By AMY SHANKLAND
Perfectly Imperfect
Turns out, John and I did not need to consider adoption after all. God had other plans.
A month after attending the pre-adoption class, I took a pregnancy test on a whim. I fell to my knees at the result. Boom! Pregnant. We told all our relatives over Easter weekend that we were changing our minds about adopting – because we were finally having a baby of our own.
I’m sure any parent-to-be thinks many of the same thoughts I did. We weren’t going to find out the gender of the baby ahead of time, so I always wondered if it was going to be a boy or a girl. And I also wondered what they would look like. This is when I reflected again on my life as an adoptee. Would some trait buried deep within my genes show up in our firstborn? Traits that I had no clue about?
Growing up, friends would often try to guess my heritage. One guy swore up-and-down that I was Polish due to my facial structure and my nose. I would discover years later that he was completely wrong.
My future baby would know all about their heritage from their father’s side. But they wouldn’t know the heritage from my side. And there would never be any medical history from that side. That bothered me enough for myself, but it really started to get to me when I thought about my baby’s future. I was used to skipping the pages at various medical offices regarding family history. But there would always be that gap in my future children’s medical history. I didn’t like that one bit.
I forced myself to push that aside, however. There was no way I was ever going to search for my birth parents and hurt my mother. At this point she was alone. My dad passed away suddenly from a heart attack when I was 23. I had never heard Dad’s thoughts on how he would have felt if I had searched for my biological mother and father. I have a feeling he would have supported me more than my mother. But I will never know.
I would just have to be diligent on all my medical checkups in the future and make certain my children would do the same.
In December of 2001, my first son, Jonathon, was born. He was healthy, cute as a button, and a good baby. Sure, he kept us up at night for a couple months and had the occasional fussy times, but overall, Jonathon was a joy.
“He looks just like John!” People would say. And sure enough, when we pulled out baby pictures of John and compared them to Jonathon, they were practically identical. It looked like our firstborn was going to have his father’s physical characteristics of strong eyebrows, dark brown hair, and blue eyes.
I didn’t need to worry about some unusual physical trait popping up after all.