18 Stories About What Can Happen If You Decide to Adopt a Kid

Millions of babies in our world grow up without parents and many adults can’t or don’t want to give birth to kids. Sometimes they meet and make a family. However, things are totally different in real life than they are in dreams because adoptive parents and their children often have many issues. For instance, a person from the kid’s past life might suddenly show up out of blue, the kid themselves can go downhill, or the parents can’t figure out how to love the kid no matter how hard they try. The good thing is that occasionally these stories end up with happy endings.

Bright Side is sure that every person, whether it’s an adult or a child, has the right to happiness and love. We want to warn you that some of today’s stories might make you shed a tear — of both joy and sadness.

• My aunt and uncle had one biological child before her whole host of medical issues made any further pregnancies next to impossible. So they decided to adopt, one little boy and one little girl. After a year or 2, the boy started showing sensitivities to certain foods, which ended up being mainly to gluten. The kicker? One of my aunt’s biggest illnesses is celiac disease and she’s heavily involved with the National Celiac Foundation. Soon, someone from my cousin’s orphanage contacted my aunt and uncle to regretfully explain why my cousin had been left there by her birth mother. Her birth mother had lupus and left her there because she couldn’t take care of herself and her child. My aunt’s other chief medical issue is that she has lupus. © DevoutandHeretical / Reddit

• When I was a kid, I thought that either my brother or I were adopted. I wanted drama in my life, just like in the movies. Several years ago, I accidentally learned that my granddad is not my granddad by birth — he adopted my father. Everything became clear because my father doesn’t have anything in common with his father. Now I am not sure whether I should keep everything as it is (let my grandparents decide whether to conceal the info or not) or tell my dad about everything (he is 50+ now). I also have kids. I would tell them if they were adopted but this secret is not mine to tell. © unknown author / Ideer

• My friend has a daughter. She was adopted at the age of 4 months. Now she is 16. They were living happily until my friend’s great-aunt asked the girl to help her carry her heavy bags when she saw her outside. Later she revealed the family secret to the girl as a sign of gratitude. When my friend asked her why she had done it, the lady said she was old, she didn’t understand much, and after all, she didn’t know it was a secret. Later it turned out that the lady was simply feeling jealous because her son and grandson were going downhill, while this adopted girl appeared to be such a good child. “All secrets become true one day and you should be able to take responsibility for your previous actions,” the angry old lady said. They decided to not sue her and told the girl that this old lady is a liar. © irina.che / Pikabu

“A photo of my beautiful Russian birth mother in the late 1980s. I was adopted from Russia to New Zealand so I never knew what she looked like until I was 21 when I met her for the first time in Russia. It changed my life completely.”

• I was born in Cambodia but was adopted when I was about 8 months old. I lived basically my whole life in the USA. I still find it sorta funny that whenever I’m in line with my parents, everybody thinks I’m just a separate kid. Occasionally I would walk next to my parents and people would ask me if I was lost. © ItsTrueChaos / Reddit

• My mom told me a story about her classmate. They adopted a girl and told her that she was born to another woman. 10 years afterward, that woman decided to find her kid (they were living in neighboring towns so it wasn’t difficult), approached her on the street, and said that she was her birth mother. The girl got scared, ran away, and rushed to her friend’s house so that this lady wouldn’t find out where her real home was (the girl didn’t realize the lady had all the necessary information already). © RA3YMKA / Pikabu

• My husband and I are 25 years old. We have a son. A little while ago a tragedy happened in our friends’ life — they died in a car accident. They had a son who was 10 who survived. None of his relatives were going to adopt him so we decided to do it ourselves. As we were going through all the “joys” of bureaucracy, we found out that I was pregnant again — with twins. We still adopted the boy and now we have a big family: my husband, 2 sons and 2 twin daughters. We live in peace and harmony and we are very happy. © unknown author / Ideer

• When my mom was in her mid-30s... she had 4 miscarriages. Modern medicine allowed her to carry me to term. She should have stopped. She was also advised that more children would be “difficult” at her age. At age 40 she still wanted 3 more children so she and my father adopted, my sister, my brother, and my other sister “to fill the house with kids.” She was a little old. She didn’t know she had signed up for “Irish Triplets” (3 kids in diapers) or how difficult that could be. She also didn’t count on how difficult my brother’s physical disabilities were. If she didn’t help him exercise daily... he would never walk. Things went slightly downhill for 6 years. Then it got ugly. Then it got really ugly. All these old country ideas surfaced. She started abusing my brother. A few years later and that abuse hit my sisters, then finally it rubbed on to me. All in all, we survived and moved on. She passed away while we were in high school. © unknown author / Quora

“Here’s the first picture I’ve ever seen of my biological grandmother. I was adopted, and never knew where I came from. Apparently, that would be Ireland.”

• My mentor and good friend decided to adopt a kid a while ago. She collected a lot of documents for it. Since she adopted a “troublesome” boy, I was one of her official warrants (basically the person who guaranteed that she was able to raise a kid, that she has sufficient income and that she was emotionally stable). Everyone kept saying that it would be extremely difficult for her: the boy looks small for his age (1 year old), he is weak and will lag in mental development. He is 14 now and they live in Montenegro. He keeps winning awards in various sports competitions and gets certificates for the best performance in school. My friend said, “I simply saw that he was lacking love!” © Timofey Kryukov / Facebook

• My partner and I adopted 2 children. We could not have children of our own and we had undergone one course of IVF to try to conceive. After a lot of thought and investigation and discussion with professionals, we decided to adopt 2 brothers who were ages 5 and 6 at the time, and had been in foster care for 3 years. We knew that kids who are put up for adoption in the UK don’t generally come from happy, stable backgrounds so we were well aware that they would probably have behavioral/developmental difficulties. Our boys are 20 and 21 now. In my heart, I feel as though we were always meant to be their parents and they were always meant to be our kids. When we had IVF we produced 2 viable embryos even though the pregnancy didn’t last, and they gave us a ’photo’ of the 2 embryos they were implanting. I kept the photo as a reminder, but from that time on I had in my mind that there were 2 kids already out there just waiting for us to find them. And we did. © Ruth Alborough / Quora

• We had a friend who got married and divorced 3 times because she couldn’t give birth to a kid. At the age of 42, she got married again. Her neighbor, a young girl, gave birth to a baby boy and left him on my friend’s porch. The baby was adopted by her family and later a miracle happened. My friend gave birth to 3 sons, one after another. The adopted son is the most favorite in this family. © Naza Ulubekova / Facebook

• My youngest daughter came to live with us when she was 10, when my middle daughter brought her home for a sleepover that has lasted for 13 years. She had been through quite a bit by this age. I realized for the first time in my life that I had to love someone without any expectation of return. She may never love us back. I love my bio children with every fiber of my being and I would give my life for them, but I love her maybe a bit harder. She didn’t have the luxury of knowing that she was safe her whole life. She changed our lives. Today, my 4 kids are as thick as thieves. We are all very protective of her. She’s thriving in school as a nursing major. We are her people and she is ours. © Renee LaCoste Long / Quora

“I was adopted at birth, and I’ve been reunited with my half-sisters. We have the same father, we’ve been searching for each other for 20 years, and we got to meet in person for the first time a few days ago!”

• The following story took place with my friend’s sister. They couldn’t give birth to a kid for a long time. Doctors kept saying that it was possible, but that the chances may be too low. They also said that there are mothers who give their babies away right in the hospital and that they could put their name on a list and adopt a baby. 6 months later, a miracle happened — they conceived their own baby. Everything was great. When it was time for the birth, they went to the hospital. She was staying in one room with a young girl who gave her baby up a couple of hours after the birth and simply disappeared. The result: my friend’s sister checked out of the hospital with 2 babies. © Ksenja Mägi / Facebook

• This is something I struggled with enormously before we adopted. I don’t especially like babies. I like kids, especially teenagers (who entertain me enormously), but babies I’ve never connected with. I sort of assumed that all men were like that, but that there was some biological “switch” that would happen when you first saw your own baby that helped you overcome that. How would that leave me when I saw my adopted baby? I knew I’d grow to love him, but would I feel a connection when I first saw him. I worried about this for months. Finally, when my son was born we were so fortunate that we were present in the hospital, and his birth mother was gracious enough to let us in the delivery room 10 minutes after he arrived. How did I feel when I saw him? Like a switch had been thrown. I can’t describe it, but from the first moment I saw him, he was my son. I love him with all my heart. © Paul Johnson / Quora

• I have an aunt and an uncle who adopted a little girl (3 years old). 8 years have passed since that time and everything was great — the girl became a part of our family, as if she had been born into it. She didn’t know she was adopted. Recently we started to notice some strange behavior in her — she started to accidentally reveal some details that she couldn’t have found out by herself. For example, she told her friend about a brother that she seemingly has. The friend told this information to her mom and her mom passed it to my aunt. After having spoken to their daughter, my aunt and uncle found out that an old lady approached their daughter on the street and told her that her parents were not her birth parents and that she has a brother. They were secretly communicating by phone and even invited the girl to their home but the girl refused. After having learned that, my parents contacted the old lady and reminded her that divulging the secret of adoption is a crime. The old lady (who turned out to be her actual granny) understood everything and now their meetings take place under the strict control of her adoptive parents. As far as I know, everything ended well. But how could that old lady take it upon herself to reveal something like this? © Albertino1989 / Pikabu

Do you have friends who’ve adopted a kid/kids?