There have been many times where I have heard new mothers talk about their newborn child by saying, ‘He’s so beautiful and he is all mine!” And every time I hear that phrase, it hurts my heart because I cannot same the same about my daughter. I can only say, ‘She is so beautiful and she is not all mine.’ I look into her lovely brown eyes, and kiss those dimpled cheeks, and squeeze that little body of hers, and I can’t help but be reminded that she doesn’t fully belong to me.
When I look into her eyes, and at her face, and as I watch this little girl change and grow right before my eyes, I can’t help but try to picture what her birth parents looked like and I can’t help but wonder about their personalities. My funny, opinionated, life-loving daughter is not all mine. She also ‘belongs’ to those first parents. I may be taking care of her, raising her, loving her, teaching her, and living this life with her, but her story begins back in China, where her mother gave birth to this baby and if only for a mere few minutes, our Catherine was her child. She could say that Catherine was all hers. However, due to some circumstance, Catherine’s parents gave her up to be cared for by an orphanage and sending her on the pathway to having two sets of parents.
I often wonder what Catherine would have been like as a little, bitty 3 year old living in China, had her family had the option to raise her. Would she have the same sense of humor? Would she be inquisitive? Would she be creative? Would she be a spit-fire? Would she not like vegetables? I have to say that, yes, she would have had this vivacious personality because I am pretty sure that her mother and father have some of those traits as well.
There are so many moments in the day when I hold her, or she says something funny, or when my parents say much I was like her when I was a child and it feels like this child came from me. It feels like she is all mine. But I then remember that there are two other parents in her life, thousands of miles and many countries apart, that have a piece of her too. They are connected by DNA but really I think they are connected way more than that. I feel pretty positive that her birth family still thinks about her and that in the very fibers of who she is, that she remembers them too.
It hurts my heart that I can’t say that Catherine is all mine. I’m not saying this for you to take pity on me for not having my own biological child, I have always wanted to adopt. It hurts my heart as an adoptee, knowing that the time will be coming when she is going to realize that she has a huge hole in her heart that I cannot fill; and that hole in her heart is caused by her story that started in China and then ended with my husband and I in the United States. Hence the fact that she is not all mine and hence the fact that there will very likely be a point in her life where she feels torn about her identity and I have to be ready to handle whatever emotions or opinions she might have towards her adoption. I have to care for her by opening my ears and shutting my mouth. I have to care for her by letting her explore where she came from and even possibly look for her biological family.
I say that I feel ready for all of this but I am not sure any adoptive parent is ever really ready. While it hurts to love a child that isn’t ‘completely’ mine, I am just so deeply honored that this child was given to us to protect, to love, and to care for her all of the days of our lives. We made that promise twice while we were in China. And while I took those oaths, I was never really promising the government, I was promising her family left behind. It’s so sad to say but, she is not all of theirs and she is not all of mine. Yes, she is her own person. But, as a parent of an adoptive child, I realize that it’s not about us. I can wish all day that she is all mine, but the choice to adopt was a decision that I made and followed through with no regrets. When we make the decision to adopt, we are getting a child who will have two stories to own and that is darn important.
