Sunday, April 29, 2007

"Trendiness" II

Stacy (and others)~ I appreciate your opinions. Stacy is the only one who left her comment in the comment section, the rest PM'd me.

Although you may have read it that way, I don't have an "aversion to people who adopt because it is promoted at their church" per se--but I do believe that it is a great source of the "trend" and I believe that trend will fade. The future will tell.

I can appreciate the woman in Stacy's example and am hoping that the "love" of her child as an individual person will far outweigh the woman's goal of performing a charitable act and that the young girl can truly become a respected member of her family. Now, truthfully and sadly, in this young girl's situation, to be a charity case in a family who cares for her and educates her is probably a huge step up from her current living situation and hope for the future. But whether one version of a person's life is better than another version of their life is unknown and not for me to decide.

And, to set the record straight, I don't really have a problem with children (bio or adopted by the way) appreciating and being thankful for their parents who have loved and cared for them. I appreciate and am thankful for my mother who cared and raised me and I hope someday my kids (bio and adopted) appreciate and are thankful for me and DH as parents. I very much appreciate them for being good kids.

I met a man recently (it was a weird work situation and I had to see him a number of times over a few mos). He and his wife had adopted 4 Native American children. He was very proud of them and was telling me about their various accomplishments. It was obvious that he cared for them. He also told me, repeatedly, that adopting them was the only "charitable" "humanitarian" and "good" thing he had ever done. To me, it seemed that the appreciation of his own good deed outweighed the love he had for the children. Selfish love = personal gain. I don't think that's the right reason for adopting.

But, I don't want to/get to/have to decide who can adopt and who can't based upon whether or not their reasons are the "right" ones. So, this is just my opinion. Others may differ, and that's OK.

1 comment:

aimeeg said...

I always cringe when people talk about how "nice" it is that people adopt those "poor babies in orphanages". We usually just have a blanket "we're the lucky ones" statement because sometimes it's just too hard to deal with that much ignorance.