Our Adoption Anniversary
As I listened to a podcast about adoption, trauma and the Enneagram this week, a therapist on the show said, “Adoption is building a family on top of the death of another family.”
Rewind. I needed to hear that line again. And again. That one line which so perfectly captures the essence of the intricate and complicated journey of adoption has run through my mind on repeat for days. It is enfolding our long journey of becoming this current family in a soft blanket that affirms all of the wrestle and trauma and tears and small victories.
January 23 marked the anniversary of the day, eight years ago, when we sat in the US Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia awaiting a clerk to call our name. It looked like we were in a DMV waiting to obtain a driver’s license.
“Brockman,” he called from behind a glass window at a stall. This felt more like a bank teller.
Dennis and I walked to the window to seal the final step in our adoption process. After some questions, he shared, “Meseret and Kamise’s father has attended his embassy appointment and stated that he relinquished his parental rights due to his inability to provide for them.”
PAUSE
Will you linger there with me? Simmering in that line could make for quite an imaginative prayer session. Imagine yourself in any one of their shoes. We’d received a photostream from our agent of their dad telling his/our daughters good-bye weeks earlier. It unraveled me to heaves.
On Halloween three months earlier, we’d sat with our daughters-to-be in the Addis Ababa courthouse awaiting our appointment with the judge. White foreigners outlined half of the room merging into Ethiopians who outlined the other half. Half of us were there to “rescue” these children, as so many have said to us. The other half were there to relinquish rights to (grand) children for whom they feel they can no longer care. I can’t think of any other safe generalizations about these groups of people. Only that the scene is haunting.
Parents/grandparents pounding the final nail into the coffin of their family that was. Unbeknownst to us, we would pound the nail into the coffin of our family that once was. This reality hadn’t yet occurred to me.
January 26 was the day we brought our new daughters into our home eight years ago. We hear stories of adoption families who buy gifts, have a party and celebrate big their gotcha days. I’ve felt shame that I don’t have the energy to pull out the stops as our anniversary comes around each year. We talk about it, and I’ll usually make a dessert, but our journey has been costly to all of us and living true to our story has meant a different kind of remembering for the Brockmans.
So when the therapist made that comment on the podcast, eight years into our new family, I realized our family rests atop the death of our daughter’s biological family—whom they loved, and our family as it was pre-adoption, which we loved.
THE GIFT OF ANOTHER FRAMING OUR STORIES
And my shame began to melt away.
Then the therapist suggested that adoption anniversaries are times to grieve the death of the original family with the lighting of a candle and sharing about the losses. It’s okay to enjoy cake afterward, too. This was the first time in eight years that someone framed our journey and helped make sense of why it felt incongruent for me to just throw a party to celebrate, for the losses still feel acute to us all. We have grown and beauty is unfolding on the mounds of family beneath us.
Our adoption journey is the embodiment of the crucifixion holding hands with the resurrection. In the process, we die small and big deaths allowing greater space for love to fill and flow out of us. Surrendering to the vision of the life Jesus showed us how to live feels like it might be the end of me sometimes. And oh yeah, Jesus said it would be...Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Is Jesus inviting you to die to something amidst your circumstances that love might flow more abundantly from within you?