by Jessica Gunkel, BS, LMFT
Our adoption experience
The unexpected grief within our joy
The process of adoption was fairly easy for us. We brought a 7-month-old baby home from Guatemala in 2007. I learned to become a parent while also learning to attach to a baby who was not biologically mine. There was much more to it than I thought, but there was also a lot more beauty than I thought there would be.
Since leaning into what it meant to add to our family through cross-cultural adoption, my life has been transformed. Since I leaned into the grief of what it meant to have a child not biologically related to me, I went back to school to become a therapist, working with adoptive families similar to mine. Since our child comes from a beautiful Indigenous Mayan Culture, I have expanded what it means to listen to perspectives and cultural wisdom that is not my own.
Raising a beautiful child of color as white parents in the culture wars being waged in America today is no light task, no matter how well-intentioned parents we may be. Now, my passion to raise our child in a world that values my child’s life has defined my relationships, my career, and my life as a woman and mother.
When considering adoption, families may at first be narrowly focused on getting a baby into their home as I was. However, if their experience is anything like mine, they’ll travel a journey filled with the valleys of grief. Through those valleys of expected and unexpected grief, they’ll also experience the mountaintops of joy and transformation.