This I Believe

When my niece, Willa, was born, she couldn’t breathe very well. I’d been waiting in the hospital corridor with a crowd of other family members, and a few minutes after we applauded her very first cry, she was taken from her mother and put under an oxygen hood. We were terrified, but more salient than our fear and sorrow was our awareness that this baby was already so widely and deeply loved.

Willa, who is six months old and healthy now, is a lucky child; millions of other children around the world wait in orphanages or foster homes for families. They are caught in this limbo for a variety of political and cultural reasons, but they are certainly as lovable and as deserving as little Willa.

When I was 14 I decided never to become pregnant. Unlike the other important life decisions I thought I’d made as a teenager, this one has stuck. I’m 28 now, and in year or two, my husband and I will begin the long and expensive process of adoption. Some people have asked us if we worry about bonding with an adopted child or if we wonder whether we can sufficiently love a child who hasn’t come from our own bodies.

I’m always a little taken aback by such questions because I believe that all of humanity, indeed all of life, is inextricably connected. I’m not entirely sure why pregnancy is not compelling to me, but I know that choosing to adopt is not a sacrifice; it’s a resounding affirmation of my belief in the interconnection of us all. And because of this belief, I have no doubt that meeting our child in an airport or an orphanage or city hall will be just as emotionally intense as meeting a child in a delivery room is for other parents.

My belief in the interconnection of life is related to my religious faith, but it is not a sectarian belief; all the major religions of the world have a belief in oneness. I think I’ve probably always had a sense that we’re all connected, all part of God, but it was my decision to adopt that made that belief real to me.

A few years ago, I was talking to a woman I worked with about my plan to adopt. She and her husband wanted a large family and she hoped to have some birth children and some adopted children. “I feel like I love my kids already,” she told me and then asked if that made her sound crazy. “Not at all,” I told her, because I love mine already too – wherever they might come from and however we might find one another.