Articles

Adoption is NOT a Label by Tom Velie

Returning home one day from a board meeting at the University in Oxford with my friend, Thad, who was sitting in the passenger seat, my cell phone rang. When the friend on the phone asked who was with me, I unconsciously replied, “Thad, my black friend from my social work class.” I was simply describing who Thad was – or so I thought.

After hanging up the phone, Thad, with his ever-calm nature, asked, “Why did you use my color to describe me? You could have easily said, ‘He’s my friend from the social work class.’”

He was right: we were the only two guys in the social work class.

Labels - we all tend to use them. And, so it is with the labels of ADOPTION, ADOPTED, ADOPTEES and ADOPTED CHILD.

I cringe when I read sensational headline titles such as, Adopted Child Kills Store Clerk in Drug-Induced Rampage.

Why not put the title, Birth Child Kills Store Clerk in Drug-Induced Rampage in similar headlines?

Our prisons are full of “fatherless” adults, our foster homes are overflowing with children who were removed from “birthparent” homes, and “birth children” share a majority of the same challenges that are faced by “adopted children.”

Adoption doesn’t define a child’s hair color, skin color, IQ, artistic ability, height, shoe size or much of anything else.

Research shows us that, except for children born to their biological parents who remain living in intact two-parent families, the outcome for children who join their families through adoption, and who remain in two-parent homes, are better than for any other group. In other words, adoption is more often than not - predictive of a successful life.

Thad is my “friend,” Cori and Shania are my “daughters,” and Ben is an “adult community leader” who joined his family through adoption. They’re all normal, healthy, happy human beings and the labels of color and adoption just don’t fit into the description of who they are. Those labels do not define them.

As you read through the variety of stories in this book, please notice how adoption is an “event” that occurred at some point in time and not an identifier that surrounds itself in every adopted persons life.

Children are reaching out and adoption is the bridge to “touch” a family.

Enjoy the stories that are written by everyday people in everyday language. We’ve edited the stories only for ease of reading, because we want you to know that families who have adopted, children who have joined families through adoption - and all the rest of us involved in the adoption process, from attorneys to ministers, to nurses, to doctors and to social workers, are just everyday folks.

Across America, and across the oceans, the hands of children are reaching out. They need homes. They need moms and dads. They need grandparents. And they need someone to touch. Perhaps they need you. . .

Taken from "If Only the Hands that Reach Could Touch (Velie 2005). Available from New Beginnings