Matteo: An Adoption Story

Matteo has been featured twice on the Love Without Boundaries blog.  The first post was written about "Smiling Matt" and the second post, Matteo: An Adoption Story, was written by his mom - me. I was so honored when a staff member at Love Without Boundaries asked me to write a blog post about Matteo for their series on foster families.  I wrote from my heart not just about my love for an incredible little boy I get to call my son, but also for his foster parents.  The foster care director read my post and asked if she could share it with Matteo's foster parents so they know how valued their work is.  Without question, yes. 

File from Love Without Boundaries

Pictures and reports of Matteo's life before we knew him recently arrived in my e-mail inbox.  His orphanage in Fuyang is supported by Love Without Boundaries (LWB) and his lip repair and foster family were sponsored by the organization.  They run many wonderful programs for children across China.  In addition to sponsoring surgeries and foster families, they provide medical care to children so they can stay with their birth families, they set up schools inside orphanages and provide children with well-balanced meals.  These much-needed programs required a lot of resources, yet Love Without Boundaries still takes the time to catalog all the photos and reports for each child in their programs so that if they are adopted, they can one day pass along all this information to the new parents.

The Love Without Boundaries website has a link under it's Contact page called Request for Child Information.  Once the adoption has been finalized, adoptive parents may submit a request for any information the organization has on their child.  I filled out the online form and hit send, but wasn't sure what I would receive or how long it would take. 

Exactly a week later, we received the gift of a glimpse into Matteo's life before we met him.  Love Without Boundaries had responded to our request with a Dropbox link. I clicked on it to find four electronic folders from the different stages of LWB sponsorship: Matteo's two stays in healing homes, his hospital stay for his lip repair and his time with his foster family.  In each folder, meticulously labeled and organized into sub-folders were monthly reports (thankfully written in English) and pictures.  There were 170 pictures from his Anhui Healing Home stay alone! 

I will be forever grateful for the care Matteo received before he became part of our family.  He needed that surgery and of course he needed loving care, like every child deserves.  What we don't necessarily "need" is the information LWB provided.  As much as the origanization was able to share with  us, it still leaves many pieces of Matteo's early life unknown and questions unanswered since LWB can only provide information about Matteo's life while he was under their care.  Yet I will argue that every person deserves to know his or her history; therefore, I am as thankful to LWB for having the discipline and organization to record all this information for each and every child in their care as I am for the medical needs they fulfill. 

I spent an evening scrolling through all the pictures and enjoyed seeing images of him that I had never seen before.  It was also bittersweet to be playing catch-up through pictures of my son's early childhood, yet again, I'm thankful for everything and I wished there were more. 

Thriving on Love

"All the children who are held and loved will know how to love others.  Spread these virtues in the world.  Nothing more needs to be done."

- Ming Zi, Chinese philosopher, circa 300 B.C.

 

The subject of attachment is very dear to our hearts in the adoption community.  Forming a bond with trusted adults is a necessary developmental milestone for young children, yet those raised in orphanages have fewer opportunities to form healthy attachments.  If caregivers are overburdened by the number of kids they have to take care of or don't stick around for long, children don't have the opportunity to learn to love and trust. 

So that's why I feel so sad when I wonder whether our children are experiencing attention, physical affection and love while we are not with them.  And then I was relieved and feeling so fortunate when I learned that our children are benefiting from the work of two amazing organizations: Love Without Boundaries and Half the Sky. They do more than provide medical care and basic necessities for orphans in China - all so greatly needed - but their goal is to make sure each child in their care is loved. Because that's how children truly thrive.  One organization sponsored not only a surgery for our son, but also his foster family, where I hope he continues to live until we are permitted to travel to him.  The other organization has been providing training to the nannies in our daughter's orphanage, where the children receive loving, family-like care.  Although she was recently placed with a host family, she still participates in programs with her peers at the orphanage.