Room to Grow

Maybe your husband was the first one to want to adopt. He was the one talking you into the idea of special needs, or adopting a child of a different race. More likely, though, it was your idea and it took a bit of time and persuasion for him to get on the same page as you. If he was anything like my husband, the latter was certainly the case.

 My understanding from talking to other adoptive moms over the years is that their husbands, like mine, took a while to get over the idea that their future child needed to share their biology. Often once husbands have accepted the idea that this isn’t going to happen and they are finally open to adoption, there is still a need to have a child that would be as close to what that biological child would have been as possible. For example, an infant child whose race is the same as their own with no special needs (disregarding the fact that any biological child can be born with special needs), and no drug exposure. 

Please understand that I am in no way disparaging dads or men in general for this concept. Nor do I insist that all dads are this way, as I know they certainly are not. As a mom my maternal heart was ready to jump in to any and every situation to bring a child home. Not all moms are this way either. My point is that hopefully moms and dads balance each other out in some ways and come to a good decision together. 

In our case (previous to our 7 adoptions and 6 special needs children not of our race), my husband struggled with the idea of adoption at first. We had given birth to our first child and tried for four years to get pregnant again without success. He wasn’t open to any kind of adoption, so I sold our crib and decided to try to let my mourning heart move on. Then one day he came home after having talked to another adoptive dad, and his mind had changed. In their conversation he had asked the other dad why he and his wife had wanted to adopt. His reply was simply because they loved kids, and that was enough to give my husband a new perspective.  We then adopted our first son domestically, who looked just like everyone in our family and had no special needs. 

Several years later we decided to adopt again. Domestic adoption had changed quite a bit by then. There was much more drug exposure, and we found it was more difficult to be specific as to the amount of openness we wanted with a birth family, and what race the child would be. My husband was still not open to other ethnicities. However, sometimes what someone states and what their heart tells them are two different things when an actual child is involved. 

My husband’s sword to the heart came in the form of “Mariah”.  It was, we thought, one of those adoptions that just drop in your lap. Friends from church knew that we were adopting and let us know that a friend of theirs was looking to place their granddaughter. The grandmother’s daughter had continually given birth to one child after another, and then left them each with her mother to raise. This daughter, who had once been on track to become an Olympic gymnast, was into drugs, and Mariah’s biracial father was currently serving time in prison. This was not a child that my husband would have ever considered in concept, but we agreed to meet with the grandmother and the little baby girl, and he adored her in an instant. We tried very hard to adopt this beautiful child, but ‘the system’ was against us, and we had to let her go. Maybe this was just the nudge he needed to go in the direction we would begin to take next. 

We then decided to adopt internationally through Taiwan. This program offered “healthy infants younger than 6 months at match with no special needs.” Our son that we were matched with was a year at match and 22 months when he came home. He was and is a gorgeous boy, and when he came home we were unaware of his special needs. A few years later we would discover through testing that our little man actually has Autism and ADHD. We were grateful to just have some answers and began to get services for him.  The true blessing in our son’s diagnosis was that as scary as the idea of ‘special needs’ had been in the decision making, we realized that we could do this! And not only could we do this, but we wanted to continue doing this with other children. We went on to eventually choose to bring home 5 more children with special needs from China within just a few years. They are such a huge blessing to us, and my husband is the best father that I know to each of them. There were times during the adoption process when I still had to give an extra nudge for him to adopt two at a time instead of one, but after prayerful consideration, he always came to a yes when one of our kids was waiting for us. The road has not always been easy as we have navigated trauma issues, and other behavioral issues that come from the early years of a child living in an institution. But we have grown, and changed the way we parent to meet their needs over the years. 

Not every husband is going to, “come around,” like mine did and decide to adopt, or to expand their ideas on the variables surrounding which child to adopt. I am reminded, though, not to judge a husband (or wife for that matter!) who isn’t ready to make that jump. They are not ‘racist’ for not yet being prepared to bring home a child of a different race of their own. They are not cold hearted for not wanting to jump into special needs adoption right away, or not being prepared to bring home a child with drug exposure. Sometimes it is a process. And when it does eventually occur, when the heart has been stretched and molded to bring these wonderful children home, it is truly a beautiful thing!