Some of the realities of adoption…..

Exodus 2:1-10 briefly tells the well-known story of Moses’ early years – how when he was born, his mother saved him from certain death by putting him in the reeds by the River Nile in a waterproof basket; how his sister Miriam watched as he was discovered by an Egyptian princess; how this princess wanted to keep the baby and allowed Miriam to find a woman to nurse the baby for her – Moses’ own mother!; and how Moses’ mother raised her son and then handed him over to Pharaoh’s daughter when he was older.

It’s a familiar Sunday School story – one of the first in that Children’s Illustrated Bible you had as a kid, one of the most popular scenes for colouring in in Sunday School. It’s the stuff of fairy tales.

It raises loads of questions for me though –

• ‘when she saw he was a fine child, she hid him’ – would she not have bothered if he was scrawny and ugly?
• how do you keep a baby hidden for 3 months anyway? (he can’t have been like Luke and screamed the house down – everyone in our block of flats knew Luke was around!)
• how would Miriam have felt, being allowed to grow up in her own home simply because she was a girl?
• why would an Egyptian princess decide to keep a Hebrew baby?
• how would it have felt to Moses’ mother to care for him knowing that she was going to lose him?
• and how did she ever find the courage to hand him over?

Of course, this whole passage makes me think about adoption. It’s a subject close to my heart. Moses’ mother had to give up her son in order that he might live – and there are women out there today who face a similar decision (different circumstances I know). There are women who make a decision to give their child up for adoption, believing that their child will go on to have a better life than they could offer it themselves. It must be heart-breaking and never, ever leave you. It must take an immense amount of strength and courage and love. Natalie’s story is just one example of the hundreds of women that are supported by organisations like After Adoption.

I know it is different, because Moses was his mother’s own child, but I have also been handed a child to look after, knowing that they may leave and return to their birth families as adults. Three in fact. They have been lent to me to care for the best I can and whilst they are adopted and are legally mine, they have a whole other back story and family out there. Courtney didn’t wait til she was an adult to find her birth family. She contacted them independently through Facebook when  she was 14 and the first time we heard about it was through the school. We were shocked and scared and hurt – shocked that it could be so easy; scared of what might happen when she invited this other family into her world; hurt that we were clearly not enough for her. It is hard to give a child your heart, knowing that they may take it with them and go their own way.

Nicola is now working on her Life Story with a worker from Adoption Services and getting the right help in having her questions answered. They are all different children and so it will be a different journey for each one of them. But adoption is a massive thing emotionally – for adopters as well as adopted children – and there needs to be more kindness and understanding out there and less thoughtless comments or assumptions. Yes it is a touchy area for me because it is a touchy area. I am very emotional about the whole thing and do over-react and am over-sensitive, because this is my heart and my life and my love you are talking about or dismissing as unimportant or telling me how to do better.

Back to Courtney – like Moses, she has two very different lives to reconcile. We are as different from her birth family as you could imagine and she is caught in the middle with two sets of standards, two sets of role models, two ways of loving and two versions of herself and where does she fit? Nowhere at the moment. No wonder her life is so traumatic and confusing and chaotic. Maybe Moses struggled too to know his identity and role in life and sense of belonging. Nothing is said – there’s a whole novel there waiting to be written.

Pharaoh’s daughter named him Moses (a Hebrew name interestingly) which means ‘I drew him out of the water’. I wonder what his name was before and why she gave him a new one. I wonder, if we had felt it was the right thing to do, what we would have named our three adopted children. Their names are one of the only things they brought with them when they came to us, along with their genes and personalities. One of the meanings of Courtney is ‘short nose’ which fits – she has a cute little nose and we used to call her that sometimes. Jordan is from the River Jordan and means ‘down-flowing’ and he loves hearing it read in church when Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan. Nicola means ‘people of victory’ – perhaps that is where her desire and determination to win every battle comes from!