Love Is a Gift

Love takes only four letters to spell. Yet…

Love is far more than just a simple word. As a lived reality, however, love is exceedingly complex. In the context of family, love has many incarnations. Some examples include the love of a spouse for their partner, a parent for their child, a child for their sibling.

The path of love is rarely straight and smooth

The typical idea of a family includes a group of people joined by love and mutual care. Most families also share a common biological link. In adoptive families the genetic connection is absent. What are the ramifications of that missing link? How does it affect the growth, depth, validity and, steadfastness of love?

Love is a choice

Whatever factors impel adoptive parents to choose to adopt, it is a decision they make for themselves. Thus, they have agency, intention, purpose, and a goal. They’ve considered adoption, made a plan, and saw it through to completion. For them, adopting a child is a dream fulfilled.

For the child, it is far more complicated and layered. Along with the acquisition of an adoptive family, they also experience grief, loss, and questions about self-worth and identity. In reality, they have two families. So, they must decipher how to live and love in that intertwined reality.

Love is not automatic

As I said previously, adoptive parents had agency in the adoption process. Typically, children have little or no agency. Adoption was something done to or for them. The family for which their bodies were pre-programmed to belong to, fit in with, and be connected to is not the one in which they are being raised.

And, since there is no pre-existing link that adoptive parents and their children share, connection and belonging must be built over time through thousands of interactions and shared moments.

Children’s personal walls come down as parents earn their trust. They begin to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and open. Seeds of trust, security and love start to take root. Because incipient trust and affection are easily compromised the relationship requires careful nurturing, vigilance, and intentional, purposeful attention.

Love is not a payment on account

It is essential that parents understand the attachment process and that they be very intentional about their efforts to help nurture and stabilize this bond between them and their child. It is especially important to understand that a child’s love is not guaranteed or automatic. Love is not a payment in exchange for their parents’ decision to adopt them and provide for them. When love becomes an obligation, it ceases to be genuine. Love in its fullest form is freely given, a grace of the heart and spirit, not a debt repaid.

The weight of love

When love is an expectation, it becomes a burden, an obligation, and a weight on the soul. Transactional love is not genuine love. It endures only as long as the power imbalance holds sway. Once the adoptee is no longer dependent on the parents, a connection based on obligated love will likely become tenuous at best. Often the relationship ends in estrangement.

The embrace of love

Genuine love endures, uplifts, comforts and strengthens. This is the kind of connection that adoptive parents want to build with their children. It is a love that nurtures, provides security, acceptance, and validation. Love provides the safe harbor. It is the matrix in which the child feels “at home” and fully accepted as their genuine self.

Daring to love

Every love relationship is a risk. The individuals choose to be vulnerable, to expose their innermost selves. The decision to love requires bravery as well as trust. We owe it to our children to handle this precious gift with the care and respect it deserves, and unfettered by expectations of obligation.

Expressing love

Love must be expressed through our actions. It is not enough simply to say I love you. We must live out that love in our actions every day. It is also important to buttress our loving actions with loving words, to infuse our children’s inner dialog with a sound track that includes I love you as a consistent refrain. This is even more necessary for children whose love language* is Words of Affirmation.

Love is expansive

An adopted person’s world includes four parents. All four are present emotionally and psychologically whether they are in contact or not. The child fares better when they feel confident that they can speak about and share their feelings about their birth parents, and about being adopted with their adoptive parents. Expecting adoptees to deny or suppress these thoughts and feelings unfairly burdens adoptees and impacts them negatively. They cannot have too many people to love and to love them back.

Love and loss

Since no one lives forever, adoptees also face double the amount of loss. This is another one of the hard things about being adopted. If you have built a context of trust, welcome and expansiveness, hopefully, they will be able to turn to you for comfort and strength. Your openness and empathy are powerful expressions of love.

A few questions

How have you built an atmosphere of welcome and openness?
How can you expand on this groundwork?
Where do you feel challenged in regards to your child’s relationship with their birth parents and family?
What will you do today to enhance the bond between you?

*Dr. Gary Chapman has written several books about the concept of Love Languages, e.g.: