Adopting attitudes

I have never fully understood why some people who desperately want to have children, but can’t, refuse to adopt. This seems to be especially true with men. Some of their logic makes a bit of sense to me, such as “I won’t know the child’s full family history” (do any of us know our family’s entire history, anyway?) But when someone says to me: “I want my own child,” I am dumbstruck. A tiny sperm successfully crashing into a single egg may create a baby with a couple’s DNA, but a newborn baby who is put in your arms, with someone else’s DNA, will feel every bit your baby if you want to be a parent. Ask any parent.

All the adoptive parents I know love their children with the same intensity as biological parents. Perhaps I’m unconventional, but when I look at my children I don’t think, “Oh, wow, these people came from my egg and Douglas’s sperm.”  The intense love I feel has more to do with everything that has happened between us for their whole lives and half of mine–good, not so good and lousy.

The sperm and egg started it all, but then all of us took over.

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0 Responses to “Adopting attitudes”

  1. eleanore says:

    I’m not sure I know why everybody wants kids, but I do know it can be a supremely selfish act, having much too much to do with what it says about the parent and little about the altruism people say is the reason. These people need a biological child because it continues the narrative about THEM…and that’s too bad

    eleanore
    The Spinsterlicious Life

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