“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”
Ephesians 1:3-5
Seattle, Washington. December, 2002. The sky is gray over Seattle Pacific University, the ground is damp but not wet and the rain-cleansed air is growing chilled as winter grips it. Students can be seen crossing campus this way and that, hurrying down concrete lanes that cut through the glistening lawns, hoping to get off campus and on to a three-week vacation as quickly as possible. All except for one very excited young man, completely oblivious to the rest of the world, bounding through the soggy piles of fallen leaves strewn over the bricks of the Tiffany Loop.
A few of his peers stop to watch his exuberant dance for a moment, but only long enough to smile, shake their heads, and go on emptying their mail boxes. There’s a letter in his outstretched hand, but the onlookers don’t know what it says. And even if they did know what it told him, chances are they still wouldn’t be able to comprehend everything that it means to the skinny, blonde freshman.
Below an array of governmental technicalities and social service pleasantries, it reads:
Jeannine Hughes
(485) 555-7491
For the first time in eighteen years, this young man knows something about his birth mother.
In 1984 Jeannine Hughes offered up her son Nathan for adoption through a private Michigan-based adoption agency called Catholic Social Services. She shuffled through files of potential families who matched her criteria and who were waiting to become parents by adoption, thereby coming across Ken and Sherri Ellis, a local middle-class, Christian couple who for years had been longing to start a family but found themselves unable to do so by natural means. They were what Jeannine was looking for. Only two short weeks after his birth in late August, the newborn was given a new family, a new home, and a new name.
Sitting and talking with me in a local coffee shop, light pouring through the six foot windows that span the side of the building behind him, the now twenty-two-year-old Nate explains—while intermittently sipping his latte—that his adoption was an ideal situation. “Before the age of six or seven months,” he says, eyes focused squarely on mine as he gets to educate me about adoption, “most children are still able to form the necessary bonds with their adopted mother and father that they would otherwise have developed with their birth parents,” which is exactly what took place for him.
Growing up as middle-class as a person can get—white picket fence included—Nate never questioned that Ken and Sherri Ellis were “really” his father and mother. And they never hid from him that he had been adopted. Rather, they regularly reminded him of this fact, telling their young son at every opportunity that their family was different.
“They would always tell me,” he conveys without falter, “‘other parents are stuck with whatever children they happen to get. But we got to choose our kids, and we chose you.”
From the unhesitant, unrestrained manner in which he tells me this, it’s clear that their message is to this day chiseled deeply into the man sitting before me. He understands.
Urbana, Illinois. December twenty-ninth, 2000. Some forty-thousand college students and high school seniors from around the United States and the globe collect like rainwater moving across the University of Illinois campus toward the Assembly Hall—the gigantic domed home of Fighting Illini athletics that the visiting students have affectionately deemed “the mother ship” for its alien design—for what is essentially a morning worship service on day two of the Urbana missions conference.
Amidst the shuffling of a few hundred late-coming feet and the rustle of young men and women settling into every seat in the arena—all of which begins to sound surprisingly like a thunderstorm pelting rain upon the dome above us—the worship band steps aside and Ken Fong—appearing no larger than an ant from my seat in the nosebleeds—ascends to the podium way down at the center of the pastel-lit stage in the middle of the floor.
He dives right into the biblical text for the day, focusing in on a handful of verses from Ephesians 1.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the Chinese-American pastor recites from his massive leather-bound bible laying open on the podium, “who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.” He stops and eyes it over for himself again, pushing his dark-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose before continuing.
He begins to walk back and forth from one side of the podium to the other, telling the story of his adopted niece’s induction into their family and how though she was not blessed with the life of a millionaire, she was blessed with love. Stopping in his tracks and stretching out his hands as though offering his thought to the crowd like a gift, he declares to the massive congregation, “The way that we’ve been blessed with every spiritual blessing is that God chose to love us, he chose to pursue us, he chose to wrap us into his family, and to make us blameless, even though we are not.” The man’s temper is bright and weighty.
He continues on, riveting my gaze to his round, bespectacled, perpetually grinning face. Toward the end of his lecture, after a profound thirty-minute discussion on being (as he puts it) “pre-loved” by God and adopted, debts and all, into the Lord’s family, the pastor does something completely unexpected. His wife and two-year-old adopted daughter come up to join him on stage.
“Hi Dah-dee!” the little girl squeals from her mothers arms, a long black ponytail flowing with each movement of her head as her mother walks across the stage.
The small Chinese-American girl is passed from maternal cradling to paternal embrace before eighty-thousand young eyes, and Fong begins to speak to her, following her eyes with his wherever they wander.
“Janessa,” he says to her, “there’s something we want you to know. You are a pre-loved child; we chose you. Long before you even existed, we loved you, we searched for you, we sacrificed for you. And now that you’re here, we’ve given you our name, and you’re now forever a part of our family. We love you unconditionally, and all you have to do is give us occasional kisses. You bring us unspeakable joy. We love you because God first loved us. And you are an inspiration to all these big people out here. God bless you for being in our life.”
Being a father now and holding his “pre-loved” daughter close to his chest, this man understands.
Seattle, Washington. February, 2007. Ted Dietz—a man I’ve just met, and in his own home—looks at me with eyes both serious and joyful and says, “The first time I saw their picture, I knew they were my kids.”
Over a cup of decaffeinated coffee and a plate of cookies sitting on top of a half-finished Superman puzzle littering the top of their round living room coffee table, Ted and his wife Sarah tell me their own story of adoption.
Over two years prior, in October of 2004, after two failed attempts at a long-awaited adoption, Ted and Sarah received a call from Pam, the new social worker recently assigned to their case. With an awkward air that comes with newness to a task, she told them that the state had found what they were looking for. She gave them an address at which to meet her early the next morning to discuss the next steps toward the possibility of an actual adoption.
The address took them to a rundown grocery store parking lot in Spokane, some thirty miles away from their home in Seattle, where Pam stood ready to get right down to business, pulling out photos, information, stories: the works.
“So,” Pam said to the couple still looking over the photo, grins inching further across their faces, “we’ll have you meet the kids, and then in a month you can take them on home.”
The young couple’s faces went blank, eyes widened and locked on the social worker, more than a little shocked at the brevity of the arrangement.
Later that night, though, after returning home and catching their breath a little, they began to feel a sense of peace fall over them as they chose to take the offer. They spent five weekends in the foster house the kids were living in, changing diapers, waking up at two in the morning to ward off nightmares, and generally practicing for all the foreign tasks of parenthood. After the “trial period” they took the two home and began their life as the parents of Matthew and Carrie Dietz.
The four of them are the Dietz family, and they will be the first to tell you that there is nothing ordinary about their family: two white parents raising a pair of black siblings, who were already pre-school and toddler-aged at the point of adoption.
Before I’d even arrived at the front door of their little mint green, one-story house, Sarah pulled Matthew and Carrie together—so she tells me—to have a chat about the man coming to visit. She looked the two of them in their big, dark eyes and made certain they understood that the man who was coming to visit would not be taking them away from her, something she has to tell them rather frequently.
When family friends—primarily couples—come to the house, the kids often try to claim the guests’ attention by charismatic force, energetically talking and crawling around on the guests like affectionate kittens. Ted explains, “Because they had been moved from house to house so many times, they’re afraid it’s going to happen again, so they’re picking who they want to go with. We call it ‘mommy-shopping.’ They’re just trying to gain some kind of control over the situation.”
I learn quickly that the road hazards of later-aged adoption are plentiful and taxing. The last two-and-a-half years have been a constant struggle for the Dietzes. They’ve faced everything from constant physical sickness to a long streak of four-year-old chauvinism against Sarah, who Matthew for some time presumed had stolen him from his previous home.
“And the troubles weren’t just during the day,” Ted mentions, outstretching his arm, “we couldn’t even get sleep at night because Carrie has these horrible nightmares. She’ll just wake up screaming. Once she had nightmares for five nights straight.”
“They’re more like night terrors,” Sarah interjects, looking almost vacant for a second.
Giving me no more than an overview of the short time they’ve had with Matthew and Carrie, they tell more stories of the difficulties of raising children who have never known instruction, never known correction, never known a sacrificial and persistent compassion than anyone without their experience could know what to do with.
At times, Ted’s mouth closes and he just stares at the coffee table, searching: for thoughts, words? Sarah’s eyes flash back to the quiet living room from her own distant reflection and she adds to her husband’s tales, the sound of two kids at play downstairs echoing through the background.
The alternating liquid shimmer in Ted’s eye and immobility of Sarah’s face as they pass the duty of storytelling back and forth catch my attention more than their words; their hearts crack and burn before a total stranger. And though the hardships of redeeming the lives of their children has proven even to be straining on their marriage, their partnership is unquestionable.
The sound of child voices and little feet gets louder, chattering and thumping up the stairs from the basement play room. All adult eyes turn to the kitchen.
Matthew emerges from behind the jamb first, an expression of increasing boredom laid across his round, dark brown cheeks. He walks straight to his mother—seated closest to the kitchen. Trailing behind, Carrie’s smaller, rounder frame emerges from the kitchen as well, making a sort of back-and-forth, zig-zagged track as opposed to her brother’s bullet-line to Sarah. The two of them are definitely siblings. Though clearly different personalities, they’ve got the same pudgy-cheeked faces, the same dark-as-night skin-tone, the same round heads, and thin, straight smiles.
While talking to their mother, they notice Ted in the next chair down (they haven’t seen him since he’d gotten home from work), and before I can chart their movement, both Matthew and Carrie launch across the room and leap onto their father, pile-driving him into his chair. A symphony of child and adult laughter fills the room as the kids crawl over Ted like ants on a doughnut.
After a few minutes of parent-wrestling, Matthew and Carrie are sent off from the warmly lit room for another round of the Curious George movie downstairs while the adults continue talking. As they turn the corner down the stairwell, the mood shifts again.
Elbows on his knees and leaning forward in thought, Ted shakes his head and continues: “It’s too hard to watch your son acting like nothing more than a creature trying to survive.” He sighs, “You ask yourself, ‘is he ever going to break free of this?’”
Sarah shifts in her chair, trying to find comfort.
“But then,” Ted’s eyes flicker, “one day, he starts to act like a little boy.” A bright smile, deeper than his vacant gaze, arcs across the man’s black-bearded face. The pride beaming from his whitish face steals my attention for a moment and I don’t hear what he’s saying.
“Things are getting better between him and Sarah,” he continues. “Matthew likes telling her the history of how she came to get them and bring them to the little green house—“
“For some reason,” Sarah interrupts, inaudible laughter brimming behind her smile, “he just loves this house—he’s always talking about the ‘little green house.’ And he’s always telling me how we ‘chose Matthew, and Carrie, and Simon’—Simon’s the cat, and for whatever reason he gets grouped in there, too.”
“He’s a part of the family,” Ted chuckles—talking about Simon. He looks to the floor for a second and then back up at me, “And they recognize us now as protecting all three of them.”
The conversation continues on a while longer, two cookies still sitting on the plate resting on pieces of Superman’s face on the coffee table. Much to the amusement of all, the Dietzes have now dubbed my interview with them a therapy session, as useful for them as it is for me.
“We don’t know what God has in store for us,” Ted says—the conversation clearly coming to a natural close, “but we’re open. We have no idea what our kids will turn out to be. All we want is that they love God and love people. But really, they could turn out terrible; we don’t know. And that’s okay, God is still good.”
As my mind reels from the shock of the trusting composure drawn across Ted’s face, he goes one comment further, “I tell Matthew all the time: ‘I chose you. Your mother and I, we chose you.’ Hopefully, later in life he can connect that with God. We keep doing what God has given us to do in raising them, and I can only pray that they receive eyes of faith and hope to respond.”
Their understanding is startling.
One of the trademarks of adopted children is an acute desire to discover their origins, their lineage, and to find the birth mother that offered them up. The mystery surrounding where an adopted child comes from almost always becomes his central struggle for identity.
After receiving his mother’s information that gray December day at SPU and dancing about the Tiffany Loop, Nate traveled back for Christmas to his home state of Michigan, where he arranged to meet his birth mother at a local soup and sandwich shop on December twenty-seventh, at one in the afternoon.
“I got there thirty minutes early,” he tells me over the din of the other customers in the coffee shop. “That was the worst mistake I could have made. All I knew was that she was medium height, medium weight, she had short blonde hair, and was middle-aged. I watched every woman who came into the front doors, wondering ‘is that her?’ It was the longest thirty minutes of my life.”
Eventually, she did come in through those doors, and he immediately knew who she was. She was indeed blonde, medium-sized, and had his face—or perhaps he had hers. She looked exactly like him, only forty-one years old and female, and she saw the same likeness in him.
They walked right up to each other, hugged, and walking to a table, felt inclined to tell all their nearby lunch-goers that they were mother and son who had just found each other after eighteen years. It played out like a movie cliché.
Through the course of their lunch dialogue, he got a glimpse of who his birth mother was, but not much else. They finished up their sandwiches, exchanged email addresses, and went their ways, keeping in correspondence for another year.
In 2003, they met under the same conditions: same place, same date, even the same hour. But this time, he came equipped with his question: the question.
Nate put his sandwich down and lost himself for a second. He looked up from his plate to his birth mother across the table—only the second time he had seen her—and simply asked, “So what happened nineteen years ago?”
She paused. “I made a big mistake…”
“I understand,” he says, coffee mug in hand, not taking his crisp blue eyes from mine. “I had friends in high school who had unwanted pregnancies. Don’t get me wrong, it makes me sad, it really does. But it affects others more than it hurts me to know I was a mistake. Answers are a heck of a lot better than not knowing. People who weren’t adopted just can’t understand.”
Since hearing at the sandwich shop that Jeannine’s pregnancy with him had been an accident—that if not for the persuasion of her mother she would have aborted him, and that she had always hoped he would never find her—he hasn’t spoken with her again. Not for the sake of bitterness, but because he had had his questions answered, and that was all he needed. He never doubted who his family was; they were the ones who had chosen him. Now he understands it all the more.
In my own growing understanding of adoption, I’ve considered how I plan to build my own family. How many children should I have? Only adopted kids? Should I have natural children too? Etc. It seems that there is no standard attitude about having a mixed adopted/natural family.
Before taking Matthew and Carrie into their home, the Dietzes had tried for a year to get pregnant, only to have their efforts end in miscarriage. So, I asked Ted and Sarah as I sat, sunk into their pale couch, “do you still want natural kids?”
They looked at each other. “A year ago,” Ted answered, given unspoken confirmation by his wife, “we would have said no; things here were just too much. But, yeah, now that things are better, we’d like to have natural children as well, if we can.”
Of Nate I asked the opposite question. “So, given your story, do you and your wife plan to adopt as well?”
His face stayed firm, un-contorted by internal debate, “My wife and I have talked about this very thing. I don’t hold anything against adoption—obviously—but I want to have my own birth children, and mixed families are just too hard on kids. People want to make it work, but as much as parents of mixed adopted/non-adopted kids try, the fact is that the adopted child is an outsider. Just loving a kid doesn’t make him entirely ‘his mother’s son.’”
People who aren’t adopted just can’t understand.
Honestly, we don’t understand. Not fully.
We can’t fathom what it’s like to specifically selected. We don’t know what it is to grow up completely unaware of who we are and how we got to where we are. We will never grasp how it feels to weep over and grow to adore a child we haven’t yet found and named our own. We don’t comprehend the victory of seeing a child redeemed from the shadows of abandonment. We who haven’t been down the road of adoption cannot possibly come to a complete understanding all that adopting or being adopted into a family that has nothing to bind it but selfless love entails, the wonder or the horror. In fact, even between the different adoption stories, children will never really comprehend the experiences of their parents, or parents their children’s, or children those of other children. It’s all really too much for us to fully understand.
But then, like most things, human adoption is a shadow of something bigger.
“In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will— to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One he loves.”
If adoption is something weighty, something mysteriously profound that those of us who aren’t involved in it will never really understand its immensity, God’s adoption of His people is infinitely more so. I’ve always wanted to fully grasp the mystery of the Father taking on illegitimate children by the blood of His one true Son. But perhaps He uses the metaphor of adoption because it is so mysterious, because it’s something you have to live. We may never understand, but God may just want us to experience.
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