We wanted to "grow" our family?

Okay, for years now, I keep hearing this from adopters or prospective adopters--the whole, "we wanted to grow our family."

What does that even mean? I'm being serious. [Adoptive parents feel free to chime in and explain what you mean when you say this, because it truly baffles me--but also understand I still might not like it...]

I honestly don't get it. And even more honestly, for some reason that I have yet to identify, every time I hear it, it makes me bristle and cringe. To again be quite frank, I hate the phrase. But I don't know why I hate it so much.

Why does it bother me so much? Fellow adoptee bloggers and readers does it bother you at all when you hear this phrase, or am I the only one? And if it does bother you, do you mind sharing your reasons as to why it bothers you, because maybe that'll help me figure out why in the world I can't stand it?

I often will have a gut reaction to something, but at times it takes a while before I can connect the emotional dots back to their originating thoughts. (The result of years of learning to suppress what I was actually thinking and feeling...)

All I know is that the explanation of "we adopted not to save a child but to grow our family" just rubs me the wrong way, and yet I don't know why...

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Ok, and then, just another random thingy...

When I hear people express all the reasons as to why family preservation programs and efforts won't or can't work in said country, I also bristle and get incredibly annoyed.

Can't, can't, can't.

Anything is possible. The wall in Germany came down. Helen Keller wrote some of the most beautifully descriptive essays I have ever read. Apartheid fell in South Africa. Segregation finally ended here in America. Man walked on moon.

Now of course, Germany still deals with the scars. Helen Keller was still deaf and blind. South Africa still struggles. Racism is by no means eradicated from America. And there are still those who disbelieve the moon landing.

But there are also still those who continue to press on--those who work to learn from the past in Germany, those who continue to seek out solutions to overcome deafness and blindness, those who struggle together toward healing in South Africa, those who fight to rise above racism, and those who actually can personally attest to their participation in moon landings from the crews on the ground to the crews in space.

And besides, "can't" never got anyone or any nation anywhere.

I've heard it said, "don't let what you can't do stop you from what you can do." I say don't say "can't" and watch what formerly impossible feats and tasks finally become possible.