Part One: Kai

We chose to adopt from China because of the program’s reputation for stability and clear timeline (that timeline began changing rapidly after we made this choice). We were told the program would take roughly a year from beginning to end. I think we also liked the idea of a child coming to us through a sort of random assignment – as that’s the way it works in the non-special needs program. We could express some choice preferences as to gender and relative age and then a baby would be selected for us. The idea of actually picking a child from a list seemed somewhat bizarre to me, but then this is what we ended up doing in both adoptions.

There is a popular saying in the Chinese adoption community that goes like this: "An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break.” This is attributed to being “an ancient Chinese belief. My understanding is that the concept of people being destined in this way, joined by this invisible red thread, actually is traditionally related to the marriage of a man and woman to one another, and really has nothing to do with children, or adoption. Still, it is a beautiful notion and I can understand why adoptive parents like it so much. Some people feel it is overly sentimental and glosses over a lot of the real challenges involved in adoption, and while this may be true, I think most people find they fall so easily in love with their adopted children, that it does seem magical.

Again, our children did not come to us through random assignment, we chose them, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it. There was a list of children we were looking at. It’s easy to compare the process to shopping, and I know that some parents to scour many many lists looking for something very specific in a child. This is not what our experience was like. We had an agency we were working with already, and at first we were looking at their Waiting Children lists out of curiosity. And then we saw Kai. The name the agency labeled him with was “Hunter”. I can remember a few of the other children on that list, as we know their families now through online connections, but I don’t remember really considering any of them seriously for our family. It was like love at first sight. We “knew” he was our child. Tina likes to say he chose us, and while that’s not the way it truly happened, it did kind of seem that way. And once we committed to him we felt as strongly about that commitment as we did with our two biological children.