There is an ancient story of an adopted child.  His mother couldn’t keep him safe and so she made an adoption plan and set the small being in a boat where someone who could care for him would surely find him.  He was pulled out of the river by another family and raised as their son.  However he never felt like he completely belonged to the new family.  Deep in his soul he never forgot who he had been and always longed to be with his people.  One day he became violent and then in his fear and shame he ran away from the family that had raised him.  He went to live in the land of his biological mother.

Adoption is not a simple issue.  It never has been and my guess is it never will be.  But it is the stuff that real life is made of.  It is not simply a matter of finding homes for children who need them, thou it is that.  It is not simply filling the need to parent, though it does that.  It does not remove infertility.  It does not erase unplanned pregnancies.  It is ribbons and bows and happy balloons, but it is also a complex set of developmental tasks some different than those biological children bring to their birth homes.   Its about how open adoptions should be, whose "best" interest gets served, and who determines what "best" means. Adoption is a complex issue that touches very tender and sometimes sore places.

 In the few minutes that we have left together this morning I want to touch on some of these topics.  I am not an adopted person, nor am I an adoptive parent, at least not yet, but as a caring person of faith, a Unitarian Universalist, I believe we need to be aware of adoption issues. It’s a question of children who grow into adults in a world that has treated them as second class citizens a world that doesn’t understand. It’s a question of wholeness and justice.

 While we won’t find answers this morning, addressing questions surrounding adoption opens our eyes to the complexity of life.  It isn’t an uncomplicated matter, "I have a new home, therefore I must be happy." Happiness, gratitude, and love are there.  But there may be other feelings there also. Like a sense of loss that never goes away. There may be sadness, anger and confusion. When an adopted person or any one whose life frame is different, looks into the mirror of our society the picture can be disturbing.  What is reflected back is that it is normal only to be in the family that gave birth to you.  But what if I am not?  What if I miss what I have never known?  What if while the entire world is telling me I need to feel happy, I feel resentment and loneliness instead?

 This juxtaposition of feelings is a place of spiritual depth.  In the struggle lie the seeds of growth and understanding.  The ability to hold happy and sad, angry and grateful, fear and comfort, loss and gain together is a task from which we can all learn.  Letting go and not letting go at the same time is a gift of wholeness we all seek.  To learn not to deny any part of our experiences is to give depth and roundness to life.  Yet these voices have been silenced from our world.  These adoptive voices that struggle with these spiritual questions have been quieted by our fear.  Our own fear and inability to deal with the shadows of our lives has prevented us from hearing from the depth of living we seek. How many of us find ourselves denying the losses we have because we "should" feel grateful?  How many of us deny our own anger out of fear of more loss?  These are the complicated emotions that can come to adopted people.  These are the complicated feelings adopted people learn to hold together in some way.

 It is like the story some of our sixth graders are reading in school.  The title of the book is Giver.  In the story the culture has decided to give up all of the complicated feelings and experiences of life.  They have given up the color.  They have given up the complexity and the pain and with that a great deal of the joy and beauty that is life. We are helped to develop depth in our own lives by learning how to feel all the colors, the red with the blue; the anger with the joy.

 I find the writings of Ms Partridge particularly moving in this way.  None of us is one thing or the product of one set of influences.  None of us can compute easily the influences in our lives that make us who we are.  We all struggle for an identity of place and origin.  Am I like this because my father was a loner?  Am I like this because my mother didn’t eat well when she carried me?  We all ask these questions.  Can we not learn from the voices of the adopted as we each try to hold our identities up to the mirror of what society calls normative?

 Thus the questions of whose best interests are being considered when the level of openness in adoption is discussed.  There are some that would have adoptions be "closed" because they worry that openness will bring more pain and fear.  There is the fear that if adoptions are very open young women will not choose abortion for fear of having their "mistake" come back to hurt them more.  Some fear that more open adoptions will "scare" families away from being adoptive parents.  The statistics don’t hold this to be true. Where adoption is open rates of adoption and abortion remain about the same.  I have to add however that my numbers come from the group called "Bastard Nation", a very radical pro-total-openness group.  And frankly, statistics like these can be bent to meet ones needs.  Beyond the statistics we need to look at these fears; the fear that our past will come back and cause us pain.  It usually does unless we have dealt with its lessons.  Even then, each time our pain returns there is new and important growth for us.  The fear of more abortions or reduced adoption rates is not rooted in the fear of openness; it is based on our inability to face our real fear of pain and growth.

Marge Percy, in her piece "To Be of Use", talks of life as being like mud; it gets our hand dirty and crumbles when it is botched.  While I love the imagery of that which is done well being clean and satisfying I also know that very little of real living happens without a few crumbles.  Real life is about satisfying moments and moments when we botch it and our hands get dirty.  Our feelings do not complete with just happiness or sadness; they curve and twist through myriad feelings.  Our lives do not follow a narrow path to the well done and the clean; there are moments of dirty and crumbly all along the way to that place called satisfied.  Adoption and its adoptees remind us of life’s messiness on a daily basis.  Groups like "Bastard Nation" make us squirm even with their name.  That squirming is good. It reminds us life is complicated and beautiful at the same time.  The uneasiness calls us to struggle to incorporate all of life into a mosaic whole.

Moses, was the child with which I started.  His story is an old one, but one filled with the same complicated and confused feelings experienced by many adoptees today.  Approximately 100,000 adoptions take place every year.  25,000 of those are infants.  60,000 are adoptions into families previously unknown to the kids.  Their voices and experiences enrich our world.  Their passages and struggles to find identity and to hold conflicting emotions together are the stuff of which faith, especially Unitarian Universalist faith, is made.  We aren’t afraid of the complex or the messy. We aren’t afraid to struggle and hold apparently conflicting truths in the same house of worship. We aren’t tied to the narrow path.  Let us welcome the openness.  Let us dance allowing those who have walked the path of adoption show us some new steps.
 
 
 
 

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