Designing Our Baby: The Adoption Questionnaire
When you’re thinking of having kids it’s natural to think about what your baby will look like. Will she have dad’s eyes and mom’s smile? Will he be dark haired or fair? It’s easy to combine all sorts of family traits, putting together the perfect child, but it’s all a just a mental picture until you see your child for the first time.
Before we started researching domestic infant adoption, I had no idea that part of this process would include the chance to design what we wanted our baby to be like.
It’s called the Adoption Questionnaire and it’s several sheets of paper adoptive parents fill out for their agency. These simple pages carry some pretty significant consequences.
On our form, there are boxes to tick for different races, indicating what ethnicity we wanted our child to be (or not). African American, Asian, Caucasian/Indian mix, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander -- there they were, singled out and in every combination imaginable. As we looked across the sheet, images of baby faces in every color flashed in my mind along with pictures of toddlers with braids or afros, kids of all shapes and sizes.
It was up to us to choose which we wanted. (For the record, it was a quick decision for us to check the “open to all races/ethnicities” box.)
It sounds a little crazy, but it makes sense when you think about it: Adoption agencies want to match adoptive parents with the babies they’re looking for, plain and simple. Agencies use these checklists to gauge the type of child who would be the best fit with our family.
But the questionnaire doesn’t stop at color; there are even more aspects of the “design” process: We get to choose our comfort level not only for the baby, but with the birth parents, as well.
We had to choose… Would it be okay if the birth mom was schizophrenic? What if she had an STD? What if she was a smoker (How much?) or used drugs (Which ones?) or had a learning disability? What if they didn’t know the father? What if the child was the result of rape? What if… what if... what if?
These are questions you don’t have to consider if you have a biological child. You know then what you’re bringing to the table; it’s a controlled experiment, one in which the outcome is more or less as expected.
You see, as much as we try to plan our lives and line everything up (get married, get promoted, buy a house, decorate, have 2.5 kids, a golden retriever and a 401k), we are ultimately not in control. Even if we’re not worried about what our children look like or who their biological parents are, we still don’t have control over what our kids will become, whether or not they’re born with an unplanned defect or difference, or how their personality will influence their future. No matter how much we try to plan things, we don’t control things like the loss of a job that affects family finances or the cancer that spins life out of control. We simply can’t predict the curveballs that will come our way.
We’ve come to realize in the infertility and adoption process that no matter how detailed a checklist we fill out, we are not anywhere close to being the ones in control.
We thank God that the future is not in our hands, but His. We have to give up the illusion of control and just roll with the next wave to come, secure in the fact that the future isn’t up to us, no matter how detailed our plan might be.
