October 14, 2008

Indecision

The more I browse and think and learn via email groups, the more I'm realizing I really want a girl. I know that I can love little boys too, and the wait for a girl is incredibly long, (more so the younger you want), plus if we were just to get pregnant, we wouldn't have a choice. So I don't know that it's worth saying anything about it. But I feel like I understand girls better, and while I know there are sports-oriented girls, I oddly feel like I can handle that better than sports-oriented boys. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with little boys, but all the ones that I have known have been very physical without a whole lot of reasoning skills. That makes me nervous, I don't know quite how to relate to it. Granted, the younger they are the more we can influence that sort of thing to some extent. And it's not just a sports thing, that's just an area in which the kind of thing I'm talking about often appears. I just tend to 'get' a higher percentage of girls than I do boys.

I also find myself still very drawn towards sibling groups (just 2), partly because we know we eventually want two anyway and I really don't want to go through this crazy government process again, and also because I feel like if there's two kids who are good at relying on each other it'd be some sort of comfort for the transition. Plus, ya know, I like kids. Since we're also looking at out-of-state adoption, I worry about the impact of removing an already-wounded child from everyone that's familiar to them. When I moved to NY it was by choice to an extended (married in) family that loved me, but no one really understood me at all; the only evidence of my past was my stuff (which many adopted kids come without), and even though I was an adult who had control over the situation it took a long hard time for me to get through it. I can only imagine what it would be like for a 5 year old kid feeling that kind of thing. I think having a brother or sister along for the ride would be a major benefit for them in an out-of-state, too-far-to-visit-often situation.

Oddly, I'm also finding myself drawn to pre-teen girls. Yes, I know, pre-teen girls are traditionally crazy even when they're not adopted kids. What in the world am I thinking?? Yes, older kids have gone through a lot, and there's a lot of physical risk when older kids decide to throw some kind of fit or something. Yes, there's hormones and other random stuff that comes with that. But we have five pre-teen/teenager friends (kids of friends, and other kids who show up to play games at the game store, some from crazy broken up home lives) who we get along with really well. We seem to really understand issues facing them (these specific ones, anyway) which even a lot of traditional style parents don't. We obviously wouldn't take just anyone, but according to what I've been reading, there are some older kids out there who are aware of their situations, able to reason and (within age-appropriate limits) make reasonable choices, want to work with the therapists and take their meds, who really just want to succeed, but nobody wants them because of their age. Yes, of course it'll be hard, but they're kids... all kids are hard, just in different ways at different stages. I feel like, chosen carefully, we have something to offer.

So all of this is to say that I'm very unsettled! None of what I've written here actually fits the paperwork we filled out. And obviously we don't want to get in over our heads; we must be able to provide for all the needs of whatever children we have in our home. But I feel like 'one toddler boy' could maybe not be the direction we're meant to be gearing up for.

When we pray for guidance, make choices based on the options available and then pray for peace, and peace is not forthcoming, doesn't that mean that perhaps we should reevaluate the choices?