Disqualified

Forget the dust bunnies your social worker might see during a home visit. You might be disqualified for adoption if you…

1. Enjoy sleep. Chances are high that your child’s history (even if he was adopted at birth) or elevated anxiety levels will disrupt his sleep patterns. Age doesn’t matter. We have a 12-year-old who frequently sleep walks and has night terrors. We get less sleep now than when we had infants and toddlers.
2. Are an introvert. Abandonment issues = hypervigilance = high need = constant chatter and always by your side. Everything is urgent and requires your undivided attention. I’m an extrovert, and my dream vacation is now a retreat in silence and solitude. Not joking. I went on one this weekend and almost didn’t come back.
3. Like control (or even the illusion of control). The hottest commodity for kids from hard places (and all adopted kids qualify) is control. You have to be willing to give over as much control as possible in order to create felt safety and love. That means that most of your presuppositions about parenting and what’s should or shouldn’t be acceptable need to go out the window with your expectations about how kids that age should act.
4. You expect kids to act their age. The only way to get out of raising these kids intact is to be able to see them as emotional infants and toddlers. You will have teenagers retaliate like 2-year-olds, physically full grown kids throw all-out-roll-on-the-ground tantrums, and enough lying/cheating/stealing to make most inmates look innocent.
5. Have a gag reflex. The one thing your kid can control, that you can’t, is bodily functions. In extreme situations (or not so extreme), kids will use their bodily functions as their mechanism of control. Think feces as art work, self-induced vomiting, and adolescents who still have frequent accidents.
6. Have bio kids. Just having bio kids doesn’t necessarily disqualify you, but caring about them might. Existing kids in the house will be targets and scapegoats and will also qualify as kids from hard places once they’ve lived with kids from hard places…it’s that traumatizing. Don’t underestimate how hard it is to watch your kids go through this.
7. Prefer conservative, socially acceptable conversations. Sex, trauma, meanness, monsters, and other horrific topics are common topics of conversation in our house. We have no control over when they pop up, and they often happen in front of our 6-year-old. There’s nothing like having your first grader ask you if you sex in the shower last night or having a family conversation about where everybody’s scars came from.
8. Your love language is verbal affirmation. Kids from hard places are experts at tearing you apart with their words. This is hard for most people but devastating for folks who rely on words to feel loved. Be prepared to hear that you should take parenting lessons from their dead bio mom, they pray every night for a new family, you are weak for calling a spouse for help, and orphanage living is preferable to the hell house they think you create for them. Clearly you adopted them because you needed slave dogs.

However, take heart! These things disqualify pretty much everyone. Fortunately, the God of the universe is out to transform adoptive families so we may be qualified by His Grace. But be forewarned, transformation feels like being purified through a fire.

If you have adopted, what has disqualified you?