Life’s most precious and beautiful gift is life itself. I mean seriously, how beautiful is that we can give life to another human being? Most people grow up with the idea of planning to get married, get a good job, be stable and then have a baby to start a new bloodline, a new generation. As I just stated though, this is a plan for most, sadly not all. Some people either have not planned to create life or cannot keep the life they create. There’s another side though to this, some people desperately want to have a child or children but just simply are not able to produce for whatever reason. If we take both of these sides and put them next to one another, we have a beautiful answer to this equation. Adoption. Perhaps it is easy for me to write about adoption because I was adopted, but I think I can speak for many when I say how blessed I feel to have gotten adopted at 22 months from Samara Russia alongside my brother and brought to the land of the free on Christmas Eve of 1996.
I have many questions about all of it, but I never let it get too overwhelming to lose my gratitude. I won’t lie though, sometimes I ask myself late at night those questions like: Who were my blood parents? (I will never use the term "real" because my real parents are the ones who adopted me, not just two people who had me.) Why couldn’t my blood parents keep me? Which blood parent had brown eyes? Why do I say or do certain things? What are my health risks later down the road? All these questions enter my head and part of me thinks it’s cool to have a couple puzzle pieces, to have part of my life be a mystery but part of me kind of wishes I could fit the puzzle together and connect the dots of my whole identity. It can be a struggle because everybody wants to know all of who they are. I guess I’ll always be a person with a few pieces missing, but I wouldn’t trade the life I have now to receive those pieces.
My adoption only proves that God had a special plan for me way before I was born. My dad always wanted to adopt and my mom couldn’t physically have kids so here I am. It still amazes me the way it all worked out. Who knew where I would have been, who I would have been with and who I would have become? More questions to wonder but never to ponder too hard because at the end it really doesn’t matter because I am here in America. I am going to school, working part time, spending time with family and friends and right now writing this. I have everything I need, the questions can linger all my life and yeah I’ll keep wondering time to time but the most important thing I learned from being adopted is: Blood means absolutely nothing. Love and care comes from the heart, not from the bloodstream. Adoption is a beautiful gift, and I hope to one day adopt to carry on my mother and father’s choice and make adoption a tradition in my family history.