Blessings and disguise

During the service, I was reminded of how blessed I am. The congregation was invited to give testimony, and they spoke of illness and trauma. It was not hard to see myself as having so many advantages in life. These were people who appeared to be old and poor.

I can call to mind my blessings easily: a devoted husband, a precious child entrusted to me by an amazing woman, first-class education, a large house, financial security, relative health, a successful career. This is one of the key lessons from the difficult adoption process. When things were bleakest, I learned to count my blessings, to appreciate what I have in life.

Even before that, speaking with expectant mothers considering adoption sparked deep thoughts about the advantages I had in life. They were struggling with so little to get through so much. Simple things that I took for granted - like a telephone - were challenges for them. They had multiple young children, mental illnesses, drug addictions, prison sentences. And on top of it all, the unplanned pregnancies.

Before I met any of them, I had thought that women chose adoption because one thing in their lives wasn't conducive to parenting. Like the man wasn't involved or they were still in college. I began to understand that these women were considering adoption because they had not one thing in their lives that they could count on. Their families were abusive or absent. They had no jobs, no health insurance, and no funds. They had no partner and no friends to rely on. They had no car or telephone.

I tried to see my husband and I, and our life, through their eyes. We must have appeared so rich, so fortunate, so advantaged. And this is with domestic adoption! One of the reasons we chose it was to minimize the differences between us and the birthfamily. When I tried to compare our situation to that of a third-world woman, it seemed as if a mountain separated us, with us at the pinnacle of wealth and she in the valley of poverty.

I had entered the church feeling nervous about being welcomed, a white woman entering a black church. Unfamiliar territory - would I be viewed as an interloper? I expected to stand out, marked as different.

While it was slightly awkward to be in a new church, it was really no different than many a cocktail party or networking group where I didn't know anyone. There were three other white people already there when I arrived, which was about one-third of the congregation in attendance on Sunday.

But as I sat there, I needed to accept that I have another advantage in life: being white. While the members of the congregation didn't speak about it, I could imagine that their struggles included being of color in a racist society.

Seen through this lens, I have to face other questions:

How much of the challenges faced by the expectant mothers with whom I spoke were because they were Latina and black?

Is my becoming a mother, one of the greatest blessings of my life, built upon the foundation of racism (that gave me the staggering amounts of money needed to adopt and robbed her of the opportunities to parent her children)?