Goodbye, Children

About six years ago, my husband felt he wanted to adopt another child. I was against it, as I have said “no more children” several times before and then relented, stretching our family size to umpteen, a perilous number. I think we are getting too old to flirt with disaster any more and I am trying to learn to color inside the lines. So I said “no.” In fact, I think I may have even said, “heck, no!”

My husband, love of my life for almost 30 years now, countered, “Will you think about it? Will you pray about it?” I agreed, knowing that nothing would change my mind, not even God.

Some time later, November and National Adoption Month rolled around. The Dave Thomas Foundation sent us some materials in the mail promoting the adoption of waiting children. Two posters were in the package, one of them with the photograph of a little boy grinning widely, showing that he’d lost his first tooth. It said something to the effect of, “You didn’t see my first smile, and you didn’t see my first steps; but there are many other firsts we could share.” Having adopted several older children (even teens), I knew this was true. It’s not about what you get to be to the child, or how many firsts you get to experience, because it’s not about you (the parent). It’s about the child’s need for parents, family and home when he has lost his, and about the many rich blessings of family. I felt my heart melt a little. But I didn’t change my mind.

Later that day, I was working outside and saw our sons pushing their younger sister along in their rusty old wagon. She was screaming and all were careening to certain disaster or death across our back pasture, headed for the creek. Their faces were splitting with laughter and joy, and suddenly I saw again what adopting kids who needed parents had done for all of us: it had given us these particular children, whose faces were full of joy and the glee of belonging somewhere.

I told my husband later that I was willing to adopt one more time, as long as the child was older than our youngest. Due to our daughter’s death, we had an age gap between children that a waiting child, most particularly a boy, might be happy to fill. So we looked around for what sorts of children needed parents the most desperately worldwide, and we settled on the African nation of Sierra Leone, where civil war had nearly destroyed the country and where there are orphans aplenty.

Many thousands of dollars and much paperwork later, we were referred one little boy. A true orphan, he had been living from family to family in his village. His father had been killed in the civil war; his mother had died of a brain disease. We agreed to adopt him. Then, about three weeks later, the agency contacted us to let us know that he had a half sister, also an orphan, who had been helping to care for him. Would we adopt her, too? She was almost a teenager. I said no. There is no way. I’m sorry, but no.

My husband agreed with a shrug of the shoulders. “I understand, sweetie,” he said. “Just do me a favor.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Call the social worker back and explain to her what you want her to say to this girl as her baby brother boards the airplane and he waves goodbye to his only living relative. Explain that in our huge house on 10 acres, with our money in the bank and with a successful business, how we don’t have room for one more child or the ability to raise her. Tell the social worker exactly what to say to this young girl about why adopting her would cramp our vacation style or cause us to have to buy one more $900 curriculum or maybe five more school uniforms at $100 apiece, and how that would be just too much money to have to pay to give her a home and family. Just call the social worker and explain that, ok babe?”

My husband, such a wonder.

This is how we ended up agreeing to adopt two children from Sierra Leone, Africa, six years ago.

Five years ago, adoptive parents working with Sierra Leone started having problems in the adoption courts. Some justices and consular officials stopped believing in adoption. They believed that white people only wanted their children for slavery or for house work. They refused to believe that anything we said or did was actually about the children’s welfare. Rumors that white people wanted the organs of these black children shut down adoptions for awhile. And, then, a justice on the bench said that no African child should ever leave Africa, even if they were orphans. They had already lost their parents and whole families; why force them to leave their own culture, too? So adoptions ended. Even missionaries living in Sierra Leone and committed to staying there until their children were raised were denied adoptions. As children’s homes, orphanages, villages and city streets filled with urchins and waifs, the judges said adoption was bad, and would not occur any more in the poorest country in the world.

I do believe that nations have the right to do what they will with their most precious resource, which is their children. But I think that these same countries who create the situations leading to civil wars in which children become orphans also have the duty of caring for those orphans. What sort of culture are you promoting for these children? Why do you force your nationalism on them when so many of your best and brightest are abandoning Sierra Leone for western nations where they will have running water and electricity that works, safety, civil rights, and decent medical care? Why must only your war orphans stay behind to repopulate your decimated landscape? Why must those who have already paid the highest price continue to pay the dues of a nation who orphaned them?

The problem arising from this change in policy for these particular kids was that they had been operating under the illusion that they had American parents for over a year by this time. That photograph above? That’s a photo of them looking at the scrapbooks full of photos of the family we sent them. The family they thought was theirs.

They were Christian children who had been praying to God for some time for deliverance, love, food, safety, and education. These, they have received in the orphanage where they live, thanks to our help and the work of a selfless agency director and staff. None of us has any problem supporting them as long as they need our help; we don’t feel we have to adopt them or have them with us before we’ll help. But something about the situation bothers me, and it’s the commitment and promises we made to them that we are now having to break, because the government in Sierra Leone absolutely refuses to consider the possibility that some children might be helped by international adoption. The officials are too short-sighted to imagine what will happen when an entire generation of orphans whose parents were violently killed by civil war grow up and project their anguish. What then, Sierra Leone? What then?

On the other hand, they might argue, Sierra Leone itself is a nation of orphans anyway, being peopled by descendants of former slaves who were bought this country and sent back there by the British when they decided slavery was wrong. Sierra Leone is the British equivalent of Liberia, which is the result of America’s later shame and admission that slavery was, in fact, wrong after all. Here is a home you can return to, former slaves, thousands of you who lost your families and tribes, your language and particular culture. Here is our answer to you, our help, a new country of your own called Liberia, called Sierra Leone. We hope you fix the problems we created by kidnapping and enslaving you. Yes, our sin is the dark gift that keeps on breeding loss, violence, schism, and orphans. I can certainly understand why you would want to keep your children out of the clutches of white folk like me.

The prayers these children have prayed for almost seven years for a family and safety have not been answered by any country, though. In fact, I’ve just heard that adopting from Sierra Leone will be well nigh impossible forever, even if my husband and I make many trips there and talk to many judges and officials. Our girl is going to turn 16 the first week in January, when she will no longer be considered adoptable by United States INS, because according to the United States INS, she will no longer be a child. Her adoption is over. And in the grand scheme of things, I accept this, even though a part of me struggles with it, too.

I’m struggling to accept this because of the longing she expresses in every letter. While I love these kids and want the best for them, I don’t feel in any way that I need to have them, need someone to save or rescue, or that coming all the way to America to be adopted will be the cosmically designed, God-ordained “best” for them. As the judge said, they have lost enough already. They need their country and their people. I see his point. I see it so much that I am willing to not adopt these children, but to merely support them, clothe and educate them, even bringing them here and sending them back. If that’s what’s best for them; I want what is good for these two children.

But the one little, niggling problem I am having here is that these kids are old enough to think and reason now, and they want to be adopted; they want to come here. Our letters explaining what all the adults think is best are not helping these kids. They continue to send us mail that says, “We pray that God Himself would direct us safely home to you.” This is what they say. This is especially what our daughter writes, our daughter who is not our daughter at all, of course.

What is a person supposed to reply to letters like that?

Today, my heart and my thoughts are with two children I have never met, who have been in limbo for six years, because I received another email telling me once more how new politices and practices have made matters even worse. By this fall, these children will have been in a seven-year limbo of living in an orphanage and thinking they have parents, waiting to get on an airplane and fly “home.” Who can convince these children that they are already home, and that they do not need parents any more than we need more children? Who can convince them that a loving God is in heaven, and that all of the deaths and dismemberments, sickness, diseases and death in their country and in their lives will work together for their good, somehow (Romans 8:28). Who on earth has an answer for situations like this?

I do not think there are easy, simplistic answers to these things. I do not think that there is a textbook answer that is “right.” I think that this is one of those “I don’t know” situations.

Regardless of what anyone thinks or feels about adoption, or whether international adoption is morally right or wrong, I know two orphans who would like to have parents and who aren’t going to get them; this bothers me and causes an ache. We made commitments to these two children, who have been like family members living somewhere else for almost seven years. As a person who keeps her commitments, this bothers me, too, the breaking of a promise. I think I could say, looking at this retrospectively, that making such promises is evidence of the pride of thinking one knows what one cannot possibly know. How arrogant of me. And how odd this world of adoption is. How unnatural, and yet how it alternately fills one’s heart with real emotions of joy, love, sorrow, hope, and grief. How amazing, that it can cause love to grow between people who have never met.

Will I ever stop being surprised by the way my thoughts will turn one day or another to these children, and wonder what they’re doing, and wonder how they are doing?

What do we say to these two beautiful children? What will I write in my next letter to them, explaining why we can’t adopt them, and why we must withdraw from being their parents? How are we supposed to explain politics and control, prejudices in their own country, history, inheritances, the unfairness of life, and the pros and cons of international, transracial adoption when all they want is a place to call home? What will we write to two children who have been calling us “Mom” and “Dad” for almost seven years now? What would you say?

Goodbye, children of ours; hello, children of Sierra Leone. I’m sorry about all the adults whose ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, who have kept you from having any family at all for your entire childhoods and for those adults like me who have promised what we could not deliver. I’m grieved to the bone that adults full of rage and righteousness torched your village, killed your fathers, cut off the limbs of your friends as you watched, decapitated babies and threw their bodies into the fire, and then became leaders who say they believe in the God of the Bible. I’m sorry, too, for my own pride, my promises made and broken, my failure to ask myself, “Are you sure?” and wait for the answer. So that I would deal truly with you, because you deserve that. I am really, truly sorry. I wish I could do something for you besides pray and send you money every month; but maye that will be enough. I think it has to be, because that’s what is.

Children, I still believe in a God who holds you against His heart and loves you, and will keep and sustain you no matter what. I only hope that you can continue to believe in Him, too.