Confession: My perspective is limited
A few days ago my oldest child was not happy with me when I told the older kids that they needed to wash, dry, and put away their laundry before any screen time that day. Normally this request wouldn’t bother him but on this day he decided it was too much and asked, “why do we have to do chores when we are off school but when we go to school you stay home and do nothing all day?”
Um, excuse me? You think I do nothing all day?
Just, wow.
If you’re a stay at home parent or a working parent then you know that my child was clueless to all of the things a parent does for their child/home/family.
Here’s what I’m having a tough time with: I don’t exactly fault my child. That was simply his perspective and he spoke it. Was he wrong? Maybe in some ways but if he doesn’t see me doing “things” then maybe in some ways he isn’t wrong for his vantage point. Perhaps it’s just an incomplete perspective. Does incomplete mean wrong? That’s what I’m going to unpack in this post.
Let’s think about it this way: if you’re on one side of the road and there is an elephant and a chicken, maybe from where you are standing you only see the elephant because its size is blocking your view of the chicken. So you think there is only one animal. If you’re standing on the other side of the road then you can see there is a chicken and behind it is a massive elephant. From that view, you would say there are two animals. There are two perspectives and vantage points. Are there two correct answers or just one? If the question is how many animals do you see? then both answers are correct. But what if the question is how many animals are there on the road? Then there is only one correct answer.
This analogy is what makes this blog post risky. It is going to be incomplete. Does that mean the content is wrong? Maybe so.
This blog post is actually an explanation for what motivated me to write my book Dew Drop from Heaven. The point of writing it was not to become popular or famous or make money. The main purpose was simple: I found healing through writing my narrative on my adoption experience. The secondary purpose was to nudge others impacted by adoption to find their own healing. It was that simple.
By the time I was in my mid-30’s I became disheartened at the number of adoptees I knew who were raised by Christian families but later rejected Christianity or had strained relationships with their Christian adoptive parents. That didn’t make sense to me. I imagine that it didn’t make sense to the Christian adoptive parents either. I knew a handful of adoptees who had close relationships with their adoptive parents and surprisingly, they were all raised in non-Christian homes. What were those families getting right that the Christian families weren’t?
When talking with the adoptees who left the Christian church or had poor relationships with their Christian adoptive parents, I began to realize that many of the things they felt were similar to things I felt. Nobody was talking about it though because collectively we had experienced or felt like our perspective was offensive, not allowed, or simply, wrong.
It seemed like the root issue was the failure to talk and have conversations where adoptees were allowed to have a perspective. Maybe they could only see the elephant and were told over and over again that they were wrong because they couldn’t see the chicken—but hearing they were wrong only caused many of the adoptees I knew to shut down or shut out their parents. What they needed was someone to listen, walk over to their side of the road and say, “it makes sense that you say there is only an elephant. Would you like to come and see what I see from the other side?” That approach might have been the thing that made all the difference.
Publishing my book was my best effort to reach out to people impacted by adoption and encourage them to remember that every story from every vantage point is unique. I don’t think any one perspective is wrong or that only one is right. Maybe they are all just incomplete and we won’t get to a better understanding until we are willing to listen to one another and allow each person to have a voice—especially the adoptee and birth parents.
So, back to the question: is an incomplete perspective wrong? It probably is some of the time for some things. I don’t really want to get into a debate over this question. When it comes to complex adoption issues, I’d like to pose a different way of defining an incomplete perspective: maybe that perspective is partially correct. I think that is where some of the Christian adoptive families got it wrong. I can’t prove it and I don’t have data to back this up but I think that many of the adoptees I knew who were raised in Christian homes received the message that their incomplete perspective was wrong rather than partially correct. Here’s an example: an adoptee says they feel like they lost their family of origin and an adoptive parent says it isn’t true because what really happened is that they gained a loving family and should feel special. In this scenario, who is correct? Both parties. Different perspectives and different experiences but only one perspective is corrected and replaced with another. Therein lies the problem. It needs to be flipped both directions.
I wonder what would have happened if, instead of being told their perspective was wrong, the message the adoptee got instead was: you are partially correct. In that scenario an adoptive parent would also validate the adoptee’s experience and say that it is ok to feel loss and grieve over severed relationships with their birth family. It doesn’t have to just be one (lost connection to a family) or the other (gained a new family)—it can be both. Sometimes, when only one perspective or one truth is allowed, it can cause undue harm.
The next time you think someone is wrong, consider their vantage point and ask yourself if it is possible that the person is partially correct with a limited perspective. Maybe it will allow you to create an opportunity for learning with the result being both of you developing a fuller perspective.
Julie Kehau 