He will become yours, and yet you will be powerless to heal all the hurts of his beginning or the new hurts that will visit him. As your child grows, he will experience those losses in differing ways. He may long to see or know about his birth family, or he may wish for a relative who looks like him. He may fear that he will be abandoned again. We learn to live on and enjoy life, but the loss is always present.
Adopted children are over-represented in the offices of counselors and psychotherapists.
That doesn't mean they have bad lives or bad parenting. It means that adopted persons have psychological challenges that those who are not adopted don't have. For them, growing up means learning to integrate their beginnings and losses with their experiences of being adopted. It means coming to terms with the missing parents without the advantage of having them around to help with the process. People worry about whether they will love their adopted child right away, and they worry about whether the child will love them in return.