Frontier

My mom and I were looking at the rows of dogs confined in their cages in the pet store tonight and none of them felt like mine, nor like it should be mine.  Maybe I had no emotional peak because I know the dog technically won't be "mine", it would be my mom's, but I would think I'd feel at least something; it'd be an addition to our family. 

And it occurred to me that maybe this is why people have their own children, and don't adopt.   Because if they adopt, there's this little person that is not technically theirs, and doesn't have their blood, and doesn't have their smell, and doesn't look like them, and doesn't really resemble them.  I think we all seek to obtain the things and the people that are reflections of ourselves, somehow, but maybe there's a point at which you stop trying to see yourself out there.  What does it feel like to go about life and seek the truly unknown?   To go where you don't see yourself?  

I don't know what that leads to, and I don't know how to begin to list the different ways in which this manifests, aside from children and the decision to adopt or not to adopt, or to have kids, at all.  

I've never been a person to step up to bat and say Okay, this is a duty, and I'll just do it.  I have always counted my feelings on the matter, sometimes so heavily that I've talked myself out of duties, or outright shunned them.  So I'm amazed at the idea of people who take something like a phrase from the Bible, and interpret it as God's suggestion that they should adopt, and then they do adopt, and they do it merely because another life needs them.  This is so foreign a concept to me that I can actually feel my neurons firing when imagining what that might feel like.