Assumptions: A Rant

Given that the title of this post is "A Rant", please consider yourselves duly warned that I am about to express my frustrations on the topic of Assumptions.

This has been building for a while. Throughout the process of taking classes and waiting to be matched with a child, I've been working very hard to answer the questions people have about adoption. More than once I've become irritated because someone will assume that they know what is going on or how things work. I could count on one hand (less, really) how often those assumptions have been correct.

Today it seems that logic and reason have gone out the window and now people are making assumptions based on... I don't know what... maybe what they want life to be like?

So, let me clear a few things up. And let's do it by putting you, the reader, in someone else's shoes.

Let's say that you live in a house with a family or whoever. It's where you live. It's familiar. You know what to expect there. Someone comes along and says, "Hey, you shouldn't live there. You need to move over here with these other people." and you don't have a choice. Right there, on the spot, you have to grab whatever it is you can to take with you. What if you were a husband or a wife and someone removed from your family and put you in a whole new family without you ever having the choice? And in a few days or months or years, you get told that now you have to move to a new family. How would you feel? Would you be excited about having to learn a new family over and over and over? What if you are the wife and the new husband wants dinner cooked a different way? Or a husband and the new wife wants you to do different activities after dinner/work than you are used to (or that you know how to do)? What if she thinks you should spend time working on the car when your last 2 families never showed you about cars but did teach you about video games? How do you feel? How do you act?

Close your eyes and imagine how that feels.

My child has been through that. So the county is trying to make it a lot easier on him. Rather than saying, "Hey, you have a new mom. Surprise!" like they could, they are saying, "Hey, here's the mentor you've been asking for." He actually gets the option to get to know me before being forced to live in my home. Wouldn't you like that better?

This gets me to the assumption part for today. I don't know when people suddenly decided that "Mentor" means "Moving In". It doesn't. I've mentored several students. Not a single one of them lived with me. I know people at church who mentor teens and young adults. Not one of them lives with the other. In fact, I've observed that almost never does mentoring mean moving in. Though, if circumstances permit, after that relationship is formed, one may eventually come to live with the other. But not until after a relationship is formed.

This week I've learned that for the purposes of my getting to know a child, people have begun assuming that, with no prior relationship, someone who I am mentoring will suddenly move into my house. WHAT??

Look, I've said this over and over. This is how I operate on a daily basis with every subject. If you want to know, ASK. DO NOT ASSUME. In case you don't know me well enough to know how I respond to one or the other, let me spell it out: If you ask a question, you'll get an answer. If you don't like my attitude when I answer, you can tell me. If I've got a bad attitude, we can talk about it and get it straightened out. If, however, you assume that you know what is going on, you are almost guaranteed to get a bad attitude from me. Or it's possible that you might get an angry attitude from me.

There are two primary ways you can push my buttons and get an instantaneous irritated response. One of those is to assume when you haven't taken the time to gain knowledge or to reason based on prior knowledge.

So, as I said previously, I have been asked to mentor a child. This does not mean the child will be placed in my home at the end of the mentoring time period. (It definitely does not mean the child is moving in now.) And it does not mean that I will end up adopting this child. But it does mean that we are building a relationship and that, at some point in the future, we can decide whether we want that relationship to move into the parent-child realm. But it's not a guarantee. So if you have questions, ask.