"In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die, and the choices that we make are ultimately our responsibility."
-Eleanor Roosevelt

There is a lot to be said for making choices thoughtfully. Part of the responsibility of being a thoughtful person also means accepting those choices, no matter how they ultimately turn out for us. This is often easier said than done. One of the hardest tasks I have had thus far as a parent, is trying to teach responsibility and consequences resulting from choices to my children. Some days I doubt it can ever really be done. I truly wonder if this lesson can only be fully learned through experience, as difficult as that sometimes might be.

One of the things I have also noticed in the world of adoption, is that choices are very hard to accept for most of us. Birthparents make an agonizing decision when they place a child. Many of the birthparents I am familiar with take a certain responsibility for their choice, even if they have gone on to later find many regrets. Despite the regrets, I believe most birthparents accept their choices made to the best of their ability, with the information available to them at the time. Of course there are many other birthparents who truly feel that they had no choice concerning adoption at all. Taking any responsibility for something may seem impossible to do when you feel you had no choice. This also has to throw the proverbial wrench into the healing process after a loss.

Adoptive parents also have difficulty with choices. Knowing how to carefully chose the situation, trample no ones rights, coerce no one, and then maintain an adoption that meets the differing standards of many, is a curious undertaking. Most of those who adopted only wanted to be parents. As with most choices, only after it is made do the additional complications become apparent. Only through the actual experience of adoption will parents find out what all the choices will bring them, and what level of responsibility they will hold for the outcomes. In some situations it might be hard to reconcile the idea of an adoption that was thought to be an ethical one, later shown to have not been. If parents adopted feeling the information they had was ethical, then I believe they have taken responsibility, as much as they may be able to that point. Now their new added responsibility might just be in how they chose to respond to the information that later is revealed.

Can those of us involved in the world of adoption ever really prepare for the full responsibility of the choices we have made?. I believe we can accept some responsibility for the choices we made, even if they were at the time ill informed. Ultimately no one can predict the future. All of us make our decisions, as difficult as they might be, based on the information we have available when we make them. They are what they are. None of us have the ability to operate from the advantage of hindsight, so why do we often feel we should? Yes if we had different information, different choices may have been made, but we often didn’t, so we used what we had. What most of us can do is accept responsibility for how we choose to deal with the outcome of those situations, when we made either ill informed choices, or felt we had no available choice. In the end the ways in which we chose to deal with the outcomes, is how we accept the responsibility for shaping who we are.

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Photo An interesting website, devoted to taking responsibility and making change.