In an effort to try to wrap my head around adoption, I stumbled on what I think is a useful metaphor: marriage.
The difficulty of course is that I’m not married and never have been, so clearly my take on marriage is limited by my lack of experience. Since adoption is even more foreign to me, though, marriage provides a decent framework to help sort through the various dynamics at play in adoption.
There’s quite a bit to unpack with this metaphor, but for now I’ll just unwrap one layer.
Adoption is like marriage because love – stripped of its emotional ups and downs and erotic undertones until it’s closer to an attribute I like to simply call “care” – is essentially the same for all relationships.
And marriage and adoption push care to the extreme.
