Adoption Carnival: What I Wish I Would Have Known

This post was originally published on AdoptionBlogs.com on September 21, 2009. Republished here with permission.

I’m a joiner, so when I read about Grown in My Heart’s new monthly Adoption Carnival, I just had to participate. The first topic is:

What I Wish I Would Have Known Before I Was Touched by Adoption.

I wish I would have known how difficult it is to find friends as a family. This may happen to biological families as well, but my husband and I really floundered in our first two years to find friends. We’ve finally made some through Jack’s preschool, but none of the ones we hang out with are black. Which brings me to point two…

I wish I knew how to make friends who are black without putting emphasis on wanting to be friends with them because they’re black. There’s all this pressure from transracial adoption sources to make sure you have meaningful relationships with people of the same culture or race as your child.

I wish I had fully understood the implications of expanding our definition of “family” to include Jack’s biological family. I don’t regret that; I just wish I had had a better grasp of the ramifications before we started, so I could have prepared better.

I wish I knew that the housing market was going to go to heck, so we might have avoided living in a house that cost far more than it’s now worth, but is too small to adopt again without adding on, which we had intended to do with equity that we no longer have. (Or, I wish Alice from Twilight existed and became my personal financial advisor.)