We spent this past Saturday at a baseball tournament. Both boys were involved, so it meant some running around and coordinating schedules so both boys could get to the correct field at the correct time. Bob helps with both teams so it usually leaves me (and often my parents!) with the four younger kids.
As I was getting their lunch ready and they were sitting on the blanket waiting, a mom of one of Jacob’s teammates asked how old they all were. I went through their ages and she said “that’s crazy!”. She then confirmed that I was indeed Jacob’s mom and I mentioned we had another son playing on the 8U team, her reply “that’s crazy, you guys are crazy!”. Then some more of the usual questions followed… “Are they siblings?” etc, etc. Again the reply was “you guys are crazy!”. I walked away from the blanket for a moment and came back with something else and she said to me “I was just curious, I didn’t mean anything by the questions” and I said in return “It’s no problem, we get those questions all the time”. And we do. Our family looks visibly different than other families so we do open ourselves up to more stares and more questions. I am not really sure what causes more attention, the fact that we have six children who are fairly close in age, or the fact that we are an “international” family.
While we do often get many nice comments about our family, we also get the “that’s crazy” response too. Obviously this mom realized that her comments were a bit awkward. I don’t think my response or lack of response to “that’s crazy!” was anything impolite, I am just not sure what kind of response she was expecting from me. She certainly wasn’t paying me a compliment. She could have chosen to ask her questions and then made no comment at all.
We have made these choices for our family simply because they have been our choices, not because we want or need validation from others. I often wonder why people feel they have to comment at all? We do feel blessed at how God has chosen to form and grow our family and we love to talk about adoption. We also hope in some very small way that we can encourage others to consider adoption. It really was the whole point of making our blog public so that people can see, even though we are not biologically related, we still are a real family in every sense of the word.
~ Mama Jen
ABOUT MAMA JEN
Jen is a wife to one amazing husband and mom to six energetic kids. Visit Forever, For Always, No Matter What where she blogs about their Catholic faith, homeschooling and adoption.