November is National Adoption Month. This month, I'd like to take the opportunity to reflect on the journey we have personally undertaken. The following post was written in October, but I have held it for this occasion.
It was one year ago this month that Troy held me as I wept at the devastating news that our third, and what would be our final, attempt at IVF had failed. After I had dried out, he sat down across the table from me and gave me a directive. "Research all of our options. I want to know everything that we can do." As the planner of the family, the person who loves to research and dig into something, I was grateful to accept the task he had set me to. It gave me something to think about. It made me feel like I was moving in a direction. It gave me some purpose. I believe he knew that it was exactly what I needed.
A week later, we sat back down and I had a pro and con list for every option that was available to us including accepting the mantle as permanent DINKs (dual income no kids), embryo adoption and international adoption. I remember that the domestic infant adoption section of my list had a particular concern of mine in bold under the cons: Domestic adoption laws don’t inspire confidence of permanency. Also under the con: Open Adoption.
I can't speak for any other prospective adoptive parents (PAPs), but from what I have gleaned from our agency, and from reading about adoptions in the era of openness, my stance was not atypical. Social workers and authors have said that this is because we PAPs are often insecure about our right to parent after often failing to become pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term. And those insecurities mean that we perceive birth families as threats to our authority. All I knew was that in every Lifetime Movie I had ever watched (unfortunately Lifetime was the only experience I had of adoption at that time) the plot line revolved around biological parents returning and either legally or illegally regaining custody of their children. Those story lines certainly didn't "inspire confidence of permanency."
I tried to convince Troy that international adoption was the way to go. Not only did 5 weeks in Russia sound like an adventure, but we would not have to worry about those pesky birth parents stalking us or stealing our baby back in the middle of the night. But the cost and time frame were hard to justify and Lifetime Movies were a horrible source upon which to base this life-changing decision.
I sought out information from our agency, the Independent Adoption Center, primarily because their placement time frames seemed to be the shortest around. I read about Open Adoption skeptically, thinking it was more a necessary evil that we would have to learn to cope with in order to shorten our wait time, than a preferred way of life. Eventually, we chose the IAC, though our reluctance in open adoption was ever-present.
For our homestudy, we were required to read two books. Everyone read the first, Children of Open Adoption, and we got to choose our second. Since going down this road of open adoption, I had sought out what seemed to be the bible on Open Adoption, a book entitled Dear Birthmother, co-written by our agency's founder and a pioneer in the field of open adoption. Since I already owned that book, I choose it as our second title.
I have long been fascinated with the power of the written word and love reading letters, which made our choice of Dear Birthmother a particularly moving one. The book is composed mainly of correspondence between members of the adoption triad (birthparents, adoptive parents and adoptees) explaining the reasons they chose adoption, and their wishes for their loved ones that support the dismantling of the four myths of adoption, some of which I admittedly believed. The poignancy of the letters and the deep expressions of love and hope with which the adoption decision was made made me cry and made me think.
All of a sudden, it wasn't, as one of my old colleague's mentioned, "adopting the birth parent, too." It was honoring the role that another family played in our child's life. It was respecting their sacrifices, and the hope and expectations that drove them to this decision. It was allowing our child the answers to all of the tough questions from the very people that made the decisions. It was also allowing us the opportunity to share something special with even more people.
On occasion, I will re-read my journal from a year ago when we were weighing our options. I laugh now because each entry seemed to point in a different direction. It truly seemed we were a bit rudderless there for a time. But now, with experience and research, and a good dose of reality, I can say that our compass is pointed firmly due north, toward our future with an Open Adoption, no longer a burden, but a blessing for our family's future.
No comments:
Post a Comment