CAN YOU LOVE SOMEONE ELSE’S CHILD?

(Quoted from the Adoptive Parent’s Association Newsletter)

At a children’s party I was introduced to a mom of a three-month-old baby boy. As the mother began to drink her tea, the baby cried out to be picked up. The mother leant down to pick up the child and as her tired eyes met mine she whispered, “I love him because he is mine.”

I looked over at my two sons – one directing the building operations of a sand castle, and the other in a faraway land on a swing. Yes, I love my sons, I thought. I love them because they are mine. No. I love them because they are not mine. No. I love them full stop.

This set me thinking for quite some time.

The question of a parent’s love for a child was again brought into sharp focus when hearing how “a nurse’s slip changed two mothers’ lives forever” and two years later discovered that they were not rearing their own biological child.

On reading an article in the Reader’s Digest entitled “Why we have children”. I was forced to flee to the ancient typewriter to share some perspectives:

By understanding how some people define families, adoptive parents may get to know why members of the public may have doubts about the acceptability of adoption or the possibilities it has for success.

The idea that family ties, bonds of respect and love are developed because of kinship must make it difficult for others to comprehend the bonds of love existent in adoptive families.

Armed with this knowledge adoptive parents may be able to sensitively educate friends and family to realize that an adopted child is entitled to full family status although he lacks a genetic link to the family he is living with.

One way of doing this, which will also be of great benefit to the adoptive child in the long run, is to make sure that our children spend time and make acquaintances with our extended families. In this way, loving and strong bonds will be formed.

Your family and your adopted child will, not due to birth, but by free association, desire and shared interests form bonds of friendships, pursuing common interests and ultimately bonds of mutual respect and love.

Not I love him because we are historically connected by blood, but … I love him, full stop.