It occurred to me today that adoption makes me smile.

Today, at work, I was completing an audit of student account information, looking to make sure that I’d made accounts for all of the new students entering our school district next week, making sure that I’d deactivated accounts for students who’d left the district over the course of the summer months. I do this audit three or four times throughout the year, to make sure that students who need access, have access. It’s really just a bunch of database searching and data manipulation.

But, I ran into a problem today that I don’t normally run into. A student, who last year had a certain student identification number, wasn’t in our student database anymore. This isn’t necessarily unusual, but when I went to see if the student had ever been in our database, the database said, “No”.

Now, it is not like me to lose track of students in my records. So, I went looking in the database for the student identification number that I’d recorded for the student last year. And, sure enough, I found that student identification number in the database, attached to a different student, with a different name. Our support staff in my school district are normally very detail-oriented, so I started to wonder what was going on. I called one of the support staff, a student database expert, and I asked her what had happened.

And she told me that the student, the one that I couldn’t find in the database anymore, didn’t actually exist anymore. Rather, that child had been adopted in the spring, and so the name of the student had changed in the adoption process. So, the person that I found in the database with the student identification number, and the former student that I couldn’t find in the database any longer, they are actually the same child.

Adopted.

So that, the previous child is gone. The new child –the adopted child– is the new student.

And the first thing that I thought to myself was, “Good for him. I’m happy for that kid.”

Right after that, I smiled.

* * *

And then, later in the day, I kept thinking about that student. I was so happy for him, and I thought about how his life-changing experience had been handled by our computer systems. I thought about how strange it would be to no longer exist in the old way that you’ve been previously existing, but rather, moving forward as a different person, in a sense. Different because someone cared enough to give you a place in their family, and a new name.

And yet, you’re still the same person, for better or for worse. The parts of you that were beloved by your adopting parents are still there, still lovable, for them, as your new mother and father, to appreciate. Additionally, the old mentality –the voice inside that told you that you weren’t good enough, that no one could ever love you enough to adopt you– is most likely still there, persisting despite of the new set of circumstances that speaks quite to the contrary.

And, since the dynamic ends up changing for the adoptee, there’s most likely a period of adjustment that happens. Putting away the old life, and getting accustomed to the new way of living, would most certainly not be something that would change overnight.

These opportunities that we have, in life, to make a course correction, to seize upon a different path to our goals, they don’t come often enough. It is much more likely the case that we tend to operate, as human beings, in ruts –> doing the same things that we’ve always done because the circumstances of life are as they’ve always been.

An adoption; now that would be a perfect opportunity to leave the past behind and start to lay claim to a new set of future possibilities.

* * *

Of course, as a Christian, my experience today of discovering that one of my students had been adopted got me to thinking about my own adoption.

By God.

Now, I usually try pretty hard to avoid overt religious messages on this blog, because I grew up in a church that taught me a lot of bad things, one of which was how damaging Bible-thumping can be for people who are hesitant to hearing God’s message. So, without getting too fired-up, I just want to talk about adoption a little bit.

The fact that I was chosen to be adopted continues to blow my mind, because I don’t think very much of myself. In fact, my adoption (by God) speaks more about my adoptive parent, I’m sure, than it does about me. Nevertheless, I am grateful for being chosen to be a part of something –part of a family– that I wasn’t going to be a part of otherwise.

And that adoption still fills me with a lot of different emotions. I am often disappointed in myself when I feel like I fall short of who my adoptive parent wants me to be. I also feel emboldened to continue the fight of being a different person than I was. The adoption made me a different person; I’m a person with a different name, and I belong to someone else now. I know what a difference adoption can make, if for nothing else, then for your peace of mind.

But, the battle is still very real. I don’t want to be a disappointment, so I keep struggling to be who My Father wants me to be.

Mostly, thinking about my adoption makes me smile.