What Are Your Biggest Fears About Adoption?

I'm linking up today with Adoption Magazine (Adoption Magazine), and this week's adoption-related question:  What are Your biggest Fears About Adoption?

I thought I'd answer this question in a way that covers three different time spans.


My fears about adoption before we adopted:

• Whether or not we would ever receive a referral, particularly in the days after our agency's bankruptcy.
• Not knowing what kinds of personalities the kids would bring to our family and whether we would gel together as a family (who knew they'd be just who we needed!)
• Not knowing what kinds of needs they would have (fears related also to the effects of the extreme malnutrition they suffered).
• Not knowing how much influence we would be able to have on our kids, given that after we received our referral we knew we would be bringing older children into our home...and that they would come with fully developed personalities and opinions and tendencies.
• Wondering how I would handle their questions about adoption, race, or their birth father.
• Not knowing whether or not I would like Ethiopia and how we would handle the toilet situation there!
• The kids' lack of English-speaking abilities...how were we ever going to communicate with children who knew no English whatsoever?
• Wondering whether they would love me.
• Parasites and head funguses and the many doctor's appointments that were to come.
• Wondering if we would be able to contact their birth family and, if so, what would that look like?

My fears about adoption in the early days after bringing our children home:

• That I was in waaaay over my head...what on earth had I been thinking, thinking that I could do this?
• That the grief coming out of Seth would never end.
• That I hadn't done enough prep for the hard stuff prior to the kids coming home.
• Never again having time to read fiction.
• That I was sinking into a depression.
• Never having a social life again, or a private life; I longed for a night out but couldn't in those early months home.

My fears these days:

• Anonymous and baseless calls to social workers.
• Making the right choices about how to h/school my three very different children.
• Not modelling well enough what it means to live a godly life that reflects the grace that God has poured into my life.
• Not being enough (whether me or the support people we work with) to meet the emotional/spiritual/psychological/educational needs of my three unique kids.
• Bouts of insomnia - because during those times, everything just becomes a wee bit harder.
• Most of all I fear that, despite all of our very best efforts, nothing we do will be enough to enable my children (all three of them) to cope with the losses they have experienced in life.