I Want to Adopt.

Yes, I'm talking about a child.

Not today, or next year, or the year after that, but sometime in the future. Let me give you the story:

I'm at work helping a student make up some missing assignments. The student is talking to me and telling me about her home life. Like most of the kids I teach, her home life is pretty sad.

and then she tells me she doesn't own a book.

Rivers of tears (literally, rivers) ran down my face as I drove home.

This may seem stupid, but books have been my bff for years. My parents read to me all the time. Has anyone read to her besides her teachers? Broke my heart.

Now, my sister has five kids, and I love them dearly, and I'm glad she has them. I give you the thumbs up if you want biological children, but for me and my life, I feel like adoption might be the way. I watch sad little kids come in and out of my classroom, and I can't justify having a child when there are so many kids out there who need love and a home.


I've really only started thinking about this in the past week, and I don't know if I would have thought about it if I wasn't teaching. Kids today have so much sadness in their lives. Even the ones we consider "good kids" are going through tough times. Their parents are getting divorced, their parent has died and they're living with grandma, their parent is in jail and they're being raised by their older sibling, or worse, they're raising themselves.

I get so angry at people who don't take parenthood seriously. Like, for example, the poor toddler who had been taken away from his mother. He weighed 8 pounds at 1 year. 8 pounds. Pitiful. (How can you choose not to feed your child? Seriously. People would bend over backwards to help you feed a baby.) What happens? The state removes the poor thing from the house, puts him in foster care, he gains weight, and then they put him back with his biological mother. In the meantime, she hasn't learned her lesson, and now the poor young baby was found dead in a dumpster. What is wrong with people? If you cannot commit to caring for a precious little soul, then you need to hand him over to the state.

At the risk of sounding like my grandmother, kids today don't have any morals. They're raised by electronic devices. They don't know how to have a face to face conversation with anyone.

Can I adopt a whole generation of sad little kids? No. But I look at adoption the same way I look at teaching: if I can save one. If I can just save one, then it will all be worth it because that one will go into the world with his/her soul burning bright.

I brought up adoption with my husband while we were walking at the park the other day. We didn't get to talk about it in depth because the park was packed, and I felt this was more of a private conversation. I did tell him some of my reasons, and he was very supportive. He agreed with me wholeheartedly. I know adopting in the states can be very time consuming and difficult, but I'm hoping everything will work out if I start doing my research now.