Every year in November, I write a column to bring attention to National Adoption Month. As the parent of two adopted children, the biological parent of their big brother, and the former foster parent of two of my wife’s great nieces (who were eventually adopted by their grandmother), I feel compelled to sing the praises of adoption every chance I get.
There is an expression that some people invoke when they are confronted with the reality that there are, in fact, thousands of children in this country who are in desperate need of a loving family. It goes something like, “I wish I could adopt them all.” To these people, I offer the following sincere and stark reply: Why don’t you start with one?
The unfortunate fact is that most people who express a desire to “adopt them all” have no intention to adopt any. There are always excuses. “I don’t have the room.” “I don’t have the money.” “I don’t have the time.” I dare you to look into the eyes of a child who has been orphaned and tell them you don’t have the room, money, or time for them.
Actually, please don’t do that.
There are currently over 123,000 children in foster care in the United States who are available for adoption. Here in Missouri, there are over 13,000 children in foster care, with over 1,500 of them still waiting for someone to apply to adopt them. Nationwide, over 20,000 kids “age-out” of the foster care system without ever having found a forever family.
Internationally, there are millions of children who are waiting for someone to call them son or daughter. A little boy born in southwest China in 2006 was one of those children. On November 3rd, 2008, in Nanning, China, two-year-old Truman became our son. Although our house was less than 2,000 square feet, we had the room. Although we had tens of thousands of dollars of debt (credit cards, car payments, student loans, mortgage) when we decided to pursue adoption, we followed the financial advice of Dave Ramsey and aggressively clawed our way out of debt so that we could afford to adopt. We also took advantage of adoption tax credits. And although we both had full-time jobs (and Bethany worked a second part-time job), we made the time. I quit my job to be a stay-at-home parent to our two sons.
We scrimped and saved for the next three years and in 2011 we hopped on another plane to China, this time to adopt our daughter Tiana. By then we really were running out of room, so we sold our home of 14 years and bought a bigger house. All that extra space came in handy when we took in Bethany’s nieces a couple of years later. For a solid year, five kids lived in our home, and I was only genetically related to one of them.
I don’t want you to get the impression that Bethany and I did anything heroic. We are just ordinary people who refused to allow the lack of room, money, or time to prevent us from growing our family through adoption and foster care. The fact is that just about anyone with the desire to open their hearts and home to a child can do so.
Happiness is losing track of how many adopted kids are in your family. I already mentioned Bethany’s nieces being adopted by their maternal grandmother. The girls’ great-uncle and his husband adopted two boys at around the same time. On my side of the family, I have one cousin who has, along with his husband, adopted two children, and another cousin who, along with his wife, adopted her three granddaughters. Interestingly, four babies born into our extended family over the years were adopted by loving people outside of our family.
If you are thinking about adding to your family, I strongly urge you to consider adoption. To get started, check out adoptuskids.org today.
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