More Love, Less Panic: 7 Lessons I Learned about Life, Love, and Parenting After We Adopted Our Son from Ethiopia - Hardcover

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I was far from home, away from my wife and kids, sitting in a dusty café in Addis Ababa, between a woman I’d never met and our five-year-old son, who didn’t speak a word of English.

Now, years later, my family looks very different from most. I have a son and a daughter who have lived their whole lives in Southern California and I have another son who spent the first five years of his life in Africa. My eldest son and my daughter grew up going to birthday parties at the beach and at Disneyland. My youngest child once was chased through his grandmother’s home by a stray hyena. As I said, my family is different than most.

This book is not about that.

This book is not about how my family is different than other people’s families because at heart, we are the same. I have learned many lessons since the day I sat in that café in Addis Ababa, but they were not lessons about how to parent a child who was different than me. They were lessons about how to parent all of my children. The only thing that’s different about my family is that sometimes the differences we shared made the lessons I learned stand out a bit more clearly.

Because my son was five years old when we met, I learned that it was far better to influence my kids than to try to control them. Because my son didn’t speak any English, I learned that I wasn’t very good at worrying, no matter how much I practiced. Because my son spent his first five years in Africa, I learned about perspective and seeing life through my kids’ eyes. Because every day of raising my son presented new challenges, I learned that not nearly perfect was, actually, more than good enough.

I will never forget the day I met my son, just as I will never forget the day any of my kids came into my life, no matter the circumstances. I was already a father, twice over when I met my son and his mother in that dusty café in Addis Ababa.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to learn everything I would ever need to know about being a parent.

To all three of my children.

LESSON ONE

IT’S BETTER TO INFLUENCE THAN TO CONTROL

How Nati’s Mother Taught Me about Letting Go

One day, my wife and I decided to adopt a child from Ethiopia, in spite of the fact that we had two perfectly good children right in our very own home.

We had our first child—our son Clay—when we’d been married for two years; our daughter, Grace, was born about two and a half years later. One boy, one girl, and that was that. Or at least that was the plan. I’d never wanted more than two kids. Truth was, raising two kids kept my wife and me so busy that sometimes it already felt like we had a dozen. And adoption was never something we’d considered or even discussed, except in the vaguest “we really ought to do something for the world, like adopt a needy orphan or sell all of Clay’s and Grace’s toys and give the money to the homeless” sort of way. The first time I can really remember my wife and me even really discussing the idea was after I’d read an article in our Sunday newspaper about the AIDS crisis in Ethiopia.

The story was straightforward. “What Will Become of Africa’s AIDS Orphans,” by Melissa Faye Greene, described how the AIDS epidemic in Ethiopia had left countless children orphaned and in need of care. I suppose I’ve read a lot of articles over the years that were similar to that one in some ways, but this was different. The way that story was told moved me in ways that no other story had.

That was my first lesson.

So much of parenting seems to be about control. My children were six and four years old. Because I was a stay-at-home dad, I was in charge of feeding them, dressing them, and getting them to bed at night. In charge. Because that’s what parents expect to be. In control. It was, I believed, my job to make my children into successful, intelligent, kind, thoughtful adults capable of professional and personal excellence. Also, my wife wanted grandchildren. But not too soon. I was well meaning, determined, and focused on doing my job as a parent as it was possible to be. After all, I was in charge.

And yet when it came to one of the most important life-changing decisions I’d ever make, I was more or less carried along by the current. The paper came. I read an article. I said a few things to my wife. My life changed forever.

•   •   •

EVEN THOUGH MY LIFE was simpler before our third child came home to us, it often felt more complicated. I worried about Grace’s nap schedule and the all-important question of whether she was getting enough midday sleep. I worried that Clay was far too cautious during recess. Why was he more interested in exploring the cracks on the pavement than in the basketball games being played all around him? Was he aggressive enough to succeed in the world? And what about the food they ate? Clay was a picky eater. Grace wasn’t all that fussy, but still I worried. . . . Living in Los Angeles, where almost everyone we knew had at some point dealt with body issues, had left me worried about how to feed my kids. I wanted Clay to eat enough so he’d grow, but I didn’t want to put out so much food every day that I somehow wound up contributing to Grace’s developing any kind of problems later on in her life. It seemed to me then that every choice I made could and would forever determine not only what sort of lives my kids would have but who they would forever be. My life felt more complicated than it does now—not because it actually was more complicated but because I was convinced that my every action could, if properly executed, ensure that my children would lead lives of unending good fortune and success. My life felt complicated and burdensome because I was trying to carry more than anyone really could. I was, in many ways, like a man complaining about how heavy his car is, because he’s trying to lift it instead of just getting in and driving.

And then the Sunday paper came.

I read that story that I’d found buried between the sports sections and the front page. I gave the article to my wife and then, after she’d read it and had a good cry, I said, almost casually, “You know, we could adopt a kid from there.”

And here, I have to be honest. I’ve gotten a lot of compliments about deciding to adopt. My favorite, I think, was when my sister said, “You know, you could rob a bank or two and still go to heaven.” I’m very proud of what my wife and I decided to do. But the truth, the absolute 100 percent real truth of the story, is that I never ever thought my wife would do it.

It’s not that I didn’t think my wife was a good person. She was and is. It’s just that Mary and I already had a full life. We had our two kids, who we adored, friends, family . . . pretty much everything we needed. We weren’t looking to add anything to our life, except maybe, since our kids were both so young, a bit more free time. Maybe some naps. But another kid? No way.

Mary and I had met about ten years before that magazine article. I had been complaining to my friend Paul that my life felt dull and predictable. Paul wisely told me that if I was bored, I should start doing things that scared me. And so, since I was single, I decided I’d try asking out the prettiest girl I saw at a party I was going to, whoever she turned out to be. That was Mary. I got her phone number, and not long after, Paul got to be my best man at our wedding. When I tell my kids now that I fell in love with Mary just ten seconds into our first phone call, I...