First let me say my son is a generous and very given person, by nature. Walking around Manhattan can be very expensive since he wants to give money every pan handler (usually its my money). He once offered his un eaten portion of his sandwich. My wife and I want him to keep that spirit of goodness and decided last year that we’d save all our change for a year and during Christmas holiday. He would he could use half to get our gifts, and the other half he would donate to a local charity.
It was decided that he would personally get some toys for less fortunate children. We ended up choosing New York Foundling, which is where I happened to have been adopted from. He went with my wife out shopping and purchased fifty dollars of assorted toys.
The week before Christmas he and The Wife went to New York Foundling located on 17th and 6th Ave to drop the gifts off. When i got home from work my wife said he was slightly disappointed since all he was able to do was drop it off at the front desk. My little man wanted to give the gift out to the kids himself.
Fast forward to this past week. My wife received an email from New York Foundling, thanking my son for his generosity, along with a picture of children holding gifts received vía donations.
While the point of donating is to show my son the ways of giving back or helping others, it pained me to see the pictured attached with the email. Though it was filled with happy and smiling children, it hurts to know that these kids have uncertain future ahead of them. I don’t know the statistics for children who are up for adoption, or how many actually get placed in welcoming homes, but it hurt to see that some of those children are about my sons age (9 years old). I know that it is often said that older they are, the less likely hood they are of being adopted.
So here I am, unsure of what to do? While I personally don’t want any more children of my own the thought of changing diaper is not what I see in my future, though adopting an older child has crossed my mind. This leaves me in the middle of a bind. While many will say, “Where there is a will, there’s a way”, but reality is, that while my change of career has brought me tons of joy it has come with a finacial sacrifice. I’m currently not making anyway near what i was making before. I know that to even think of adopting I would have to think about how I’m doing financially first. Wondering where do I go from here…
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