I was just reading an interesting post in the blog, "The Life of a Texas Mom." Gwen, a Christian adoptive mom of three, details a conversation she had with a couple of the moms at her daughter's softball practice. One of them asked where her daughter got her blonde hair. Rather than go into detail about why one daughter had blonde hair and the others didn't, Gwen explained that her children were adopted.

The woman Gwen was talking to was offended that Gwen hadn't explained instantly that her children were adopted, and Gwen retorted that she tries to leave it up to her children to share that information about themselves (except when backed into a corner, as she apparently felt in this situation).

Gwen brings up a good point – that being genuinely curious is fine, but there are limits. Just because children look different than their parents, does that give others a right to pry into WHY they look different? Does it really matter whether they’re birth children, adopted children, children from a divorce or whatever?

Gwen wonders how the woman would have responded had her answer been, “Well, I had an affair and produced X child.”

The woman then went on to ask whether two of Gwen's daughters have the same mother. Flustered, Gwen responded, "Do you mean the same biological mother?" (She later wished she had just said, "Yes, they do!")

At this point in the conversation, another woman joined them and started singing Gwen's praises for adopting her children.

In her post, Gwen reflects:

For anyone that thinks we are saints for doing so let me explain. I did not adopt to "rescue" a child. I did not go into adoption with this saintly idea that I wanted to do a "good deed" and give "my part" back to society. I adopted my children because I wanted to be a Mommy and my husband wanted to be a Daddy. It was purely selfish on our behalf.

Gwen explains that she felt uncomfortable during the entire conversation, mainly because the women were singling her children out as oddities. “Do I want them hearing how different from their peers they are?” asks Gwen. “Do I really want them to overhear this conversation? The answer is NO!”

She wishes that people could simply view them as a family of five:

One Mom, one Dad, two little girls, and one little boy. This family of five lives together, loves together, laughs together, goes through hard times together, and forges through in this world together just like any other family does. Mommy and Daddy have brown hair and blue eyes with fair skin, one of the daughters and the son have olive color skin and black hair with dark brown eyes, and then there is the baby with dirty blonde hair, fair skin, and hazel eyes. Oh yes....and our family was built by adoption. That's it. That is all there is to it.