Family Connections

I saw a picture in the paper today. People sitting a courtroom, looking much friendlier than they typically do at a trial or jury selection day. The bench is piled with teddy bears and other cuddly critters. In the foreground, a man hugs a little girl while his wife, decked out in a corsage, wipes away tears. The caption says this girl, age 5, was one of 25 local kids who got a new “forever family” on Adoption Day.

A note under the caption directed me to more photos on the website. I found more photos of the little girl with her new parents, and photos of another couple who adopted three boys to add to the three kids they already had. It was a happy occasion all around. Each adopted child got a stuffed animal to take home, and a necklace or bracelet engraved with his or her new name.


Wow. What a great story! Bless those kids, their new siblings and parents, and the judges and lawyers who made it official.

Similar celebrations are going on all over Texas this month. They’re promoted by our state Department of Family and Protective Services, and they’re about kids that have wound up in state custody for one reason or another. Rather than keep them in foster care for years on end, as was typical 30 years ago, the department works to find families that will take them on for life. 

But the picture got me thinking about adoption in general. It’s more common than you might think.

I grabbed pencil and paper and made a quick list. Without thinking too hard, I came up with around 30 adoptees that I know personally, or knew at one time. They include a close childhood friend, a co-worker, a kid at my church, and children of friends and business associates. Heck, I count nine in my own extended family. And there’s probaby somebody I’m forgetting.

These friends and acquaintances represent all classes of adoptees, if you want to put it that way.

• Some were adopted as infants by families of similar appearance; they could pass for natural children if you didn’t happen to know, except that in some cases their parents are a bit older than average.
• Some were adopted by parents of a different ethnic group; if the kids didn’t notice, I suspect they didn’t get very old before some bystander brought it to their attention.
• I know kids who were adopted from foster care like the ones I saw in the newspaper today,
• ... kids who were orphaned by famine or unrest in other parts of the world and found new families in the United States,
• ... and kids who were formally adopted by guardian aunts, grandparents, or a parent’s new spouse.

I’m calling them kids, but many of these individuals aren’t kids any more. Some were hardly what you’d call kids when the adoption ceremony took place. I knew two brothers and a sister whose mother lived an unsettled life. She often left them in the care of a maiden aunt who helped them with homework, signed their report cards, and got them to doctors when they were sick. All three kids thought of the aunt as their “real” mom, but their mother didn’t want to waive parental rights. Until the kids reached legal age and could decide for themselves. When their aunt got around to adopting them, the oldest was married with a child of her own. She became a mother and a grandma all at once.

In these families of my acquaintance, it doesn’t seem to matter how old the kids were when they were adopted, or whether they do or don’t look like their parents. When someone says, “I’d like you to meet my dad,” or “That’s our daughter, third from the right, with the clarinet,” they all sound pretty much the same.

Everyone needs a Forever Family. And there are many different ways of making one.