a couple of days ago, angie weldon, commented on our little blog. ooh. i felt so special!
in honor of her sharing her family’s story of adopting their daughter, emery, i decided to do a little adoption series on our little blog.
i’m sure this will come as a shock to none of you to learn that i am adopted.
i don’t remember where i came from because i was just a baby when i arrived in the USA to my forever family. but for the first [almost] 6 months of my life, i was somewhere else, with some other people, in some other country.
south korea to be exact.
south korea has never had an official “one child policy” like china. however, during the 1980’s the government had a strongly emphasized campaign to “have a single child and raise it well”.
the obvious preference was for a boy and many families had multiple children until they had a boy. many children were abandoned during this time due to the encouragement of the government to have only one child.
one statistic i read said that in 1986 there were 18,700 abandoned or orphaned children in south korea. the total population of south korea at that time was around 42 million. to put it in perspective, in 2010, the state of california had a population of around 38 million.
but this isn’t a sad story about how i was one of those abandoned babies. this is a joyous story of God’s plan for my life.
i came home april 25, 1987. my parents adopted me through holt international children’s services, the first organization to facilitate international adoptions in south korea. the same organization katherine heigl and josh kelley worked with to adopt their daughter, naleigh.
people often ask me what age my family decided to tell me i was adopted. i always knew. well i’m pretty obviously a different ethnicity than my parents so it would be hard to hide for very long. and it’s part of my story…and my family has always celebrated that.
there have been hard times in my life. understanding yourself as an adopted kid with no biological history can be tough sometimes. but i feel so grateful. not because i’m one of the lucky kids that got to have a real family, but because i feel like i understand the Gospel so much more than i would otherwise.
so yes. i’m adopted. by my parents and by my God. and what a lucky girl i am.