Our adoption lawyer has nearly two decades worth of experience helping families adopt. She is as short in temper as she is in stature. Her fearless advocacy for Bolivian children has brought suits against corrupt judges, pushes piles of paperwork through a faulty system, and hangs on with a fierce tenacity when the process drags out for years.

Her third floor office takes up the space of a regular sized bathroom in a U.S. home. I stared at her with my jaw in my lap as I sat across from her at her desk littered with files, official documents, and little gifts from her clients, the kids she has helped.

“I get a call at least once a week like one of those from those ignorant Bolivians,” she spewed out after smashing her badly beaten cell phone on a stack of papers. She is Bolivian, by the way.

With a lead in like that, one must know what the person on the other line could have possibly said. She went on to explain that they call looking for help. Not help in the beautiful family sense. Help as in the book The Help. Maids. Houseboys. Servants. Slaves, to put it bluntly. They try to convince her that to adopt a child and allow him or her the security of room and board, and sometimes even education, whilst requiring “minimal labor” from them is actually helping society and cleaning up the streets. She no longer tries to explain the blistering error in this assumption. Angered too many times by the effects of an immature cultural perspective of adoption, she primarily services foreigners and international adoptions.

Appalling, right? Yet, you know it goes on, right?

Fast forward to the finalization of our adoption. Kaitlynn came to us three years ago this month. Her hair tainted orange from an unhealthy start in life. Scars on her body, their origins unknown, spoke of inner scarring deep in the soul. In the two and a half years of her existence it is probable she was exposed to the indecent reality of human baseness in it’s rawest condition.

Her room at our house, which she shared with her sisters, pulsated with sparkly flowers, soft blankets, cute clothes, and tons of toys. We read stories in the rocking chair. We had fun times of coloring together at a tiny pink table with pink chairs. She was really such a happy kid.

But when she was left to entertain herself a panic seized me like I had never known. No amount of reading or counseling can prepare you for the emotional barrage that consumes you as an adoptive parent. The moments hit and you have to deal with them. All I wanted to do was yell an emphatic, “NO!” She didn’t dig in her toy box. She didn’t look at books or even ask to watch cartoons.

She found a rag and started wiping everything. There were two other things she loved to do most. One was follow our maid around and chat with her as they did chores. The other thing she would do is find a comfy spot and just sit and stare. She would just sit for so long I felt compelled to engage her in doing something. Most two-year-old children are busy, busy, busy. I should have been grateful for her calm nature; instead it concerned me. And to have a child contented to do chores around the house? Answer to prayers, right? I was not content. I was scared.

Through tears on a friend’s couch I confided my anxiety, “I just don’t want her to grow up to be a maid.”

The stigma attached to “that class” of society, and the thought of her stooping to “that level”, riled me. It shames me to confess this now because this is obviously a classist prejudice darkening my soul. The thought of the swirling poverty “those people” are destined to endure made me tremble.

These intimate thoughts are laid bare in hopes of encouraging others with similar, possibly unidentified, struggles. The prejudice was only the icing on the cake. The crumbly substance below bore the brazen name: pride.

How would a career of that choice reflect on me? In what ways would I have failed her if she “ended up” in such a state? What would people say about our family if she turns out as a “failure”?

How selfish of me!

I tried to tell myself that my concerns were honorable. The statistics of abuse amongst those who work in the homes of others stack a fine argument for advising one to steer away from that line of work. Or this one was my favorite: surely God has placed her in a highly ambitious American family so that she can learn how to be successful in life. Oh how blindly I lied to myself.

Since that time I have shared these fears with close, trustworthy, people. To my surprise, their gentle rebuff remains unvaried. They don’t know each other, they live thousands of miles apart, yet they know the sweet voice of the Holy Spirit. They all say basically the same few truths that I need to hear to calm me.

- What would be so bad about her being a maid?

- Her destiny is not for you to design.

- Trust God.

Depending on the day, my responses to those truths varies. On the good days I remember that the skills of a maid are one in the same with managing a household as a wife, or mother; of working in a nursing home, or orphanage, or a wing in a hospital; and of keeping things tidy no matter where life takes you. On days when, by the mercy of God, I operate with more grace than comes natural to me, verses of scripture whisper in my mind telling me that the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are the least of these, and Christ humbled Himself, and a gentle and quiet spirit is precious. Then, in His supreme goodness and ever loving character, I feel the arm of my Lord around my shoulder and see the smile at the corner of His mouth as He suggests that maybe she has been placed in a highly ambitious American family so that we can learn from her true success in life.

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