Stories of YES #55 - Perspective on older child adoption: Feeling Family

 

A couple of weeks ago we were talking about older child adoption with some friends who are currently in process for an older boy. Andrew knows them, and we were asking him if he ever got out of the orphanage when he lived in China, what did he think of the “outside world”? I recalled how he told me he once went to a wedding with one of his nannies (he was a favorite for obvious reasons ) I said, “Yeah, wasn’t it her daughter’s wedding or something?” He said he didn’t know whose wedding it was but he remembers going to one. And then he said something that made us all stop and we had to process what his words meant.

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He said, “I didn’t even know what that meant...‘daughter’ or ‘son.’ I didn’t even know that existed. I thought we were all just human.”

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This is my 14 year old son recalling what his 10-year-old self thought about family. To be clear… he didn’t know what family even was. Can you imagine? He realizes now, in hindsight, he didn’t know what the concept of ‘family’ meant. It’s hard for us to even comprehend that for the same reason it was hard for him to understand what it meant to be a son. When all you’ve ever known is living in an institution with caregivers who come and go, it isn’t something that crosses your mind.

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Growing up in an orphanage is not how children should be raised. But for some children, it’s just all they know… until they FEEL what family is, they don’t understand what they are missing. It’s maybe one of the saddest paradoxes in our world today. They are living day to day, in a constantly changing, ever uncertain environment, and they make the best of it because they are kids and it’s all they know. But WE know better. And so we can do better, for them.

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Family isn’t blood, it isn’t a name, it isn’t proximity... it’s unconditional, never gonna give-up, you before me kinda love. It isn’t always pretty, it’s far from perfect, and it will test you over and over again, but family is for everyone… and everyone deserves family.

-Alison Dewberry Dri