Book – Adoptive Father
New book about adoption of children. Download free!
The life of an adoptive father – The adoption of a child from a father’s point of view
“I hope you enjoy my experience and happiness because my experience is just one of the millions found among parents who, one day, had the opportunity of being adopted by their children.”
Anderson Hernandes
PREFACE
ADOPTING ADOPTION
I have not always understood the grandiosity of loving a non-biological child, loving, that is, not as if the child were biological, but with much more love and dedication.
I came to the point, a long time ago, of considering adoption with harsh prejudice. I believed that adoption was a solution only for those who could not have biological children. It is evident that those who cannot have biological children have the adoption as a solution. However, many of those in such situation do not choose to adopt or, if they do, they procrastinate such decision for so long or they make so many choices as to how the ideal child should be that they end up not adopting, and by doing this, they deceive themselves into thinking that they really want to adopt.
I have learned what it is to love a non-biological child with the hundreds of adoptive fathers and mothers that I have met since I started working as a judicial psychologist, and more specifically when, for some reason, I got involved in the case of an adoption support group. I confess that I do not know why I became involved in this. But I felt that there was something missing in the adoption work and that this hole needed to be filled with a support group. When the group started, there were no others than some fellow workers from other entities and I, who worked with adoption. We decided to create a group that, as we thought at that time, somebody else would eventually take care of. Evidently, some of our partners, especially adoptive parents, joined us and started to adopt the group with us. In reality, we have never abandoned our child: the GEAA-SBC, we have been caring for it until this day, with the same care and dedication as if to a child: an adoptive child.
With the GEAA-SBC, we truly understood the suffering of a child who is neglected by all. We also understood the suffering of those who cannot bear their own children and who start to, symbolically speaking, for a long time, expect a child — a child that nobody knows when will be born and to whom will resemble. What a joy it is for mature and experienced couples that have already raised their own children and later choose to be parents again, but by adoption. And what a joy it is for a child, that perhaps for the first time, instead of calling the most loved person in life aunt or uncle, can now say MOMMY or DADDY.
Believe me, this is not all insignificant. As I said earlier, I do not know why I got involved in the adoption support cause. I just know now that I do not intend to leave this job. Besides being able to help many people make sensible, necessary and legal decisions and making possible that such decisions happen with the least suffering and the most dose of happiness and gratification possible, I feel that a bit of each happy and satisfying moment and of each successful encounter stay with me, even though my participation in promoting them may have been very little. The suffering and deception of a child without the chance to have a family is also something that, at least in part, stays with me. Exactly for the fact that I am able to feel, imagine, and see in my mind’s eye, at least a little, the pain of a child, and in order to help other children not suffer the same rejection and pain, I continue in this fight. This is why I adopted adoption.
Marta Wiering Yamaoka, judicial psychologist of the Forum of São Bernardo do Campo, technical coordinator of GEAA-SBC – Group of Studies and Support of Adoption of SBC, specialist in Judicial Psychology by CRP 06, with extensive experience in therapeutic and community groups.
