Family Matters

This past Sunday (Feb. 12) I was honored to be a part of the service at our new church, PUUF, on Family Matters. Here is the speach I gave:


Three years ago a woman sat on our couch holding a clip board and taking notes. She was there to determine if we would be fit parents – sane, financialy stable, and maintaining a healthy relationship. It was strange, and eerily unjust, that Mark and I would find ourselves sitting across from a social worker with our intentions under a microscope. We live in a society which demands that a family consists of a mother, a father, and their biological children, yet that same society often views children as a consequence, rather than a worth in themselves. All families are created within the arms of choice and chance, especially those created through adoption.

Our daughter was born on March 5, 2004 at 6:25 pm. This, as it happens, was exactly five minutes before my very being shattered, crashed to the ground, and resassembled itself into the person you see standing here today. We were waiting in the nursery when a nurse approached us and said our baby was on her way down the hall. We stepped into the hall to see a cart being pushed toward us. Inside that cart was a fabric burrito wearing a stripped hat. I looked at the face of that burrito and knew I that everything I believed to be true about myself and the world was insignificant. I was about to be completely consumed.

When people have lived together for a long time they begin to look like eachother, act like eachother, smell like eachother. Perhaps this is why choosing a mate confounds us so. We don’t want to smell like just any body. This blending, I think, is the stuff that gells a family. A family is not something that is created in a ceremony or with a document, nor guaranteed through genetics; it is a merging of souls and lives through love, commitment, and mutual affirmation. When a family is created through adoption, it’s a lot like a blind date with someone you will be partnered with your whole life, and you just hope you get lucky.

We met Divina’s birthmother at a Wendy’s in Bloomington, Indiana, when she was seven months pregnant. She had chosen our profile from several other profiles that were given to her by the nice ladies at the Coleman Adoption Agency. We arrived at that Wendy’s with the intention of asking her to give us her baby, a bold request, but early in our meeting it became clear that A had arrived with the intention of asking us to please consider opening our home to her baby. We had been worried about being good enough for her, and she was worried about being judged by us. After all the anxiety of what would happen at this meeting, it turned out that we each came with love, commitment, and mutal affirmation, all with the knowledge that this tiny life would bind us, forever, in a way that most pepole are not.

More than once a child has asked me “Why is she brown?” or “Is that your baby?” Not just kids, people stare. People notice that Divina could not be our biological child. Our kind of family is an unusal phenomena in our culture which insights all sorts of questions about race and the validity of transracial love. My best answer to kids is that I couldn’t make a baby, so another lady made her for us, a brown lady made her for us. She not only gave us her beautiful child, she gave us her faith.

I have often envisioned Divina’s family tree. Her name is placed on it’s trunk. Her birthmother is it’s roots and Mark and I are it’s branches. Divina, your birthmother pulled you out of the earth, and we lift you to the sky. Biology or adoption: Which is your real family? We both are.