Love You Like Crazy Cakes

OK – back to the story of adoption.

About the time that I submitted my application and was accepted into the Ethiopia program at Dove Adoptions international, I started to be filled with significant doubt. I had been doing a lot of research and reading a ton. One of the potential challenges with international adoption is the affect of institutionalization on a child. Because many are in orphanages with irregular care from many caregivers, developing a strong bond and attachment rarely occurs.

Of course my mind goes to the worst case scenario possible as I process all this information. I start to get overwhelmed with all the potential issues that come from attachment disorders.

It really affected me. I started to cry and I realized I was grieving. The truth is two-fold. I am extremely excited about the opportunity to give a new life to a precious child who deserves a loving home. I am overwhelmed with joy about this opportunity! But there is a sadness and a loss at the same time. Many of the books I have been reading say that adoption is a relationship that starts on the premise of grief and loss and to deny that reality will cause issues in the long run. For the child, it is the loss of familiarity – sights, smells, sounds, etc., a loss of their culture and surroundings and the mother that carried them for 9 months – the sound of her heartbeat and her voice. For adoptive parents, often their journey starts with the loss of not being able to conceive their own child and the pain that process brings.
As I was reading these things, I didn’t think that I would have grief issues as I have never tried to conceive a child and it just didn’t seem to fit me. Until that morning reading all the stuff about attachment.

I started getting emotional realizing that potentially the child that I would give my life to, may never love me and may turn out to be a difficult child to raise as a result of the trauma they faced in the first months/years of their life. As I reacted to this thought, I realized I was, in fact, grieving. I was grieving not having a child that has been with me their whole life and hasn’t been affected by outside situations that likely will shape them. I was grieving not having a child in a “normal” way and in a “normal” sequence of events. Not to mention grieving the fact that I will not know what it is to be married without a child present in my life. It is easy to romanticize the adoption process, but it can be very challenging, difficult and emotional. So I gave myself the space to have a good pity cry about all this. After all that is what the books say to do, so I am allowed to, right?

Perhaps not completely.

In the middle of my cry, I felt compelled to check my bin that I transport things to and from church and on the top of the pile was this book, “I Love You Like Crazy Cakes.” One of my staff members gave it to me and I had not noticed it. I pulled it out and flipped it open. On the first page, she wrote me a personal note about how she had had this book for quite some time and has always wondered why she has kept it. They day after I told her my story of adoption, she opened the closet where the book was in and she felt God say, “now you know why you have kept this book.” This book is written by a single mom who adopts a girl from China.

I started to read through the pages of the book and cried the whole way through the book. The phrase “love you like crazy cakes” just kept rolling through my mind. I realized that for the last few days I was grieving what I would be losing – so much so that couldn’t see any longer what I was gaining. I was so worried about what I thought it would be that I wasn’t trusting what it could be.

I started to sense God reminding me that there are no guarantees with love. I really want a guarantee. I want to know that everything will work out just right. But that is not the nature of love. God reminded me that He created in love a whole human race, in the hope that they would receive His love and join in a loving relationship, but the reality is that the majority of them will reject Him – yet He still stepped out in love. Following His example, we too must take the first step in love. We have the assurance of His unending love for us and that gives us the confidence to step out in love no matter how it turns out. We receive the gift of love to pass it on to another. True, there are no guarantees of my love being reciprocated by this, or any child or anyone else in my life for that matter, but I have all I need from the One who loves me. So the real question is, do I really trust the guarantee of His love?

As God reminded me of all this, I felt like I needed to engage my heart fully in this process. He still has lots He wants to teach me about love - His love and I think that this adoption process will be a grand learning curve.

And the journey continues…