Having Your "Own" Children

Today I read a very insightful post by an adoptive mom of two beautiful children from Colombia. She also happens to be an adult adoptee, and I so appreciated her perspective! She was writing out of the concern she feels from being approached by a number of well-meaning people with the comment that she and her husband "need" to have biological children now - as if, she writes:

" ... like somehow our lives won't be complete or content without that experience. The actual words have been "You need to get pregnant with YOUR OWN children now." In saying this, they are indirectly saying that parenting an adopted child is really second-best to the experience of giving birth to a biological child. Can you imagine the implication of this statement?!?!

It might be important for the readers to know that adoption was our first choice for building our family. We were a family without children and there are over 140 million orphans throughout the world waiting for families. It was an easy choice for us. Growing up adopted I knew that it was possible to love an adopted child completely. As an adoptee I never felt like my parents "second choice", or a consolation gift for living a life of infertility. Instead I felt that God, in His sovereignty, had brought my family together. Indeed, my parents never once allowed me to feel that I was anything less than the child they had always hoped to have (even though I realize I was in no way a perfect child...strong willed was the word they most recently used to describe my growing up years...surprising, no?).

This idea that our family needs to experience pregnancy and giving birth is a distressing one for me because it implies that what God has blessed us with through adoption is simply not enough. In reality, God's blessings through adoption are more than sufficient (speaking in an eternal sense), because it is only through adoption that we can become His children. Giving birth to our children does not make them any more "ours" than adopting them does. After all, many people can give birth to children and then abandon, neglect, or abuse them. The act of giving birth does not equal the role of parenthood, though for some it is a part of the experience. For us, the act of giving birth was not involved in our parenting Corinn and Noah, but our role of parenthood is entirely complete even without that act ...

In essence, if you have found yourself encouraging us to "have our own" children, or if you have said that to someone else in our position I would like to challenge you to think about your reasons for saying it, and to possibly apologize for what it implies not only to us as adoptive parents, but also what it implies to our children. They are not second best...they are exactly what God had planned for our family. We look forward to the opportunity to follow His leading again sometime in the future to open our hearts and home to other children whom we did not give birth to, but whom we can call our own."