Adoption, Destiny and Magical Thinking

By MATTHEW HUTSON

Illustration by KJ Dell’Antonia

I’m not a big believer in destiny. I’m squarely in the “stuff happens” camp. But the human tendency to feel that certain things were meant to be fascinates me. I’m impressed by our ability to extract a sense of purpose from the random events that make up our lives.
So in researching my recent book on magical thinking, I interviewed a psychologist about personal narratives — the way we tell stories out of our lives — and about how they might relate to perceptions of fate. He pointed me toward one of his collaborators, Miriam Klevan, a doctoral student at Northwestern University, who had interviewed 38 adoptive parents. It turns out that most of the parents had told her that their children had been brought to them by destiny.
This phenomenon grabbed me. I spoke with adoption professionals, who confirmed that most adoptive parents feel their children are meant to be theirs. And I heard from other like-minded parents. To me, seeing destiny in adoption was such compelling evidence of the strength — and occasional benevolence — of magical thinking. And, not having kids of my own, I was touched by the power of parenthood. Apparently the connection with one’s children can be so strong it feels as if the universe conspired to make it happen.
Of course, adoptive parents don’t have exclusive rights to the story of boy and girl meet baby, boy and girl fall in love with baby, boy and girl think they were meant to be with baby. Many birth parents also feel their children were destined to be in their lives. But when your child doesn’t come to you through “natural” means, the possibility of an intervening force — God, karma, destiny — becomes more salient. Adoptive parents don’t have as much control over their situation as other parents. They often adopt in response to infertility, and the adoption process is long and difficult. According to one adoptive mother, “The planets have to align.”
Ms. Klevan points out that adoptive parents might also feel more motivated than birth parents to believe in fate. Narratives of destiny provide a sense of legitimacy. Take one woman who told Ms. Klevan, “One little thing happening a different way would have kept us apart, but all these miraculous things happened.”
“She could have said ‘this is just a series of coincidences,’ but that’s such an unacceptable way to feel about your child. For most people, if you start going down that road, then this child isn’t yours … in order to parent effectively, parents must feel entitled to their children,” Ms. Klevan told me. It allows them to be disciplinarians and teach right and wrong. “Fate is a really useful way for adoptive parents to entitle themselves. ‘Of course I’m your mom! I was meant to be your mom! God said I was your mom! This isn’t coincidence! So go clean your room!’”
In researching adoption, I was particularly moved by the way many parents were able to see their hardships as necessary steps on the paths toward their children. Of the 19 couples Ms. Kleven spoke to, all of them had experienced infertility, and the majority told her it was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Yet these couples set aside crippling grievances as soon as they came in contact with someone who needed their love.
One woman I met with in Virginia exemplifies such a transformation. Cindy Bennett was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 35. She asked the surgeons to save what they could, but, she says, “they kind of had a fire sale.” The good news: She would survive. The bad news: She was now infertile. “I was really angry,” Ms. Bennett says. “I hated anybody who was pregnant.”
A year later, she and her husband, Randy, adopted, bringing home baby Jackson. “He healed my soul,” she says. Eight years later they adopted again— Carson. The matches immediately felt right. To Cindy, they were destined. In retrospect, she sees her cancer and infertility as “a gift.” Other parents also now feel grateful for any unpleasant plot points on the way to adoption. One adoptive mother who considers herself an atheist nevertheless quoted me a country song: “God bless the broken road that led me straight to you.”
But of course not everyone is as sold on the idea of destiny — even when adoption goes right. Another mother offered a more nuanced and conflicted perspective, one that resonates with how I think I would feel in her shoes. She wrote:

I don’t know if I’d say my children were “meant” to be mine — it does seem like a slap in the face to the sacrifices of their birth parents, as well as turning a blind eye to the losses my children may (or may not) feel about being adopted as they grow up.
But am I in awe of the amazing alchemy of timing, chance, life paths intersecting and a thousand other intangible happenings that made these children mine? Do I think about the small changes in those random happenings that could have brought other children into my family, whether biologically or by adoption? And do I gasp in wonder at how lucky I am that these are my children? At the alchemy that created my family?
Yes, yes I do.