I experienced my first moment of overt racism just months before our adoption referral. The wife of an elder at our then-church and I joyously discussed the upcoming domestic adoption of dear friends of ours, SongOfSixpence and the King (although this time the baby was Blackbird rather than ThePie). Wife-of-the-Elder patted me on the shoulder, believing she consoled me, saying, “And they got a white baby.”

Yesterday, as I dragged my now five-and-a-half-year-old Tongginator into a local coffee shop, a man surprised me from behind, asking quite bluntly, “Where is she from?” I turned and looked at him for a minute with a raised eyebrow before sharing the name of our town, then adding, “but she was born in China” so that I could avoid the dreaded “But where is she really from?”

Adoptive parents are a diverse crowd, and our children are just as diverse, so I don’t know that it’s completely fair to create a list of specific dos and don’ts and say “THIS is what love in adoption MUST look like.” But… but… some overall concepts are universally true. While we may not agree on every single detail, and I may not be right on every single point, I do believe that sharing my list – the things that God has placed on my heart – will help you think more about God’s Truth when it comes to your own call to adopt.

One of the hardest parts of adopting a child from another country is being able to meet your child and then having to say goodbye. Your brain knows that you have to do it but …

What if you couldn’t turn on the light, any light, not even a flashlight? What if you simply had no means of stretching across the span that separated you from what you desired? What if the person you wished to learn from couldn’t communicate?

Every year for Chinese New Year, our foster home celebrates the holiday by engaging in all the most common traditions – decorating the home with paper cuttings and chuen lian (door post hangings), lighting fire crackers, eating lots of oranges, making jiaozi (dumplings) and stuffing ourselves until we all want to nap. (Though the food is different, the actual cultural practice is similar to America’s Thanksgiving!)

I often forget we work at an orphanage.

“Do the Chinese celebrate Christmas in China?” Well, the answer to that is yes and no. A growing number of Chinese, especially young urbanites, celebrate some version of Christmas in China, but the central part of the holiday – the religious celebration of Christ’s birth – is not typically acknowledged nor even known because less than 5% of the 1.3 billion people living in China identify as Christian.

Two steps and a knock from my front door, and I’m in an orphanage. We don’t call it an orphanage, but a rose by any other name is still a rose. No matter what we call it, Mommy and Daddy don’t come home at night.

The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute just released the executive summary of its recent research study entitled Beyond Culture Camp: Promoting Healthy Identity Formation in Adoption. I’m so excited to see this published study because, although the results aren’t really all that new if you already listen to the voices of adult adoptees, this study will reach a much wider audience of adoptive parents. And since they are the ones raising this next generation of adoptees, they are the ones most needing to hear the results.