A writer is still on the fence about adoption, but the love of a child, and his wife’s needs, could easily push him off.

My wife has been ready to adopt for years, and I had always wanted to take the high road and insisted on having our own children naturally. But there are other issues there as well and it may actually be more practical to just go ahead and adopt. Not to go into too much information about it you need to make some hard choices about why are you having children, for any reason, and what the fact of your not having children says about the relationship at the place where you are at.

Growing up I had my own issues about children because I felt that I had never been able to enjoy my own childhood and needed to get over what my childhood was not. I had my own nieces and nephews that I would often babysit, for various reasons, and being that I was a teenager I would have rather done my own thing during that time. It’s easier to appreciate those relationships now looking back at it and I have come to understand what is really important about life.

Chances are you have a million excuses about why you do not want to adopt and why you are dragging your heels on the subject. Your wife has her own maternal needs and her biological clock and her emotions are driving her to consider adoption and you have your own perfectionist ideas about what a family should be. But what really matters is the family that you do have, not the one that you want. For whatever reason, the fact that your wife is wanting to adopt shows that there is a possibility that your family is not going to be the traditional, All-American ideal anyway; you just have to realize that and come to terms with it yourself.

Perhaps you feel that you could not love a child that isn’t your own or would not feel that you are the right person to adopt a child for that reason. But think back to everything else that you had loved, that didn’t come into your life through the traditional channels, pets you may have had, other children you had come to know that aren’t directly related to you. Perhaps you do not feel as though you have the money to go through the process and do not want the embarrassment of starting yet another thing you cannot finish; if it is meant for you to adopt that won’t be a problem.

We feel that we have to have all of the answers and that we can take care of everything and micromanage every aspect of our lives, and we do not get the chance to do that when it comes to adoption. There are a lot of variables that we do not have any control over; we do not know if the birth mother will want to come back into the child’s life 10 years from now, regardless of what rights she had signed away or that it was a closed adoption. We have to come to terms with the fact that we have to deal with externalities apart from just our wife and that child.

If you look inside of yourself and are prayerful about the situation it will come into place on its own, and you will find the right child for you. Adopting can teach us a lot about giving and being selfless and how to come to terms with someone that may or may not have had their own ideas about growing up apart from what we have instilled in the child. When you know that this is something that you are called on to do, it makes the choice to go forward with adoption that much easier …