Lisa Harper recently published a children’s book with her adopted daughter Missy, called Who’s Your Daddy?, that explores Missy’s quest to find out more about her heavenly Daddy.
Learn more about Who’s Your Daddy? here.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
There are so many things about adoption that have surprised me in the best of ways. And I’d say the biggest surprise for me is how quickly it became a non-thing. A non-issue.
I think I assumed there’d be kind of this line of demarcation. That I would always kind of be hit in the face every time I looked at Missy, thinking, “She isn’t my biological child.” Almost like there’s this asterisk next to her as my daughter. But t’s like it immediately went away. It’s funny that even though my little girl is from Haiti, so we don’t look exactly the same – she has curly hair and I have straight hair – I forget that I did not give birth to this kid.
We were at the doctor’s office recently. My little girl has HIV, so the doctor is very fastidious if she has any tiny, little infection. He’ll spend a long time on it even though her HIV is undetectable.
But she had this little, infected mosquito bite on her shoulder. The doctor spent what felt like hours. It was only a couple of minutes. But he was just focused on this one little infected mosquito bite. Just wondering why this infection got past her immune system because it’s so good now.
And I’m waiting and waiting and waiting and watching and watching and finally I went, “Dr. Wilson, my skin does exactly the same thing every time I get bit.” And I hike up my pant leg to show him where I have an infected mosquito bite. He just looked at me quizzically like, “Um, yea, she’s adopted.” It was hilarious because I went, “Oh. Oh yeah.” I literally said that out loud because I had forgotten.
In that moment at the doctor, there was my child from Haiti that I brought home at two and a half. You would think I would remember that she’s adopted. But I forgot it almost as quickly as I had her home because God just sovereignly knit her into my heart and my soul. She’s my child. I very rarely now say she’s my adopted daughter. She’s just my daughter.
