Meant to be?

As you may or may not know, I'm the owner of AdoptShoppe.com and we sell a variety of adoption gifts and books. As the owner of the store, I have the freedom to merchandise it, to some degree, to my own sensibilities. Hence, you won't find certain popular adoption lifebooks because I don't like the adoption language used.

What you also won't find is merchandise tagged with stuff like, "Meant to Be" because where are the birth parents left in the equation? Some poor Korean girl factory worker falls in love, gets pregnant outside of marriage and makes an adpption plan because her baby is actually meant to be mine?

No, sorry. That doesn't work for me. I don't know that my children, any of them, were meant to be. I had a few miscarriages before my eldest was born. I had lots more after she was born. Had any of those other pregnancies been viable, my family size and make-up would have been different. I don't think I was meant to suffer all those losses. I think I was meant to be open to life's possibilities, the good and the not-so-good.

Back to "meant to be." For those of us who believe in reincarnation (I'm open on the subject, would like to believe it's possible), there is the belief that we tend to travel in familiar groups, the roles simply change. So, your wife in this life could have been a brother or distant uncle in a previous life. Sometimes we orbit close, sometimes not. If this is the case, perhaps our children's birth parents (unknown to us now but maybe not in the long continuum of things) are fellow travelers. We have been connected over many lifetimes and will continue to be over many more.

Now that's something I could put on a t-shirt - Fellow Traveler on Life's Continuum. What do you think?