The World's Best Parents

This is the third in a series of reflections about a book I’m reading: The Post Adoption Blues: Overcoming the Unforeseen Challenges of Adoption, by Karen J. Foli and John R. Thompson. Parts 1 and 2 were posted September 12 and 14, 2005.

In order to receive a child, adoptive parents have to convince many parties that we are going to be The World’s Best Parents. We share our intended parenting strategies with our case worker. We expound about the merits of our beautiful home, our pets, our safe vehicles, our great careers. We promise social workers, lawyers, judges, and birth parents that we will be The World’s Best Parents. Single parents, in particular, feel additional stress to be Super Parent, because they are “it.”

Because we so publicly proclaim our readiness to be great parents, when we make mistakes, we feel hesitant to reveal them. I can recall several times (okay, zillions of times) when I’ve lost my patience with my children. Immediately I chastise myself: How could you have done that? You promised never to get angry at your kids! What would their birth parents think? What if the kids decide they want to go back and live with their birth parents because you yelled at them?

When my former next-door-neighbors, parents of two adopted daughters, got divorced, I thought: How could they do that? Adoptive parents spend so much time convincing social workers that they’ll provide their child with a stable, two-parent family. Was all the talk a sham? It’s inconceivable that they would get divorced!

All adoptive parents eventually must come to grips with the fact that we aren’t as good as our home study says we are. When one of my friends adopted a daughter from China, she  discovered that her daughter had some significant attachment issues that she hadn’t been adequately prepared to cope with. My friend shamefacedly confessed, “I often ask myself, ‘What have I done? Sometimes I wish I could just take her back.’”

It takes courage to admit that parenting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (and possibly, our kids aren’t all we’d dreamed they’d be). But admitting that fact is the catalyst for change. Completing a home study does not earn us a Master of Arts in Parenting. When we stop trying to be The World’s Best Parents and start coming to terms with the fact that none of us are perfect and it’s okay to make mistakes, we’ll begin to feel more comfortable in our role as parents.

Our kids don’t belong to us, whether we birth them or adopt them, says my pastor, Earl Palmer. We just borrow them for a few years while they’re growing up – “we prepare them for the road.”