Our second born child, Evan, is now eleven years old. When he was about two, I remember thinking - very frequently - "Where did this kid come from?" He was not at all like his older brother; he was loud, always grinning and laughing about seemingly nothing, talking non-stop, and making jokes - albeit very simple, nonsense kind of jokes (think knock-knock and chicken crossing the road.) We have a video clip of him with his head stuck in between the newel posts of the banister; we were able to get it on video because it had happened previously and we knew it was coming again. Upon calling for help and having his head released, he often went right back to trying to get re-stuck.
By the time he was three, I was convinced that we had somehow gone incredibly wrong in parenting this kid; it just didn't make sense that he was so completely different from his brother, we had birthed them both, after all. Slowly the connection began to be clear, this son of mine had directly inherited all of his DNA from one of his grandparents. Today Evan has an indescribable affinity for his Pappy. Thank goodness we were able to make this connection, otherwise I'm sure we'd be hauling Evan all over the place for all sorts of evaluations.
In the cases of our children who have been adopted, we have varying degrees of knowledge of the birth families. For one of our kids, we had much interaction with the mother, and watch as our child grows to be very much like her. Some of the personality traits and even physical characteristics are very obviously genetic, and that gives a certain sense of comfort: to the child to know that they are forever tied to their birth mother, and to us as parents to not have to wonder about the origin of certain behaviors.
With another of our kids the only information we have was provided in writing from the birth mother. This information is helpful as it details certain health conditions of the extended biological family. Therefore, we were not surprised to find this child diagnosed with specific conditions, and there is an understanding of what the future may hold.
In the case of our third adopted child, we have no written information and limited personal knowledge - our own as well as what was shared by case workers. Lately I'm wishing that we could get half-a-clue about what's going on. My normally friendly child has become a bully; or maybe not become, but rather, it's just now beginning to unravel. This well-laid plan of my child now has the attention of the teacher and several other parents, we have also gotten wind of similar situations happening in church.
This is the conundrum of adoptive parents: how much of this is genetics - we don't know if the parents had mental health instability, anger issues, medical conditions that could be a root cause of some of these behaviors, and how much of it is just personality traits which could also be hereditary. It's not as if knowing the personal information of the birth parents would 'fix' it all - not that I think my child needs fixing - but it might help to put things in perspective, to help us identify what we are seeing, and then to help us help our child learn a better way of handling life.
It's now very easy to see that Evan is an apple that hasn't fallen very far from the tree, and with our other two adopted children that is also a somewhat comforting and helpful statement. But with this last one... well, if we knew what the tree was like, we might be having more success with this little apple.
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