What Does “Normal” Look Like?

Honestly some days I think I must have a huge pile of insurmountable stuff going on that makes my family life feel like anything but normal. We have all the regular family concerns of course, but when you add in all the adoption/ special needs/ birthfamily/ transracial family issues it can begin to feel more than a little isolating at times. It becomes easy to believe that if you were just doing something more like someone else (you know the ones who seems to have it all together) then life would be great, maybe even manageable.

I was already thinking how other people must surely have a more “normal” life than we do when I saw Cindy Bodie’s post for the day. I could most definitely relate. No I am not a mom of 39, but good gosh some days I feel like I have been. No my children did not come to me as older abused and emotionally challenged foster children. I have however been with them long enough to see how the genetic history and pre-birth trauma their birthfamily might have lent to them has been carried forward into our home, and my life with them. It sure is not normal, and it can be all too easy to believe that our family is somehow more “messed up” than that other family who lives next door. Hey and none of them were adopted.

For me reading online about other adoptive families and their issues often leaves me wondering how far from normal our family is as measured on the adoption spectrum. When you click “adoption” into google you are bound to come up with just about any perspective on the topic, all so vastly different. I honestly wonder where do we fall? Obviously I am not an “expert” on adoption by virtue of anything other than my life experience, and my experience is just that, mine. I am not an author of any books touting adoption rhetoric (yet), I have no university degree to show my competence with adoption knowledge. Surely I must know something, but then why do I always find myself thinking that somehow our little family unit has it less right, that we have more problems, or that we are just more socially incorrect that most other people. Adoption that’s how.

Adoption has got to be the answer for a huge part of it. The worst is actually being an adoptive parent, struggling to feel normal and good about your family, and then seeing and reading so much about how that is unacceptable. I know some people do not like adoption. I understand that there are flaws with how many adoptions come about that need to meet with reform. I even see some of how adoption in general is not the most ideal of life situations, but can it ever feel “normal”? Well I know I really need it to. Why does adoption have to be looked at as so strange? If adoption was not looked at as strange would I still feel less than normal? Probably.

When it is all said and done I am sure that what goes on in our home is much like a lot of other families, adoptive or not. I don’t like being looked at as if we do not do the same average things as other families, yet I know that adoption is something that sets us somewhat apart, like it or not. I still find myself (like Cindy) looking at that seemingly “normal” family at church and wondering what it is that makes them seem so together to me when I feel so out of it. Yes I also wonder what they are hiding under that facade of normalcy, I admit it. My therapist once told me very wisely that I needed to stop judging my insides by their outsides. He certainly has a point, but that is a lot easier said than done.

Working At Family

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