Sometimes this adoption stuff and the wait is harder than I imagined or planned on it to be. With both my other boys, I had a rough idea of when they would make their appearance. Granted Leighton decided to throw us for a little surprise and show up early and we took a detour though the NICU before coming home. And Caedmon decided he was quite comfortable where he was at and we were going to have to literally use a vacuum to get him out (might have had something to do with his enormous head as well). But really it was a fairly set time frame.
And while with that comes the issue of not necessarily us waiting to bring him home to us (which is totally real) but the fact that he is waiting for his family which breaks my heart. And I think it is something that gets overlooked. And it’s hard to explain and even communicate to others. Both Leighton and Caedmon had and knew a family the moment that they were born, you could even argue for months before they were born they had us.
Edric doesn’t have a family yet. At least not that he knows. It’s no one’s plan or desire to be an orphan and yet that is all that he has known. He’s been in foster care from fairly early on which is a huge blessing, as so many orphans around the world have never even known that.
Being an orphan isn’t a government’s plan to make money. It isn’t a charity case that others take on to feel good about themselves. It isn’t a second best way of getting what you wanted. It isn’t a ticket to a better life. I didn’t just make those last phrases up, I have heard each of those things said to me about adoption/orphans.
Being an orphan is first and foremost a breaking and wrecking of something that is sacred and true for each human. It is a tearing and destruction of that familial bond.
And so adoption and the waiting that goes with it, isn’t about us getting Edric, but about Edric getting the one thing he has never had, a family. And in no way are we a perfect family, but rather far from it. But he needs a family, and by the grace and plan of One far bigger than all of us, we are that family.
He’s not going to know that we are his family right away. It is going to take a lot of work to make that a reality in his life. But just as labor is not without pains (even with an epidural) and tears, blood and lots of sweat, neither is the process of building a family. And so as we wait, and more so as he waits, we know that with each passing day he is one step closer to a family.
And one day I will tell him how I too was once an orphan and given the gift of a family, and maybe one day I will have the opportunity to watch all my boys give the gifts of a family to other orphans.
Here’s a great blog I recently read on a very similar topic-> Adoption:Giving a Family, Not Just Geting A Child
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