Adoption Support at Forever Parents

Adoption Interviews: second installment

Here are the second two in our series of interviews with adoptive and waiting parents that I did through e-mail and on our adoption forum. In an effort to show the many paths adoption can take, I’ll try and choose two that pursued or are pursuing adoption in different ways. If you’re interested in participating (the more the merrier), please e-mail me or leave a comment. To read the rest of the series. please click “adoption interviews” in the sidebar.

1) The first one is Heather, who blogs at Based On A True StoryPeople decide to adopt for many different reasons. What led you to adoption?

I’ve never wanted biological children. I’m also not a fan of babies. So an older child adoption seemed perfect for me. It is an ethical question for me. I wouldn’t feel right producing new children when there are many, many kids already in the world who need homes. My husband doesn’t quite see it that way. He was strongly in favor of biological children but he’s excited about the adoption now.What type of adoption(s) are you/did you pursue (international, siblings, transracial, open, etc)? Was it what you had intended to pursue all along? Was the process what you thought it would be?

Our adoption went through many incarnations. We started looking at Vietnam around 1999. At the time our main limitation was the cost of an international adoption. Over time Vietnam closed for a while and we started looking at India. Again the major concern was cost. We hadn’t seriously looked at U.S. adoption because of the horror stories that we’d heard about kids being taken away from adoptive families and about the psychological state of kids in foster care. Once we started actually researching U.S. adoption it wasn’t as scary as the stories that we had heard.We were hoping for a 3-6 year old girl any race. We were open to siblings. We did not want to break up a set of siblings. We were matched with a 4 year old Caucasian girl who has a younger brother that was already adopted separately. After years of assuming that we’d be adopting internationally, looking at pictures of a blond haired, blue eyed girl that looks like me was quite strange. Not at all what we expected.

What obstacles, if any, are you/did you face along the way? How did you overcome them?

Other than cost our main obstacle was family. He had just built a house and were at a place that we could start taking action when my mother-in-law came for a 3 week visit that turned into a 1.5 year stay. Neither of us were willing to pursue an adoption with her in the house because she would have needed to be included in all the paperwork and the interviews. We also didn’t get along very well so the atmosphere in the house was very tense. It wouldn’t have been a good environment to bring a child into. After she left we took about 6 months to recover our sanity and then started working on the adoption.We had a hard time finding an agency to work with us. One that we found (and paid a deposit to) had such poor communication that we missed our orientation because they told us the wrong days in spite of us calling twice to confirm. We started looking for another agency but no one in the state works with foster kids. We were told by the agencies that we should do it on our own using the internet to find child profiles so that’s what we decided to do.

Our homestudy worker was against our plan to adopt from foster care too. She is a former county foster care director and spent a lot of the interview trying to convince us to either adopt a baby or to adopt from Vietnam. She told us that kids from the foster care system will ruin our lives. We’ll spend all our time driving them to therapy with no true family bonding or love to show for it. Luckily we had done enough research at the time to know that that wasn’t necessarily true. I don’t know what effect hearing that from an “expert” would have on people who were just starting to consider adoption.

The homestudy paperwork wasn’t as bad as I’d heard. The only problem we had was with my husband’s fingerprints. Mine took 24 hours to get back. His took 4 months. For a long time the agency wouldn’t release them. Then they got lost in the mail twice. I started wondering if he was either a CIA agent or a terrorist! That held everything up for a while. After that it has been fast. Our homestudy approval is dated April 1 and we were contacted about a possible match the first week of May. That is incredibly fast in retrospect but it seemed like forever at the time.

Working with bureaucracy can be tiring. We were told that we might have to take a foster care training so I found a course. I called back to the child’s social worker and was told that we wouldn’t have to take the course. A week after the course started we got a call that said we were approved for placement as soon as we could take a foster care training course. No other ones are offered for a few months. It is nothing life-threatening but it is annoying.

Do/did you have the support of family and friends during your adoption journey? If not, how did it affect you? If yes, how important was it to you?

I tend to be fairly independent and stubborn so the opinions of other people in this area don’t matter all that much to me. My mother would prefer that we had biological children but she has accepted that it won’t happen. The rest of my family is supportive. My friends and co-workers are excited about it but don’t understand why it is taking so long.Generally speaking, if you could change something about adoption or how it is perceived, what would it be and why? Do you think that change will ever come to be?

I would change the assumption that adoption is something that you do as a last resort. I would love for it to be seen as a logical thing to do instead of having biological children. I’d love to see the sentence, “They tried and tried to have kids and they couldn’t so they adopted” disappear. I’m not sure if that will happen. Even people who know that I have chosen to adopt instead of reproducing have told me that I’ll get pregnant now. Uh, no. That’s not the goal.As the parent (or parent-to-be) of an adoptee/s, what challenges do you think they will face as they grow up? Will life be easier for them than that of adoptees before them? How will you help them with any issues that they may face?

I think that adoption is more out in the open than ever before. Our matched child is old enough to know what is going on. It isn’t like she isn’t going to know that she’s adopted. I do worry about people asking about why she was removed from her birth family in front of her. We’ll be dealing with the aftereffects of abuse for the rest of her life. We’ll have therapists for her to help her work through issues. I think being open and honest will be the key.

2) The second one for this installment is Petunia who blogs at Stupid Stuff I Think who says “I started my blog as a way to journal my feelings about our own adoption and all it entailed. It quickly became a defense for adoption with the many anti adoption bloggers. They were used to telling prospective adoptive parents the evils of adoption. But they were not prepared for me also being adopted and happy about it”.People decide to adopt for many different reasons. What led you to adoption?

We tried to conceive for 13 years. We tried hormone therapy, drugs, surgery and IUIs but in the end we felt it was God’s way of telling us to adopt. Once we finally decided to give up all the procedures we were so sure and at ease with our decision. We know now the wait was all worth it to find our daughter.

What type of adoption(s) are you/did you pursue (international, siblings, transracial, open, etc)? Was it what you had intended to pursue all along? Was the process what you thought it would be?We had thought about Russian adoption after my brother went to St. Petersburg for my nephew. We went to a picnic in a nearby town where they sponsored a group of Russian children from an orphanage and prayed that if it was something we were supposed to do, God would let us be totally at ease. When we got there NO ONE talked to us and we were SO uncomfortable. That was our answer. A friend had told me the agency she had gone through when she placed her child and I got some information from them and we started the process. I didn’t even check any other agencies, we felt so at ease with the one we had chosen. They were small and got to know each couple that went through their doors. We felt they were an ethical agency who supplied counseling and cared for all the birthmothers they helped with placement. We had chosen to adopt in our area and have a semi-open adoption. We came to find out the agency was NOT the one my friend used but that confirmed for us that it was a leading that had to be God. We were meant to find our little girl.What obstacles, if any, are you/did you face along the way? How did you overcome them?

We really were worried that wanting a semi-open adoption and me having a full-time job would be a turn off for any birthmother. I also thought that me being adopted would make a difference but it’s one of the reasons we were chosen by our daughter birthparents.

Do/did you have the support of family and friends during your adoption journey? If not, how did it affect you? If yes, how important was it to you?

My parents were all for it of course. Not only was I adopted but my nephew and my cousin were adopted. That same cousin adopted two boys from Russia and another two cousins adopted babies in the last few years. My family is very touched by the adoption process and knows how wonderful it can be. My husband’s parents were unsure about the whole thing, being new to it, and were unsure how they would feel about an adopted child. They were never too negative but I knew they had some apprehension. It really was upsetting to me but I felt they needed to be educated (as do most people that aren’t informed about adoption).

Generally speaking, if you could change something about adoption or how it is perceived, what would it be and why? Do you think that change will ever come to be? First, I would like people to be more educated about the whole thing. The language they use can seem rude and can hurt other people’s feelings. Secondly, people can’t ever understand that you love an adopted child as much as any biological child. Lastly, I would like to see agencies be ethical and consider the money that is exchanged. We are middle income and had a difficult time affording all the expenses that went into our own adoption. I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon and I’m glad the government in some states give an adoption tax break.

As the parent (or parent-to-be) of an adoptee/s, what challenges do you think they will face as they grow up? Will life be easier for them than adoptees before them? How will you help them with any issues that they may face?It is a different world than it was when I was growing up adopted. We just didn’t talk about it and I feel today it can be too much of a topic in a family because we are trying to be so open and honest. I want it to be a topic that can be talked about if my daughter wants to ask. I worry that it will be lost in the daily grind and then we’ll have to bring it up so it is not lost…I’m still trying to discover how to do that.

Thank you to both ladies who participated.
Related Tags: adoption, adoptive parents, adopt, adopting

Related Posts:

1. Adoption Interviews: Fourth Installment
2. Adoption Interviews: third installment
3. Adoption Interviews
4. Making the Decision to Adopt
5. Adoption Connections