I’ve done it again…found myself shopping for kids online. I don’t mean buying gifts for my current children; I mean actually shopping for kids. It’s true…I’m an adoption website addict. I’ve tried to stop, really I have. My husband has threatened to put a block on our internet to prevent inappropriate searches that include the word “adoption” to bar any future incidents…but I’ve sworn to stop on my own. I can do it. Really.
It’s the late nights alone that get to me. When all the kids are in bed and the house is quiet…so quiet that I forget the chaos that was here just an hour before bedtime when I was crying in the corner, sucking my thumb. So soon I forget. The house goes silent, I wander about looking at their cute little socks on the floor, the stack of “I made this for you” art projects on the table next to my chair…and I can’t help myself. I know it’s wrong even as I do it…type in the web address of the forbidden sites…yet my fingers go there and before I know it I’m clicking on “search”…and it’s all over.
I tend to search out the sibling groups rather than individual children. I think somehow I’ve rationalized that the sibling groups are perfectly good children who are only out there waiting because of the sheer size of their family. But the individual kids, out there on their own…I figure they must be trouble, otherwise, why wouldn’t they have been chosen? I know…prejudiced in my thinking but I never claimed there was anything rational about this addiction.
So I type into the search form, narrowing it down to sibling groups of 3 or more, no racial preference, no age or sex favorites…it’s the numbers I’m after. The bigger the better. Those are the ones who aren’t ever going to find someone crazy enough to take them in. They are the ones who age out of the system, never really being a family. And then what? They grow up and don’t know how to create a family of their own, thus perpetuating the problem for yet another generation.
I’m drawn to the groups of seven or eight…those are the ones that really suck me in. I start to calculate the number of kids I can fit into each bedroom, stacking them up like cord wood in double decker bunk beds, filling our seven bedroom house to the hilt, maybe converting the garage to a bunk house…can you imagine the slumber parties?!
The crazy part is, I’m not even planning to adopt again. Really. Most days I don’t actually want the kids I have, let alone more. (I’m not kidding.)But after all these years of consistently acquiring new children on a regular basis, this is like a dry spell…almost four years without a new addition. It’s unheard of.
But I can do this. Step awaaayy from Adoptuskids.org. Put down the attorneys phone number. Do not dial that hotline. There…that’s better. Whew. I made it through another late night without filling out a query form. Really. Okay….maybe one. But there were only six of them…surely Dan won’t notice.
