Adoption Week! I came across this article on Google News. The article talks about the complex reality of adoption:
The British Association of Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) has published information today stating that one in every three parents looking to adopt would not consider a child born out of a pregnancy that included alcohol or drug abuse by the mother. This view on adoption is troubling given that nearly half of children in the U.K. that need adopted families originate from homes where drugs and alcohol were abused.
With National Adoption Week beginning today, BAAF wants to place an emphasis on steering prospective parents out of a fantasized ideal of adoption and into today’s modern reality of adoption. (Bolding mine.)
I don't blame adoptive parents for wanting a baby with a "clean slate". Raising a child with special needs, be that a disability or a troubled past, is heartbreaking and difficult. But the idea that a "baggage-less" adopted child will be just like a biological child is a fantasy. Every adopted child has a past:
Genetic ties and shared history can never be severed. An adopted child and their new family must always live with that difference.
YES. I want every person who has any contact with an adopted child or their family to understand that. I want people to understand that adoption is a beautiful and wonderful thing, but that it ain't perfect. Adoption is born out of hope, but it's also a connection forged out of the grief of parents: birth parents who have to give up a child and many adoptive parents who are unable to concieve. Adoption changes everything you know about family and genetics and love. I want people who know my family to acknowlege that. Don't put adoption or my family on a pedestal.
"Adoption is such a miraculous process!" Yes it is, but so is having a biological child, and that is messy and scary and frustrating while also being joyful and more fulfilling than anything else in the world.
Happy Adoption Week to everyone touched by adoption. God preserve all of us! :)
...I would buy everything in this store. I look at their website and salivate. I walk into their store and get weak at the knees. If I found some genie, my third wish would be to get a hundred-thousand dollar giftcard to this store, right after world peace and the elimination of hunger.
Seriously....this quilt? These shirts? This skirt?? To die for.
Vox is nice for some things, but the fact I cannot easily get my content out of the service is something I cannot ignore any longer. There's, quite simply, no benefit to me having my content on Vox versus having it on my own servers. Okay, maybe they're not my servers, since I'm using a shared hosting environment, but I am paying for them and I have a lot more access to the data on them than I have on Vox.
The stuff you formerly were looking for here is over on http://phoneboy.info. I might migrate stuff off of Vox or I may simply delete it all. Haven't decided.
