The following was submitted by Beth, one of our blog readers. Leave a comment here if you’d like to share your adoption story also.

We have three children. Our oldest daughter and son were adopted at birth. Our youngest son was adopted right before his tenth birthday. This is a story of both joy and sorrow, excitement and patience, and most importantly, unconditional love.

My husband and I were married in 1965. Like most young couples at that time, we wanted children. We started trying right away. After two years, and no baby, we sought out medical advice. Unlike the medical treatments and techniques available today, in vitro fertilization, hormone therapies, etc., were not available at that time – at least not to us. We both worked, but didn’t have a lot of expendable cash, and we turned to the only thing we knew – adoption.

Even back then, the adoption process was not a quick one. We applied for adoption through the State of Wisconsin, and were subjected to background checks, home visits, and social worker interviews before we would even be considered. But fortunately, we were put on “the list” and began the waiting game. In the fall of 1969, we were told that a baby boy was available for adoption. We were ecstatic! We could hardly wait to see our son and bring him home. But finally, after more waiting, and interviews and home visits galore, we were able to pick up our baby boy. And he was beautiful – perfect, just like we imagined he would be. It’s hard to put into words how much you can love someone so little, how much that little person can make a couple into a family. But he did. There’s nothing that can explain the love and pride you have in your own child – it didn’t matter that we didn’t conceive him, it mattered that he was put in our hands to love and guide for the rest of our lives. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world.

In the summer of 1971, we were able to experience this joy for the second time. This time, we adopted a baby girl – and now we felt our family was complete. You think you can’t love anyone more than your first child, and then the second comes along and you realize your heart just gets bigger and you can love another child just as much as the first. It took about a year for each of our children to become “officially” ours, meaning, when the court turned over full custody to us.

After some time, we decided to adopt again. However, it had become more difficult at this point. My husband was over 35. Apparently this was some magic number suggesting that he was too old to care for an infant. So once again, we began the adoption process, this time hoping to adopt a toddler or young child. Once again, we were subjected to home visits, only now, the social workers also interviewed our children. I guess they were trying to asses if this would be a good home for a child. It took longer this time. Another thing that was different, is that we had some choice – we were able to read case files on children to see if they would be a good fit for our family. We could “accept” or “reject” them. We finally found a boy that seemed like he would be a good fit for our family – he was nine years old at the time, older than we had hoped.

Unlike with an infant, he had to do home visits with us and he also got to decide if we were a good family for him. I think this took a couple of months. It was different than adopting a baby – when our older son and daughter were placed in our arms, they were ours, totally and completely. This boy knew his other mother and grandparents. At the same time, once we got to know him, we started to fall in love with him, just as we had done with our older children. The process was different, but the end result was the same – after about a year, he became our son legally, and we couldn’t have loved him any more.

Thank you for letting me share.
Beth

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The following article is by Jill Smolowe, author of A Love Like No Other: Stories from Adoptive Parents. My husband and I equally wanted to adopt children but I know that there are couples that struggle with this.

The Reluctant Spouse:
Don’t be surprised if your mate resists adoption even as you’re embracing it.
By Jill Smolowe

It had been a long haul to convince my husband to start a family. When biology failed us, he felt the subject of children was closed. By then past 50, Joe was not interested in raising a child whom he inelegantly described as someone else’s kid. That was before we went to China in January 1995 and held an adorable, alert seven-month-old girl, who cast her spell over Joe in about five minutes flat. By the time we got home two weeks later, Joe was undeniably, smittenly, inalterably Beckys father.

Now that theres a happy ending, Joe and I can laugh about some of our more heated debates, and share our experiences with other couples who are thinking about or pursuing adoption. But when we were in the midst of the decision-making process, I thought Joe and I were a seriously defective marital unit.

At the time, nobody I knew had a spouse so reluctant about children in general, and adoption in particular. Why couldn’t we get it together? It should not be this hard, I told myself, even as I persevered. What is wrong with us? Everybody else manages to have kids without all this sturm and drang.

Or so I thought, until I published an account that spoke candidly of the stresses that the long journey to parenthood had put on our marriage. Suddenly, total strangers opened up to us. And, lo! I discovered that Joe and I were not unique. Perhaps not even unusual. Many, many couples, we learned, had been or currently are deeply divided over the issue of adoption.

By that, I don’t mean the sort of frustrations that draw appreciative laughs from an adoption audience. (Say, shes got her birth certificate in hand for the home study, while he hasn’t sent away for his yet.) Rather, I mean bone marrow deep differences that, as happened in my case, can put a marriage on the line. I mean differences so fundamental that some marriages bust up as a result.

Sadly, such couples often struggle in isolation, when some empathy and support, particularly from other adoptive couples who have worked through their differences, might ease the strain. Often, fear of the unknown stands in the way, says Jan Garten, a Manhattan marriage therapist who counsels many couples divided about adoption. Its good to talk to people who have gone through the process.

The toughest decision, of course, is the first: Will we adopt, or wont we? Marriage counselors, adoption specialists, and social workers agree that when a couple is not in lockstep, its usually the wife who wants to proceed, and the husband who doesn’t. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that reluctant men are often ambivalent about adoption, but resistant women tend to be inflexible.)

Some adoption experts maintain that its wrong to press ahead with an adoption before a reluctant spouse is fully on board. They argue that before launching a search, a couple needs not only to confront, but sort out and resolve all uncertainties, ambivalences, and concerns about adoption.

For many couples, though, you might as well ask them to foresee and figure out the rest of their lives. Why? Consider the range of concerns that fuel reluctance:
Age. (Am I too old to be a parent? Will I have enough energy? Enough patience? Enough love?)
Money. (How can I save for a college education when I need to save for retirement? Will an adoption eat up all my savings? Will we ever get to take a vacation again?)
Time. (Will a child be too disruptive? Will I have to curb my work hours? Do I want to?)
Family. (Will my parents reject an adopted child? Will my children from a prior marriage resent me for starting a new family? Will I make the same parenting mistakes again?)
The unknown. (Who will the child be? What genetic surprises might be in store? Will I be able to love an adopted child as much as a biological one?)

Such questions are important, legitimate and often unanswerable until a couple is actually living the changes a child brings. They reflect the reluctant spouses focus on what may be lost: financial security, spousal attention, uninterrupted work time, a biological connection. Until the spouse experiences the benefits that come with parenting, there is essentially nothing to mitigate those fears.

Even after a spouse agrees reluctantly to move forward, there may be backsliding. This is understandable when you contrast a pregnancy with the adoption process. Typically, a pregnancy is a fait accompli that gives a reluctant spouse nine months to ease into the idea of parenthood. Greeted with joy and excitement by friends and relatives, a pregnancy tends to inspire questions like: Do you know if its a boy or girl? Have you picked a name? How much time do you plan to take off from work?

Now, consider the kinds of issues that couples are forced to confront during the adoption process. What age child do you want? What sex? What health condition? What ethnicity? What race? How much contact do you want with birthparents? How do you plan to raise this child? How will you speak of adoption to him? What role will the childs ethnic heritage play in her life? How will you cope with an emotional or physical disability? What will you do if your relatives don’t embrace this child? And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the procedural aspects. Lawyer or agency? Public or private? Open or closed? Domestic or overseas?

Such questions not only thrust the issue of baby at a reluctant spouse over and over, but demand repeatedly that he opt in or out. In essence, the process requires that he try to envision the child’s entire upbringing at a time when he might prefer not to think about children at all.

The upside is that this insistent probing gives adoptive couples a rigorous preparation for parenting that the biological route rarely affords. The downside is that every new question and issue risks reigniting or ratcheting up a reluctant spouses resistance. My own husband signed on and off to adoption so often that by the time we boarded the plane for China, neither one of us could have said for certain whether he would stick around after we returned home.

He did.

In fact, the man who for years had insisted that he was too old, too busy, too uninterested in kids, is a wonderful, involved father who resents even the occasional business trip that keeps him from tucking Becky in at night. These days when a call comes in from a distressed couple, Joe gets on the phone with the reluctant spouse sometimes, literally, for hours. He listens. He empathizes and commiserates. He reassures them that their fears and concerns are legitimate. Then, ever so subtly, he encourages them to take the plunge.

Jill Smolowe, an adoptive parent, is a journalist and the author of An Empty Lap (Pocket Books). She lives in New Jersey with her husband, Joe Treen, and with their daughter, Becky.

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What role does race play in adoption? Not the race of the child, but rather the race of the person or couple who is adopting. Has your race ever been a factor (not necessarily in a negative way either) in your adoption process?

I asked this question at our adoption forums and I’ll open it up to our blog visitors as well. Feel free to answer in a comment here, or on your own blog. If you answer at your blog, let me know in a comment here so I can link to your answer.

Here are the thoughts of three of our adoption forum members;

2: I’ve written in posts before about how our own race (both seemingly Caucasian) was a factor in our adoption journey. Early on……when we first started the adoption process, our race was an issue—and not a good one, as far as we were concerned. In 1979……..going into an adoption agency—the ONLY adoption agency— in Okinawa,Japan, and telling the caseworker conducting our homestudy that we really wanted to adopt a baby who was ‘Black/Okinawan’……was enough to literally make her drop her pen to the floor and say to us:

“YOU would be WILLING to adopt a black child?!?!?!?!?”
“Yes.”, we said.

And to that, the caseworker said that this would have to go in front of their agency board. When we returned several days later for the next interview, she told us:

“We’ve discussed this and concluded that Mr. X (my husband)…..while your complexion is darker; Mrs. X (that was me), you are much to fair complected to adopt a black child.”

So, what did this agency do? They allowed us to adopt—either through Korea, the Philippines, or wait for a baby from Okinawa (which was a very long wait).
We chose Korea; and one of the big factors was because adopting through Korea meant a shorter wait. However, did they really think that Korean baby would look any MORE like US…than any other ‘un-white baby’??? :shrug I don’t understand it any better now, than I did back then. And my husband would say the same.

We had to wait 12 months before we could apply to adopt again. We did. As soon as the one year mark came, we made an appointment with the agency to adopt another baby. We already knew we would want another Asian baby, simply because we felt our first child would feel some sort of bond by having another ‘non-white’ person in the family. We sat with another caseworker to update the home study. Her comment?

“…of course NOW you’ll want a white baby, won’t you???!!!” (grinning with anticipation)
“No, we want to adopt another Asian baby.”

Needless to say, they still didn’t get it.

We were then told we didn’t have enough time left on the island (my husband was Air Force), and would have to extend our stay there because the waiting list was so long. (Frankly, I don’t remember why we didn’t go through Korea again, except that it would take the extended time to do so.) We told the agency we’d think about it. As we left the agency, I told my husband that there just had to be another way. There was. I was finishing my bachelor’s degree while we lived on the island, and through connections there, we actually found our next baby. That’s another story; and a good one at that. :nod

In the end, we flew home on the date we were originally supposed to…without extended time. We left with two babies….one that was 2yrs old; the other that was 8months old. One born in Korea; the other born in Japan. We’ve had other negative scenarios concerning our race and adoption; but I believe these were the worst ones of all.

By the way, we’ve gone on to adopt three more babies. All African American.

3: As an interracial (AA/CC) couple, it seemed to us that adoption was always a very short wait. Even though we are not a young couple (second marriage for both of us), we never waited more than a couple of months for a placement and sometimes weren’t waiting at all, but were called or presented with situations.

Our son’s Caucasian foster parents, who live in Michigan, had a very difficult time with the adoption of their daughter 25 years ago. She has Down Syndrome and is biracial. She was one of many, many infants placed in this outstanding foster home. Because she had a heart condition, they were told she likely would not live through heart surgery. Foster mom fed her with an eye dropper to get her strong enough for surgery, loved and nursed her through two surgeries. When she became healthy, the foster parents decided that, although they had never desired to adopt any of their foster children, they were so bonded with this child, they requested to adopt her. ALL OF THE SUDDEN, the agency said there was a black couple who wanted to adopt her. They virtually DUG UP a family to adopt this child because they were so against interracial adoption. Foster family got the ACLU involved, were on numerous talk shows, created their own alliance against racial preference in adoption, and WON THE CASE. Their daughter is now nearly 24 and doing very well.

Things have come a long way, but I still hear of cases where biases are held by agencies/social workers regarding race in adoption.

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Two adoption articles have been posted at our forums. Please share the link with those who might be interested.

Waiting To Adopt
Open Adoption, Semi-Open Adoption And Closed Adoption

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