As I talk to more people about our adoption, the questions that I most commonly hear are:
1. Why Russia?
2. Why two?
3. Why a boy and a girl?
4. Why adoption?
I've already covered question 1 and 4. Today I'll tackle question #3. Why a boy and a girl?
The true answer is "because we can." We struggled with this for a while. Are we playing God by choosing the sex of our children? It goes without saying that when we had our first two biological children we had no part in determining the sex. Why on earth do we now dare to be so bold and handpick our children? (one may ask)
Well, if we think about it logically there are only two sexes to pick from. Therefore, we are not really narrowing down our selection to anything unreasonable. Secondly, Russia does not have a major shortage of boys or girls one way or another. Now we have been told that the Russian culture favors girls because it is thought that the girls are more likely to stay around and take care of there parents when they're older. (Nothing motivates more than self interest) Therefore it is slightly more difficult to adopt girls.
Nevertheless, we have opted to ask for a boy and girl and see what happens. Part of us likes the symetry that will occur in the family: 2 boys 2 girls; 2 biological 2 adopted; it seems to make sense to us. It's as if everyone will have a "friend" in any situation.
Do I sound severely warped by my comments? Am I living in a fantasy? I suppose.... Like I said before, the reason we picked a boy and girl is because we can. It was one of the questions that we filled out on our application to the adoption agency. We had to put something down. Must we always have a profound reason for what we do?
It reminds me of a line from my favorite movie "So I Married an Axe Murderer": The scene takes place at a 30th anniversary party for the parents of the main characters. The husband of 30 years stands up to give a toast to his wife and says,
"I'm glad I married you May, because..... uh.... it could've been worse?"
Ok, I'm not really sure that has anything to do with what I was talking about - but it still makes me laugh.
For the record, if we get a phone call saying that they have 2 girls waiting for us, we probablly won't hesitate for one minute. We'll take 'em.
2 comments:
Any thoughts about whether you will request (or wait) for a sibling set? We just met with our agency director and we are considering what is most important to us: siblings, age or sex. We are still mulling this over. But I know what you are saying, it's weird to request something when in the end we'll be open to just about any children who are presented to us.
Tricia,
We really want 2 children under the age of 24 months. This is mostly so we don't mess up the birth order of our children.
Because of this, it will be much more difficult to get a sibling set. (As it takes 9 months justation.... you probablly already know how this works) But you get my point. It would be a unique event to have 2 children in less than a year and then upon the birth of the second child, put them up for adoption.
Nevertheless, we are very open to sibling sets. Our agency does allow for adopting 2 unrelated children, so we'll get what we get.
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