Is Adoption Hard? Wrong Question

Next week, I’m traveling to Haiti to pick up my two adopted kids. Plainly, this is an exciting time and also frightening. I’ve studied, read, and thought a lot about what to expect. Does that mean I’m “prepared”? Of course not. Check back with me in six months, and I’ll let you know what sort of curve balls our family got thrown and how we hit them, struck out, or ducked and covered.

But for now, one thing is clear to me: I don’t want to hear any more admonitions that “it’s going to be so hard!” This message comes from a variety of directions, ranging from chats with parents to adoption blogs to social workers. It has a certain utility, but I believe it makes up far too much of the conversation.

The message itself is true. Yes, it will be hard. Of the dozens of accounts I’ve read of bringing home older adopted kids, I’ve come across one that said, “It wasn’t that bad.” I could enumerate horror stories I’ve heard, from massive property damage to a mother almost being choked. What startles me is that it has not always been the default to expect such hardship. Apparently, until recent years and revised adoption trainings, it was common for families to believe that older, internationally adopted kids would feel grateful for coming to a new, better home and be generally well behaved. That expectation is unrealistic. Who would be grateful for being torn out of the only home they’ve ever known and taken away from friends and loved ones to a strange place with strange sights, smells, and tastes where you don’t speak the language and can barely communicate your needs and are completely dependent on strangers who speak gibberish at you? Who wouldn’t melt down and behave badly, especially given a child’s coping skills? Yet this, apparently, was a common belief—and continues to linger in some quarters—so as an inoculation against that kind of false expectation, the “it’s so hard!” narrative does positive work.

In fact, it feels like a reaction to a tacit cultural ideal that life and love are meant to be easy: nothing but giggles and balloons? Our culture promotes that expectation: in ads for wonder products, self-help books, a large proportion of our media, as if the goal of modern life should be to expend minimal effort on anything not fun (though, in practice, we Americans berate people who don’t work themselves to the bone—unless they’re rich). To the extent we expect life to be easy, we should quell that expectation. Life has never been like that and never will be. And thank God for that because, if we ever got there, we would be in the Brave New World.

But the flip side of this desire for ease is a fetishizing of our hardships, and it is equally unhealthy. It’s frightening and negative to little good purpose. It cuts apart the wholeness of relationship with another person in favor of scattered puzzle pieces of misery. One friend adopting through the same program as me once said (paraphrased), “If I believed everything I read in adoption blogs, I’d believe that I’ll never be happy again ever in my life.” Why would anyone adopt if that were case? Why would anyone not commit suicide if life were nothing but these lists of unpleasant moments?

Beyond a certain point, this focus on hardship only serves to make a stressful situation more stressful. And though I’m talking about adoption here, I think this is true for our lives in general. A great many things in life are hard: childhood, childbirth, puberty, heartbreak, high school, parenthood, family, poverty, illness, injury, grief, age, death. Life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Life is a “veil of tears.” We can look at life this way, but quite honestly, what good comes of enumerating our slings and arrows? It seems to me to do little besides encourage self-pity and eclipse what really matters, which is acting with love.

As for myself, I’m a person who lives through story, so I look to stories for help with these questions. Let’s take The Lord of the Rings: there’s a lot that happens in this story that’s “hard.” People die (spoilers!), hard lessons are learned, lives are irrevocably changed, and that’s not even touching on the moment-to-moment hardships of terror, injury, hunger, cold, etc. But this is not how we talk about The Lord of the Rings. This is not what the story is about. It’s not some sort of prep manual for being thrown into trench warfare. It’s a story about living and doing what life calls upon you to do.

As help for managing the hurdles of adoptive parenthood, the concrete information behind these “it’s so hard!” communications is very valuable. I want to know what I might expect, both physically and emotionally. But I wish that the general rhetoric were weighted more toward the positive—not the whitewashed but the coping skills, methods for helping children through trauma, moments of play and enjoyment. Finally, I would rather read more accounts from the perspective of “I” vs. “you”: that is, I would like to hear about specific people in specific relationships describing their own specific experiences. I’m tired of being told, “You will be a zombie, and in your few moments of coherence mentally kick yourself for being so stupid as to adopt,” and so on. Dear bloggers, please don’t tell me how I’ll think. You might be right, but you don’t know me or what my specific situation will be.

I’m tired of the dwelling on hardship. I would rather live life.