There’s a word we use quite loosely. This word is used in trying to raise money for highways or endangered species. It is used when people learn to do something new. It is used when people take a child that is not biologically theirs as their own.

This word is Adoption and it needs to stop being used as a catch all phrase for any random thing we care about. I am not dismissing the validity of the other uses, however, they need a new word.

In my family, half of my siblings are adopted. Now I know that, but it doesn’t matter to me. The bond I have with each of my siblings is irreplaceable. My relationships with my siblings each have a level of complexity, of uniqueness. Here’s the thing, my siblings that don’t look like me, the ones that don’t need glasses, the ones that each have a different beginning than myself, they were adopted. That highway wasn’t adopted, that cheetah wasn’t adopted, that puppy of yours wasn’t adopted.

Did you spend months on piles of paperwork like my mom did? Did you research a new culture? Did you meet with birth mothers and birth fathers? Did you have a social worker come to your house every couple of months? Did you pray every night for that highway? What about that cheetah? Did you wait almost three years to bring it home? And when the adoption took place, did hold your sobbing puppy in the middle of the night when he was crying because he missed everything he ever knew? Did you have to explain to your puppy in a combination of English and the little bits of the foreign language that you couldn’t find even a Rosetta Stone for that because of horrible circumstances that he couldn’t go back to his country? Do you hug that highway every day and hope you are being a good enough sister? With that cheetah you adopted, do you go to cultural events three hours away to keep his culture strong?

As Webster’s says, adoption is “the act or process of adopting a child.” A CHILD! A human being. I am aware that highways and cheetahs need financial support. I understand that the bond between a human and a pet can be very deep. I’ve had pets before, and I still remember crying my eyes out when my parents sold our first cow. However, as someone, who for the last 18 years, has been on a journey with HUMANS who have been adopted, let me tell you, adoption is about so much more than financial support. My sister got very offended when she saw a bumper sticker promoting pet “adoption.” She has a right to be offended. Did that dog have to learn how to love a new family? Did that dog have to eat new foods or get used to foreign smells? Did that highway have to be OK with new cultural practices? Does that cheetah have to wake up every morning and hear a language he didn’t learn as a baby?

Adoption is joining multiple families together. Adoption is taking on a new culture partially as your own. Adoption is loving your new sibling or child in the easy times and the extremely difficult times. It’s about the little stuff, like learning about new hair products, or making sure the new child in your life doesn’t have to see any sort of snakes because he’s scared to death of them. It’s about the big things too, it’s about staying up till 3 in the morning so you can help your sister process why she is having a difficult time socially. It’s about learning how to love someone even in the most frustrating of times. Adoption is recognizing that one of your fellow human beings needs a family and deserves all the same crazy family stories that you do. I might be biologically an Evans, but my siblings who started life with a different last name have just as much of a right to my crazy family as I do. The stories of our uncle putting smelly cheese in my dad’s wallet are just as much mine as they are my sister’s.

I firmly believe that every member of my family was destined to be together. Each personality just makes so much sense. We work together. We are like a mosaic. There are a lot of different pieces, and each piece is cut differently and has a different beauty to it. But, when you put us all together, we’re a portrait of love and perseverance.