Quick Word for Recent “Followers”

Thank you for choosing to follow this new blog, Adoptionality.  Claudia and I and three of our kids are finishing our vacation (which began at the NACAC Conference last week) in the DC area, and we have limited internet connections.

Watch, beginning early next week, for updates to the site.

A Special Word to Those Attending My NACAC Conference Workshop in July 2012

First of all, thank you for being a part of my workshop, “Riding Your Internal Monsters Down: Spiritual Dynamics of Adoptive Parenting.”  I am writing these words the night before we actually meet together, so I may have more to say in a separate post in a day or so, but for now I want to invite you to consider three things:

1. Would you take a moment to let me know what part of the workshop was most meaningful to you and why?  I would welcome your email at revbafletcher@mac.com.
2. Do you have any interest in forming an online learning community (not a public forum, but a private one) in which we could learn and process together what “adoptionality” looks like or what it grows to look like in our lives?
3. Please let me know if there are specific ways I can be of assistance to you in your quest to address the “internal monsters” of your soul’s growth as an adoptive parent.  Email is the most reliable form of communication for me:  revbafletcher@mac.com

I would love to be part of a movement that helps adoptive parents recognize, understand and address their internal, spiritual “monsters” in order that children may find permanency and that parents may find the peaceful fulfillment for which they long.

The Origins of “Adoptionality”

As I have explained in my first post, Welcome to Adoptionality, this phrase is a hybridization of two significant experiences:  adoption and spirituality.  You can discover more about this concept by clicking the above link.

What I have not yet written about is how “adoptionality” originated.  Here’s a quick summary of my story, beginning sixteen years ago (as of this writing) in 1996, when four significant transitions occurred for me during the course of five short months.

1. In early May I completed graduate school, receiving a Master of Divinity, which fulfilled academic requirements in order that
2. in late May I was ordained an Elder in The United Methodist Church (“Elder” is nomenclature for one of two ordained orders within the UMC).
3. Two weeks later, on June 15, Claudia and I exchanged wedding vows, embarked on our honeymoon to Maine, and within weeks of our return home had completed paperwork to become licensed foster parents in our Minnesota county.
4. During the first week of October, we welcomed into our home our first foster son, twenty months of age, a child we were eventually able to make ours through the gift of adoption.  As of this writing he is one of our three seventeen year olds.

Those were exhilarating months in my life.  Completing a graduate degree and receiving ecclesiastical recognition gave me a sense of accomplishment.  There was joy in joining my life with another person whose sense of mission echoed my own.  Becoming a father for the first time to a curly-headed blond boy with sparkling, capacious blue eyes was delightfully rewarding.

Heady with optimism and the conviction that older kids in foster care need permanent family resources, Claudia and I moved forward in our quest to be parents.  In the course of the next decade we added to our family another son, a sibling group of two, a sibling group of three, three more sons, and a sibling group of two.  You can read more about our family and what we learned in the process by reading Out of Many One: How Two Parents Claimed Twelve Children Through Adoption.

In the midst of the changes and the responsibilities of parenting a burgeoning young family, at first I didn’t recognize the deep ways my life was changing.  I attributed my occasional feelings of disappointment to the stresses any large family faces.  Tucking away disillusionment and anxiety created within the deepest recesses of my soul a stranger with doubts and conflicts.  While I could identify myself functionally as a “pastor,” and as a “husband,” and as a “father,” I was no longer sure who “I” really was.

I began to read more widely from those who understood the soul better than I.  I began to listen more intently to what other adoptive parents were (and, perhaps more tellingly) were not saying.  And I began to hear common themes emerge, from my experience and theirs.  I am not naive enough to believe that in the course of human history I am the only person to have experienced what I was feeling, so I began to delve into the spiritual lives of those before me who experienced their moments of “consolation” and “desolation.”

Without recognizing it, I was beginning to envision a spirituality of adoptive parenting, something I have begun to call “adoptionality.”  In the posts that follow in this blog, I intend to explore and develop more fully what the spirituality of adoptive parents might look like.  My goal is also to provide guidance for parents feeling the “dark night of the soul,” as well as to provide resources for understanding and enhancing the soul life of adoptive parents.

Welcome to Adoptionality

Thank you for taking a moment to read these introductory words of welcome to Adoptionality, a resource for the spiritual growth of parents touched by adoption.  In the decade and a half that my spouse and I have been foster and adoptive parents, our lives have been both flooded with blessing and rocked with disappointment.  These experiences, most of which we could never have anticipated before beginning this journey, have shaped our spiritual lives in powerfully transforming ways.

Adoptionality will focus less on practical, day-to-day details of adoptive parents (there are an abundance of very good blogs to help parents with questions in those realms) and will focus on the ways in which an adoptive parent’s life may be deeply transformed spiritually.  Adoptionality is a hybridization of two concepts:  adoption + spirituality = adoptionality.  It is my attempt to identify in the broadest possible way the spiritual dynamics of adoptive parenting.

“Spirituality” in this broad understanding is not sectarian.  While I am a practicing Christian and an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, and while there may be times this blog reflects my particular faith understanding, my goal is to “get beneath” to the deepest human longing, a meaningful spiritual life.  It seeks to answer the question:  “Where is God in this adoption experience?”

My spouse Claudia, whose life’s vocation is in the adoption world, often speaks about the adoptive parenting experience as a “roller coaster ride.”  Some people prefer to watch the roller coaster from a distance, marveling at its thrill-seeking possibilities.  They are witnesses to what the riders seem to enjoy.  Others are roller coaster enthusiasts who purchase their tickets, get in line and wait to climb aboard.  Once aboard there are moments of exhilirating beauty, white-knuckled surprise and momentary period of relief, until at last the ride comes to a conclusion of sorts.  Some choose to hop back on the ride again, others “have had enough,” and still others watch, waving joyously and calling encouragingly as yet new riders board the adoption car.

Whoever you are in this adoption experience — observer, encourager, rider — the deepest part of who you are (your spiritual life) is being changed and transformed.  Let’s learn together what that looks like.  Along the way we will discover what “adoptionality” means.  In the comment section below, please take a moment to introduce yourself (if you so desire).  Tell us how you are connected to the adoption experience (adoptive parent, encourager of adoptive parents, potential adoptive parent, etc.) and a little about yourself.

Welcome aboard!