I have thought before about this– about what it means to be a wanted child.

like, how that concept is defined. Wanted, unwanted. Planned, unplanned. What are the criteria for this.

And how that connects to things like adoption– where the general understanding is that if you were adopted, your birth parents did not consider you a wanted child, but your adoptive parents wanted you very much.

and yet.

when I think about adoptive families, it seems to me that in most cases the adopted child is not the one they wanted.

At least, going by the order of what they attempt.

By that metric, the child they actually wanted was the one they tried and failed to conceive naturally. Failing that, their second and third choices may have been the child they could not conceive with fertility drugs, and the one they could not conceive with in vitro fertilization.

The adopted child, failing all those earlier attempts, was sometimes at least the fourth choice.

But then… looking at it that way, my mind has to concede that this means nearly all babies are unwanted.

because… even if you were conceived naturally by the birth parents who raised you, no medical intervention, no adoption?

Even then, it’s rare to conceive within the first month of trying. and yet, that is the ideal outcome for those who are trying to conceive.

So, for example, if your parents tried for six months to conceive a child, and finally managed on the sixth try? That means you were not plan A. You were backup plan F. There were five potential kids they would rather have had instead of you.

When you look at it this way… it looks bad for a second.

…but then it suddenly stops looking so bad at all, as you think about it more.

because, if they do prefer those kids they never had… then what do they prefer about them?

Only that they would have happened a little sooner.

other than that, there are probably no specific details they think would have been different between those kids and you.

they did not want “you” specifically. Nor did they want any other baby specifically. they wanted whatever baby they could get. the sooner the better.

but the timing wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. they are just glad they had a baby.

any feelings about you that were actually based on who you are, came much later.

Which, on one level, to me, feels like a bit of an insult to my ego.

to realize that for the first few months of my life, nobody loved me for who I was. Because that was impossible. Because “who I was” wasn’t even established yet, at all– and their reasons for love were unrelated to any characteristics that were established.

They didn’t love anything I can describe as “me,” by any thought process that makes sense to my mind. They loved the presence of a living infant human body. They would have loved it just the same, if nearly everything about it had been completely different from the beginning. That baby being “me” was irrelevant.

A humbling thought.

But I can’t really dwell on that.

Because, by the same logic, it can’t be an insult to me. Not by any definition of “me” that makes sense. “The baby that grew into me” isn’t a being that my current self can identify with, at all.

So, as long as my parents treated that baby well enough for it to grow up into me– into all the subsequent instances of “me” that I actually can remember and identify with– then it really doesn’t matter why.

And I think a similar thought process would apply if I’d been adopted.

because, if my birth parents had given me up, their reasons would be as unrelated to my actual self as my adoptive parents’ reasons for adopting me.

The reason in both cases would have been “because it’s a baby.”

The details of which baby would not matter. Only the circumstances of how and when they had the baby, which yes, they would have had feelings about. But not personal. Not to me.

Impossible for me to take personally.

Because I am not a baby. I completely replaced the baby, bit by bit, over the years. While changing, in form and function, so entirely that I do not even slightly resemble the thing I replaced.

What anyone felt about me as a baby has nothing to do with me now.

is this why I feel a certain distance whenever I think of the fond memories my parents have recounted about my infancy?

is this why the whole concept of people having or wanting babies feels so alien, so incomprehensible to me, on so many levels?

to be loved is to be changed, but then, so is everything. we are change. we are sequences of many different selves over time. frames in the animation of life.

always some number of selves ahead of a past one that was so different that it’s now dead, by any definition that matters.