I just got home from welcoming four teenage girls into their adoptive home. For the first time in years they aren't going to have to worry tomorrow about how many points they have or what level they are on. They aren't going to have to have a social worker checking on them (except me, but I don't count). They aren't going to have the stigma of being foster kids any longer.
Instead they have loving parents who own a resort where they spend their summers. Their new parents are both college professors. They won't have to worry about whether they will have enough money to go to school.
Now I know that things aren't going to be perfect. The adjustment is going to be very hard, but the feeling for just this moment are profound.
It reminds me of when we were in Guatemala picking up our sons, one each trip, who were almost too old to live in their orphanage. We saw boys just a little older than them on the streets -- selling gum, shining shoes, washing windshields, hailing taxis for tourists at the airport. And we knew that they could be our boys in a few years had we not stepped in.
People ask me, "How can you do this?" I ask, "How can you NOT do this?" Tonight I don't understand how anyone would not want to change a life forever. How could anyone resist the feeling of bringing a kid from a life of abuse, neglect, poverty, drug addiction, domestic violence, generations of alcoholism, etc. and showing them another way to live?
The single best piece of advice I ever received about adoption came from a seasoned parent who said, "Never live more than one day at a time."
So for today, I am only thinking about this feeling -- the incredible joy of putting four girls, ages 17, 16, 14 and 13 into an adoptive home with parents who I know will hang on to them for dear life and love them forever.
There's no feeling like it.
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