This is a very common thing for people to say when they find out your children are adopted. I personally have been told this on a number of different times concerning my children. This is a comment I also remember hearing a lot as a child when people found out I was adopted.

As a young child, I never real understood the comment and felt it was a strange thing for people to say. As I got older, it bothered me. If it was not for luck I did not matter. Luck, how did that involve me? I was lucky that I found my lost glove on the bus. So, without luck I did not matter. My other thoughts about this, was something so wrong with me that I was lucky that my adoptive parents took me. A child does not want to be grateful for love, them just want to be loved and love back (Which loving back is not always so easy for some adopted children). As a young adult and maybe even an older teenager you are grateful for the life adoption has brought you. But I do not think that luck, and being grateful belongs in a child’s childhood.

As an adoptive mother, it bothers me to hear this comment from people. Which I always correct them by saying if anyone is lucky it is me that I am blessed to have this child to love and be a mother too. My favorite response is, “We are both blessed to have each other.”

I do not think people know what it sounds like when they say it or the effect one might feel from their choice of words. It is just something you might think about the next time someone says it to you. I know as an adoptive mother I do not want my children thinking they should be lucky we adopted them or grateful. I just want them to know that I wanted them with all my heart even before I knew about them, and they should feel truly loved, not grateful.