one of the losses that adoption literature tells us that we might experience, is the loss of our “dream child.”  This is the child that we’ve always dreamed that we’d parent.  When I first read about this concept, I sort of scoffed because although I had (of course) always thought about a “dream child” in my mind, I never really expected to HAVE the dream child (you know, the one that never misbehaves and is super cute and charming and never wipes their snot across the back seat of the car), so surely that loss must be minimal because I never actually expected it to happen, right?

Then, tiny little details cropped up that made me realize who the real dream child was for me.  In my head, I always assumed my child would have wispy, white-blonde hair like mine (which was really only about a 50% chance since my husband’s and all of his family’s is dark), so one day when I saw a child with hair like that, and for a split second thought, “that’s what MY kid’s hair will look like” and then got kicked in the gut when I realized that there was a pretty decent chance that it won’t.  Another day, I began to realize that the special boy-name I’ve been secretly saving for years may never go to a son of mine.  For one thing, I may only have daughters (not an adoption-specific loss), but if my son is of Hispanic heritage, I’m not sure I’d give him this name as it doesn’t translate well to Spanish, or we may find ourselves matched with a birthmother who hates that name and I would have to think about it for a long time to decide whether I was willing to let my special name be a sticking point in our relationship.

On the other hand, whenever I find myself thinking about how my poor future sons will have male pattern baldness issues because it runs in my dad’s family or about how my future daughters will always struggle with their weight because that runs in my mom’s family, or how my children will have terrible eyesight or giant gaps between their front teeth because both j and i do…. I smile, realizing that I won’t be responsible for passing these family traits on to my children.  Of course, that just means that now, I’m embracing the dream adopted child.  Who will, of course, never even get a runny nose.