As an adoptive father, I celebrate parents who create redefined family relationships

• Michael McSurdy is the president and CEO of Family & Children’s Service, a non-profit serving more than 60,000 Tennesseans each year.

November is National Adoption Month, a time set aside to celebrate and appreciate adoption and the many ways families are formed.  I have a personal appreciation for the power of adoption, as adoption was my path to fatherhood. 

I also appreciate that adoption is a happy circumstance born of great loss and trauma. Regardless of child welfare system involvement, incapacity or death of a parent, or voluntary relinquishment by a parent, each circumstance has at its core the loss of a child’s earliest relationships and the loss of a parent’s immediate identity.  In adoption, profound happiness and profound sadness coexist. 

Adoption also resides within a continuum of permanency options for a child.  All children require permanent, loving relationships to develop and thrive. Adoption is a means of legally creating such a relationship, which must be nurtured by the adoptive parent and the community to ensure its lasting and deepening. 

Familial relationships are redefined with adoption

During National Adoption Month, I have stressed the appreciation for the variety of ways children and families achieve permanency. About 60,000 children in Tennessee (and 2.5 million nationally) have permanency in the homes of their grandparents and other relatives. 

They are with these relatives for the same variety of reasons a child might come to be adopted, but their permanency may not be legally recognized, and often it is not. Parental rights are typically not terminated. While loss is still core in this permanency, it may be far less deep and related to a redefining of familial relationships, as opposed to the severing of those ties.

Within the child welfare system, a limited number of children aging out of custody may achieve permanency through an expressed, long-term commitment from the family they have joined through foster care placement.  Again, this is permanency without a legal relationship and permanency, which may or may not include termination of parental rights.  This permanency also incorporates varying levels of loss for the child.  In this case, permanency may later be legally acknowledged through an adult adoption, which is how my son came to my family. 

Let's also celebrate and respect birth parents

In November and always, I am thankful to have become a father through adoption.  And I am thankful that those I love and work with/for understand my path to parenthood. I am blessed that my three children are firmly connected to family and will always know love. 

I also understand that each day I am their father, I share my parenting role with others who conceived and ushered them into the world and to me. And because of the love I feel daily, I know and respect their loss. So, I encourage us all to celebrate and respect birth parents.

I invite all of us not only to embrace adoption as a means of building families but also to realize that children and those who parent them come together in many ways.  Remember that lasting relationships can form out of foster care and that so many grandparents become parents again launching children into adulthood while grounding them in forever families.  I encourage you to consider if you might be a permanent resource to a child through adoption, foster care, or relative care. 

And lastly, please take time to recognize the relationships that have given you the security and permanency to thrive and that have allowed you to support this same security in younger people. 

I greatly value the strength developed in me by my parents and grandparents (who also cared for me as a child), and I know I am richer for having shared that strength and love with my children, who thankfully made me their father through adoption. 

Michael McSurdy is the president and CEO of Family & Children’s Service, a non-profit that offers more than a dozen different services creating a safety net to ensure that all children and families can be safe and healthy, serving more than 60,000 Tennesseans each year.