ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the findings from an anthropological study of transnational adoption in Norway that took between 1999 and 2009, outlining how the participants the study handled the process of adopting a child from a distant and unknown country and who, in most cases, looks very different from its adoptive parents. It explores how the 'kinning' process transforms the unknown, unconnected child into 'our child'. Most adoptive parents undergo a practical and emotional journey that involves handling changes in the meaning of family, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood in Norway over the past hundred years. The chapter argues that these social statuses have become imbued with increased psychological elaborations and expectations, which, in turn, intensify the feelings of loss for those who cannot achieve them. It discusses the powerful emotionality that can accompany the personal situation of involuntary childlessness: To want but not to have biological children is a crisis, albeit a drawn-out and unpredictable one.
