The Mysterious What If

I stood in the middle of an ashen covered field and watched the brightly dressed children run from one end to the other. High up in the Andes mountains in a remote Ecuadorian village I had never felt so free and purposeful. It had been a long and tiring week, and while I was ready to go home, I wished I could do this every day. At fourteen years old I behaved more like a 30 year old woman than a teenager. I was confident and sure of myself that I knew everything (or at least almost).  This was my very first mission trip, and since my church was not participating in a trip that year, I had volunteered to go with a local neighboring church. I only knew one other girl on the team, but that didn’t matter to me because I had been waiting impatiently for years to participate.  I was always so ready to grow up! Getting on a plane with a bunch of strangers to go to a strange third world country where no one spoke my language—Sign me up! I had no idea the effect this trip would have on me once I arrived. It was my first time back in Latin America since I was small child.  As we went from village to village and worked in the different schools, I felt like every child there could have been me.  Was I really that close to having this as my life? If I had not been adopted, would I have been put in an orphanage? Or forced to work on the streets and sell candy, or pick pockets like so many of the children I was ministering to? It was this, “What if?” that caused me to feel crazy so many times in my life.  But it also drove several other unexpected things.

My fear of, “what if” caused me to grasp ever so tightly to the family who had saved me from it. As a teenager I may have been ready to go anywhere and do anything at a moment’s notice, but as child I hated the idea of leaving home. I was convinced that my family desperately needed me, and that if I left home something bad might happen. It was so much a dependence on them, as the thinking that they were depending on me.  I was afraid that if I caused too many problems they may regret adopting me.  I wanted to be something they could show off and be proud of.  Thus I became a type A perfectionist who was fiercely independent with a need to prove something.  

This was magnified in high school.  If you have ever been in a minister’s family then you know that it is like living in a glass house.  In the small corner of Georgia (where we moved at the start of my sophomore year) everyone knows everyone, and our church was the largest Baptist church in the county. I had spent most of my life homeschooled, and was very much an introvert who liked to spend hours alone in my room reading a good book. Being a new girl in high school is tough. Being a new girl at 15 in a town of a few thousand people, who is the preacher’s daughter, never been to public school before or lived in the south is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. Can you say culture shock?  In all my craziness I found making friends difficult.   I was so different from everyone around me. The pressure was on to stay physically beautiful, maintain a 4.0, be at church every time the doors were open, and NEVER SHOW WEAKNESS. Maybe if I was perfect then people would like me.  Maybe then my parents would be proud of me and not want to give me back. What if I let them down? What I failed to see was that they were so loving that never would have crossed their minds.  My friends just wanted me to be down to earth and act like a normal teenager instead of a perfect one.

Growing up I have had many adopted friends. In those friends I have noticed that they either shared my extreme type A want to please their parents and be perfect nature, or they looked at the “what if” very differently. They saw the “what if” as “What if my birth parents really loved me and didn’t want to give me away? What if my life could have been better with them in my life? What if I could just find them and maybe feel like I belong?”  Usually I saw this manifested in a more rebellious nature, and a person who is more indifferent about things than needing to be perfect people pleasers.

In doing research for this blog I wanted to see what mental disorders adoptees get labeled with. Some traits I came across consistently were: unsocial, lack of identity, insecurity, feeling alone, withdrawal, anxiety, and even aggression. These were made worse in children who were adopted at an older age, or those whose birth mothers had been drug addicts or alcoholics.  They actually have a mental disease called Adopted Child Syndrome, a dissociative disorder which has been used as a defense for many murder trials where the accused killer was in fact adopted.

To be quite honest I don’t know that I really buy into being labeled as one thing or the other. I’m definitely not a psychiatrist, and I know that many of my own personality traits and those described above are not reflected solely in adoptees but in many other children as well.  I do believe one thing to be true. Adoption is hugely popular right now, especially among the Christian community where well known speakers and musicians speak on the subject and adopt many children as well.  I must confess though that I grow somewhat irritated when I see these with their books, and their doctorates and so on speaking for those who have been adopted. They will never know what it feels like to be labeled as “adopted,” and everything that comes with that. So many times we here from the parents and how wonderful it is to adopt and go out and get your child. That is all well and good, and I want to adopt in the future as well. We need to remember though, when you adopt that child you are permanently altering their future. Just because you put them in your family doesn’t mean that everything is instantly better for them—we aren’t pets. The future you are giving them is sure to be far better than anything they could have hoped for, but they will have pain and difficult emotional issues.   Healing takes time, and you have been given the unique role of being the stitches to their brokenness.  True forgiveness and healing, however, can only come from the Lord. This is why I believe so many “successful” adoptions still result in broken and hurting adoptees.  

 “What if” I had never been an adoptee is a future I am glad God never planned for me, and I will take whatever struggles that come with that label. I am so thankful to serve a God who remembers  even the abandoned ones.