Three Things I’ve Learned as an Adoptive Father

My father in-law’s favorite holiday is Fathers’ Day. He loves the attention, the attention, and the gifts. I’ve been able to join in on the attention and gifts for the past couple of years, and, I have to admit, he’s right. Celebrating the wonderful relationship between me and my daughters is a highlight of the whole year. Over the past couple of years, in addition to the celebrations, I have also learned a lot.

Being a father is the most wonderful thing in life.

I’m luckier than most fathers in that I’ve been able to spend most of the girls’ first 2 years of life at home with them. I just graduated from medical school, and the fourth year of medical school is mostly filled with electives and interviews for residency. This means I got a lot of downtime at home with my girls. I’m very proud of how many diapers I’ve changed, and how fast I am at it. We’ve gone to the zoo enough times that I’m on a first name basis with the polar bears, we’ve gone to almost all of the free museum days, and I have Swaddle-Swagger™.

All this time together means that I know these two girls as well as anyone. I know when her cry is for a water bottle, or it’s because Mr. Noodle is creeping her out. I know the sweet spot for nap time and I will guard it with my life, because I’ve seen the other side and it’s not pretty. And I DO know what brown bear, brown bear sees.

And it’s all amazing. Watching these girls develop into kind, funny, smart toddlers is something I will always appreciate being able to witness first-hand.

Going through the adoption process, and becoming a transracial family, is challenging.

First, the adoption process is so broken. In Hannah and my experience, every day it felt like we were deciding “how worth it” the ends justified the means. We were definitely warned that there were tough things about the adoption process, but I’m not sure we prepared ourselves enough for this. Without wading through too many of the details, issues related to how the adoption agency handles money, how they ensure post-care placement for the birth-mother, how they handle birth-father rights, all were tough facets to swallow. For each of these issues, Hannah and I struggled, and honestly probably did a poor job, trying to be principled people in ensuring these areas were done well. This is a big reason why I’m so proud of the Kindred + Co. community that is committed to educating for ethical adoption practices and lifting all voices of the adoption triad. Especially as a budding psychiatrist, I’m so proud of my wife who recently joined the board of On Your Feet Foundation, an organization who assists birth mothers, giving them tools they need to get “back on their feet” after placement.

Second, becoming a transracial family has been tough, at times. When I’m out with the girls at the zoo or in a predominantly white neighborhood, especially if it’s just me with the girls, I find myself hypervigilant of lingering looks from passers-by. When I notice someone not-so-subtly-drop-their-jaw when they see us, I try to remind myself of privilege. I try to remember that I am a white (or at least I believe that I am white) well-educated, cis-het male, with loads of privilege. I try to remember unconscious bias, and we all have immediate thought patterns that can reveal our biases. If you haven’t learned much about unconscious bias, I highly recommend you check this out, and take a couple of tests they provide. This concept, hearing from the scientists, and taking a few tests has really revealed to me how much work I have to do on my own biases.

I don’t actually have much control.

No matter if it’s the chaotic adoption process, my patient’s decision not to take the medications I recommended, or what’s on the TV most Monday nights (Hannah + Chris Harrison 4eva), I don’t have as much control as I would like to think.

When I look back at our adoption story, I think of how I tried desperately to control it all. We made a plan. We completed our home study. We registered for the classes. We made a budget. We dreamt of what our child… wait, what? twins?… would look like. We knew how this was all going to work out. But then things got a little hectic.

We were matched with twins only 10 days before their birth, we were WAY over budget, and I had to take a big med school test right before their birth. Suddenly, all of the parts I tried to control were being thrown into the air.

Long story short, I took my big med school test on Friday, April 15th, flew to meet our girls’ birth mother on Saturday, and the girls were born on Monday (The first morning of my only time off that year from school). We stayed in the NICU for two weeks and I returned to school to start my third year without missing a day. Disrupted? Yes. In the Plan? No. Did it work out? Yes.

And here is the lesson I learned. In the moment of what feels like chaos, it is natural to feel like I have no control of the situation. But time and time again, it is in the days, weeks, months afterward that I see how things were working out better than I could have imagined all along, and my control was actually getting in the way!

There is a story in the book of Exodus in the Old Testament of Moses wanting to see God on Mount Sinai. In the story, God says no one can see God’s face and live, so God allows Moses to see God’s back as God passes by. It has been said, by much smarter people than me, that this story is less about the actual events on the mountaintop, but instead a lesson on how difficult it is to see how God is working in one’s lives while it is happening. But it is easier to see where God has been. There’s a lot to unpack there, but for me, I think it has given me license to accept a little more chaos into Hannah’s and my life. In the moment it can be scary and confusing, but how often have I looked back and seen the impossible became true despite all my worries?

This Fathers’ Day, I’d like to acknowledge that this day can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For some of us, our relationships with their father is strained, our fathers are gone, fatherhood is something we want more than anything, or we are birth fathers whose child was placed for adoption. No matter how we are coming to this Father’s Day, I hope the words in the post encourage you embrace how great Fatherhood can be, examine your own unconscious bias, and let go of a little control.

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