This morning the website brought me an email from a long ago adoptive mom. Her daughter (now grown) is about to become full time guardian of an at-risk teenager.

A couple of weeks ago I heard from the wife of a former Wednesday’s Child. This couple is planning to adopt a child from foster care.

I’m not saying that either of these young adults had easy childhoods. Quite the opposite. They and their adoptive families met the challenges. And now they’ve grown into adulthood with the desire to pass love along to someone else that needs to be safe and needs a place to belong.

Several years ago a couple of caseworkers and their supervisors, along with some generous volunteers and supporters put love in motion for one boy and one girl. Now those efforts are rippling out to two more youth in the next generation.

Yes, I’m aware of it. The whole world took a hit. And recovery is very slow.

I’m remembering another time (about 25 years ago) that I felt like we do today – so, so tight on money with bills stacking up.

I’d done the math and was convinced The Adoption Exchange could net over $3,000 on helium balloon sales at our exhibit booth at the national adoption conference. So we purchased the balloons for about $900 and took them to the conference.

We scarcely had $900. But we had a good plan.

We rented a helium tank and set up shop at the conference…and …

…they were defective balloons that would not float. No matter what we did – including sealing them with the curling iron I’d brought in my suitcase. We trimmed each one with fingernail scissors to make them lighter weight – and still those balloons would not rise into the air.

It was dismal. At one point I climbed into the bathtub in my hotel room, holding a sampling of balloons under water to see if there were leaks.

Oh, what a sinking feeling.

We tried to sell them flat (not blown up) as something to tack on poster board, but there wasn’t much of a market.

Six months later, when we were still trying to recover our $900 investment from the manufacturer, I walked into the office to see one of those pathetic balloons languidly drifting 3 inches off the lobby floor (that’s all the altitude they ever got).

We recovered.

Bobby wasn’t yet in school when parental rights were terminated. His grandmother later told me some of the story behind his adoption. Their daughter (Bobby’s mother) has a debilitating mental illness, and her parents were faced with an agonizing decision.

They were forced to choose between caring for their daughter and raising their grandson, who was prevented by the courts from having contact with his mother.

The grandparents felt confident that Bobby would have a loving adoptive family. To raise the little boy they loved, they would have to break off all contact with their daughter who needed them.

And so they helped their little grandson say goodbye to his pre-school friends and to his birth mother. And they helped him learn to trust the people who became his adoptive parents.

It wasn’t easy. They did it because they loved Bobby and his mommy.

As he was settling into life with his adoptive family, the question Bobby asked his grandmother was, “Some day will you help me find my other mommy again?”

Today Indian child welfare specialists challenge mainstream professional and legal definitions of family. Terry Cross, Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, reminds us that the whole idea behind the push to provide children with permanent families is the concept of belonging, a central value in Indian culture.

Their experiences encourage us to recognize customary adoption and other legal options that create permanent and safe family bonds without terminating all legal rights of birth parents.

It is the notion of belonging in a community – not just in a narrowly defined nuclear family.

We are slowly learning that openness in adoption is a good thing. But adoption isn’t just a social arrangement. It is also a legal contract. Adoption and family laws off the reservation don’t acknowledge customary or informal adoptions.

Nonetheless, Bobby’s caseworkers, adoptive parents and his birth grandparents created a sort of blend – partly open, a little bit like customary adoption. It was a good option for Bobby.

And it’s another example of how in the world of adoption one size fits one.

Buddy has always made it a point to see to it that his adopted son stayed in touch with his brother, who was not adopted. Buddy has moved with the Department of Defense to various teaching positions around the globe. He used video tapes, telephone, and Skype. The boys spent vacation time together as they were growing up.

Once the decision was made not to place the boys in the same family, I imagine they were in as frequent communication as they would have been if they’d been in foster or adoptive homes in the same city.

According to the International Herald Tribune (July 19, 2004), if you pull into the drive-up window of a McDonald’s near Cape Girardeau, MO, you’ll get fast, friendly service, even though the person who takes your order is not in the restaurant….or even in the state of Missouri. The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, CO, nearly 1,000 miles away.

And we worry about how a child living in one location can stay in touch with siblings in another?!

Face Book recently announced that it has 500 million users. When the media made the announcement a reporter commented, “If Face Book were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world.”

Wow!

We are finding new ways of organizing and identifying ourselves – inventing new, meaningful ways of communicating.

This makes our discussions about inter-jurisdiction adoption seem archaic.

An adoptive mom in Utah published a book of poetry in 1983. That’s the same year The Adoption Exchange opened our first office. After reading the book Dorothy DeBolt said, “Lordy! How Grace Sandness can write!..She has taken my innermost thoughts and placed them on paper. She answers every ‘why’ ever asked of parents of large ‘chosen’ families…”

Here is one of the poems from the book “the loving river” that touches me:

He’d been waiting in foster care for four years. Waiting since he was nine years old.

Four long years – ages 9-12.

______________________________________________________

Learn more about Dixie.