Children drop into your life.  Not on top but in.

There was a game I used to play as a kid.  It was called Perfection.  There were pieces in different shapes and a board with the corresponding shapes.  You would push the board down, then you had to get all the pieces in before time ran out. When time ran out the board popped and all the pieces would scatter.

I kind of hated this game.  It ticked like a bomb, and then it would pop with an unnecessarily loud noise. Anything short of perfection was failure, and I think this game gave me a complex.

But there was something satisfying when you beat the clock and got that last piece to sink into the hole.  The hole that it was designed for.

I was thinking about this game, when I was thinking about what it means to accept a child into your life.

I’ve heard it from countless parents, whose children came to them in every way, but when that kiddo shows up, it feels as if they had always been there.

There was a recent interview with Sandra Bullock,  and she was talking about meeting her adoptive son.  She said she looked at him and said, “Oh there you are.” She said he fit in the crick of her arm.

Al Roker, one of the interviewers, who has several adopted siblings and an adopted daughter himself shared a similar story about becoming an adoptive parent.  He said when he picked up his daughter, he looked in the back seat, “There was nobody there an hour earlier, and then there was MY girl.”

That’s how children drop into your life. They don’t come in and land on top of your life.  They show up and slip into a spot that was always made for them.  They fit like a glove into a hole you never knew was there.  And the acceptance is instant.

You look at them and say, “I have just met you, but somehow, I knew you all along.”

I was thinking about kids slipping into their perfect spot, and I was thinking about the game perfection.  One is blissful moment, and the other is a stressful game that is probably used to test the IQ of spies.  The correlation isn’t “perfect” and neither is that pun.

However, there is that satisfaction when you know you’ve found the piece that fits perfectly.  And your kiddo will feel like your perfect piece in your life.