Our paperwork is in, we are waiting! As many of you know, hubby and I adopted our little boy just under three years ago. From the moment we laid eyes on him we knew he was ours, he was meant to be our son, he was what we had waited for, prayed for. Fast forward to today, we are now in the process of adopting baby number two – WE ARE GROWING OUR FAMILY!! Our application is in and we are now on the waiting list. This means that, well, we wait!

But this leads me to the point where I don’t feel as excited as I should. You see, the first time around we started the adoption process with no race preference, that is, we wanted a child from any colour of the rainbow. Living in South Africa, statistics show that an average of 300 black babies are abandoned every day, this outnumbers the white babies who are waiting to be adopted by far! So, we were very much expecting (and happily so) to be matched with a beautiful brown child. But destiny had other plans for us, instead we received a call to say that a little pink boy was waiting for us in hospital, and that he was our match! Needless to say, at this point colour was not a priority, WE WERE PARENTS! After trying to conceive a child for more than five years, this was our miracle moment and colour was not going to change that.

This time however, we have decided to adopt a white child. This is our decision (so far), a box we ticked on our application form. And boy does this play on my conscience. You see, we sat down with our social worker, voiced our concerns, discussed our hopes and aspirations for our first “born” and came to the conclusion that as a family, we are simply not equipped to adopt transracially. Our counselor feels that if we adopted a child of another colour, that all of our attention would go into protecting that child, and our older son would be neglected, leaving him in a fragile state, since he will also have “adoption demons” that he will need help fighting. It’s been advised that both our kids should be white, preferably. There are a few more personal reasons to add to the list too.

At first, this was a little sigh of relief for us. Not because we are racist, NOT AT ALL. We are educated enough to know that raising a child of colour in South Africa comes with challenges, these challenges will be hard for us, but more so for this vulnerable little soul. This child needs someone who is brave enough to take on the challenges for him or her and can do so by “knowing what they are doing”. I don’t know if we are brave enough. While I would like to think so…I just don’t know.

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Anyway, this brings me to this point. We are members of quite a large adoption community. Most of the families have adopted transracially. Since we broke the news that we are on the waiting list for a white child, we have somewhat been snubbed. They think we don’t like their brown children. But we love their brown children, in fact, we are often host parents to many Zulu babies while they wait to be placed with their matched families – we are not racist. We know what it entails raising a kid from another race group in this country – we’re scared. We are scared that we cannot protect our one child and the other at the same time. But now I feel ashamed that we ticked the White box.

It also eats at me that while we are waiting for one of the very few adoptable white babies to be placed with our family, hundreds, no thousands of black babies crowd baby homes and orphanages waiting to go to their forever homes. We could be a forever home for one of them. Is our request for a white child unreasonable?

As you can see we have hit a slight twist in our adoption journey. We are slightly at a loss with what to do. We have now asked our social worker for another appointment for more counsel. We are still open to adopting transracially, that door is not closed, in fact, its opening more and more by the day. We just need reassurance, resources and support to guide us in the right direction, to make the right decision, for our own family.

Adoption is not easy.

Advice (and reassurance) from the @teamsouthafrica community is welcome

Much love - @sweetpea

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