She’s not even 21 days old. She’s one of the most beautiful babies I’ve ever seen. Fine porcelain features, flawless skin, and full lips. She’s tiny, and her little fingers look so fragile that I’m almost afraid to touch her. When I sit beside her crib watching her sleep, I find myself holding my breath. I don’t know why. I think its maybe because I want time to stand still for her, and somewhere inside of me, I hope that if I remain perfectly still, time will freeze.

I want time to freeze because right now she doesn’t know she is an orphan.

Maybe she does. Maybe she realizes that the voices she heard while in the womb for 9 months are no longer around her. Maybe when she is being held, she can feel the difference in cadence of the nanny’s chest gently rising and falling as she breathes… knowing it isn’t the same as the one she felt before birth.

But I like to imagine that right now, as she sleeps, she doesn’t know anything that has happened to her yet. She doesn’t know that sometime shortly after birth, she was abandoned because of spina bifida. She doesn’t know that she traveled a long distance to come to our foster home for surgery. She doesn’t know that those voices she heard for the months leading up to her birth will now be silent forever. I want to pretend that she knows none of this yet and that time will freeze so that she never has to know.

So that she remains unbroken.

Because quickly she will grow into a 5-year-old girl. A 5-year-old who sat in my friend’s lap while she watched another child meeting her mom and dad for the first time. As everyone’s attention was focused on the formation of a new family, this little 5-year-old felt her own void deep in her soul. She told my friend that she can count to 10 in both English and Chinese, and reminded her that she knew all of her colors. With doubting eyes, she asked if she was pretty enough for a family.

And even if she is adopted, at some point in her journey she’ll be like another 5-year-old girl I know. Abandoned at 9 months and adopted at age 3, she cried herself to sleep the other night, asking to go back to China where her “real” mommy and daddy must be looking for her. She wanted to know why she was “taken away from them,” and shared with her mom that she knew they missed her and loved her and wanted her to come home. To consider the fact that she was intentionally abandoned is too painful; it is easier to imagine that there’s an unseen villain in the story.

A close friend of ours who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent says that adoption is “a redemptive response to a tragedy.” I don’t think many adoptive parents want to go there mentally. They want to imagine that the child experiences adoption with the same joy, satisfaction, and excitement as they do as parents. While I know that each and every child wants a mother and a father, getting a new set of parents doesn’t replace the void left by the absence of the biological parents.

Working with orphans on a daily basis is helping me to understand the depth of grief that comes from being abandoned. It isn’t something that adoptive parents can fix, and confronting that reality has changed the way I think about adoption.  There was a time when I thought everyone should adopt. There is such a need, and it seemed obvious to me that if we all stepped forward and did our part, we could solve the problem. But, now I’m a bit more cautious. I know there isn’t anything worse than growing up an orphan, but it isn’t ideal to grow up as an adopted child in a family that doesn’t take your grief and loss seriously; a family who imagines your story started the day they signed the adoption papers and doesn’t give you room to grieve.

Adoption isn’t for the faint of heart. Responding to a tragedy requires one to enter into that tragedy, and that means opening your heart to a world of hurt.  But the beautiful thing about adoption is that it is redemption – it turns the broken into the beautiful, on the most profound level imaginable.

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Carrie writes about her life in China where she works at a foster home for orphans with special needs at her blog, Signs of Hope.