Reluctant Half Steps

Note: the following is an entry from Steve & Amy Nelsons’s weblog. Steve gave CWA permission to reprint it, so read on and be blessed.

Part of the joy of keeping a website on international adoption is NOT having an FAQ section for common questions—because there really aren’t any common ones. Almost everyone who posts or e-mails us, or folks we’ve talked to at home before leaving, have different questions about the process. And if there were a common or “frequently asked” question about our adventure, there are no easy answers.

One fairly common but unspoken question is “Why are you doing this?” Other than “Why Not?,” how should we answer? All we can really say in response is that we have felt compelled to do so. Starting sometime before our marriage one or both of us has thought about adoption at one point or another, and then around mid-2003 we both started thinking about it at the same time. And since then, we have felt compelled—not under a curse, or a sentence, but compelled in the sense that it is not only a good thing to do, but the right thing to do. And not much would have turned us back at that point. In fact, most of the details just kept moving us forward, in what I have come to call “reluctant half-steps.” There is no way we would have bought into such a long trip, or such a faraway place, or such a different language and culture, or such high tights or such fast-paced cereal shoveling all in one package. Like a lot of things in life, you carefully take that one cautious step in a direction you think is right, knowing you may have to move your foot back where it was—or to another position—to keep your balance at a moment’s notice. And now we’ve arrived at our destination with the full package, the collective accumulation of all those reluctant half-steps, for a long stay in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. And despite its challenges, I would do this particular trip all over again.

Just as I know Amy and I would re-live each of our kids’ pregnancies and births all over again to get to the end result. I remember the birth of each of my first three children, and after a long and arduous pregnancy and delivery, they handed the baby to me and said “here’s your baby.” I’m now convinced that very little of the attachment that follows is due to the genetic contribution I’ve made to the kids (and there are of course many moments when I would love to blame someone else’s genetic contribution for their errant ways). After “The Handoff,” the attachment that occurs between father and child and how it develops is surely a mystery. And even though there were about seven months and 24 days between Aliya’s birth and a caretaker handing her over to me to hold, I can’t feel a difference or a loss over those months and days—it just feels absolutely the same as the first three to me. This convinces me that there is a process outside of myself that works to connect me and Aliya together as father and daughter.

There is a dimension of our adoption experience that reflects some important things to me about my faith, as well, which I do not consider a religion that I follow but a relationship that I have felt compelled to pursue and honor since I was about 16. Like our adoption of Aliya and the creation of that father-daughter relationship, there has been no roadmap or engineering schematic in my faith as a Christian—not any four-step or thirty-two tier packaged program of goods and services I need to buy into. I just feel compelled to follow, to take a reluctant half step each day towards the place God calls me to. And frankly, I distrust any expression of religion that promises miracles if you will just get with the program. So all the twists and turns we have suffered along the way in our adoption journey seem a lot like life itself—the waiting, the hoping, the hurry up and wait, the start then the stop and then the start again, one more piece of paperwork and then a little more paperwork and then maybe tomorrow or no, wait—instead maybe six months. Joy followed by setback, followed by an interminable wait, then a setback, and then joy again. To stop in the middle of an adoption journey and demand the final roadmap, to threaten not to continue until someone spells it all out for me, piece by piece, day by day, with total predictability, would be absurd. Anyone involved in adoptions will laugh at the notion and would think my demands totally petty, and selfish, and unrealistic. The path just needs to be clear enough for me to take that next step forward.

So I have a better understanding of life and faith, having experienced the long beginning of my relationship with Aliya, which started before she was born, took forever to get to the point where it was real, and seemed hopeless and never to come true around the time of her birth at Maternity Hospital #4. And now, just eight months and twenty-three days later, the relationship seems like it was created and destined to happen well before I ever got myself involved in the process. How will I ever look at her and try to tell her that all I did was to choose the right program—that I just did everything I needed to DO to find her, and that I deserve the credit (with Amy) for finding her out?—it cannot be! We have felt compelled from the beginning to keep taking small steps, and felt pushed forward from behind when we wanted to quit. If the process were dependent on our effort and our diligence or perseverance, it wouldn’t have happened.

Fortunately, all God needed to create the relationship between me and Aliya was my next step—nothing more, nothing less. And now I realize that my relationship with Jesus, who says in the Gospels, “Follow Me,” is really everyday a new beginning of an adventure that’s not mapped out for me, or packaged neatly, but is one that I have great confidence will cause me to say that it has been destined, and created from the beginning, to happen exactly as I would have wished.

Most people with questions about our adoption can understand the beginning of a new relationship between father and daughter, I think. It’s harder to understand a spiritual relationship with God, because man-made religion and programs and to-do lists and to-don’t lists and offering plates distract from the truth. But I swear to you, the nature of the relationship and how it starts and develops is just the same. One reluctant half-step at a time. And then all of a sudden it’s real.

Steve Nelson

Steve with Aliya