Our journey to international adoption

When we first were seriously considering adoption, we were already battleworn, exhausted and heartbroken over our IF journey. We were scared to begin another path that held the potential to wound us further. Confident though we were in our decision to "switch gears" and pursue adoption, we were scared of all the "what ifs" surrounding adoption.

We began the adoption journey first by making the decision to "cease and desist" all IF treatments. Most agencies, we learned, had a policy against potential adoptive parents seeking IF treatments on the side. But more importantly, I knew I wouldn't have the emotional capacity to play both fields simultaneously. In retrospect, this was one of the most important decisions we made. The adoption process is difficult and emotionally draining, not to mention expensive. It would have been difficult to throw myself wholeheartedly into the adoption process and prepare myself for parenting a child the non-biological way had I been still obsessing over my charts. This is not to say we didn't actively try each month. Despite not charting, we still knew when we were "fertile" and we made good use of those days. :) The only drug I made an exception for and continued to take was hCG, but it was--as it is now--chiefly for PMS management. I'm telling you, I cannot live without my hCG. Mr. Mike wholeheartedly agrees.

We started the ball rolling by attending a variety of information meetings at numerous agencies. We had just moved to the bustling DC/Baltimore metro area from the midwest and were pleased with the sheer volume of local agencies and options around us. We began looking chiefly at domestic infant adoption, but also casually interested in international.
For personal reasons, we didn't feel comfortable with domestic adoption and in time, learned some attractive characteristics about international adoption. We learned that disrupted adoptions were a rarity among international programs and that the costs involved were often equivalent to domestic if not more static. International adoptions also offered a somewhat predictable time line upon which we could loosely plan around. (We would learn the hard way that this is not always the case. More on that later...) We were also drawn to the fact that foreign orphans (especially in certain underdeveloped countries) stood less of a chance of being adopted than their US counterparts. Now I'm no do-gooder, but this really spoke to me. At least in this country we have programs, however imperfect, to get kids off the streets and into foster homes. Many underdeveloped have no such options and their children scavage around landfills to survive--as we would see in our travels to Guatemala.

Deciding upon international adoption then begged the question, "where?" And after that question came the next, "are we open to all races?"
I initially struggled a bit with adopting outside our own race. I wasn't worried if I could fully love a child that was not birthed from my own body. But I admit that I struggled  abit initially, wondering about whether a different skin color could make that loving bond more difficult. Would we stick out in a crowd? How awkward would it be? Would we be stared at/pointed at everywhere we go? Would our families be accepting of a child from another race? Mr. Mike patiently reminded me that even if we adopted from Russia our children wouldn't look like us.

Mercifully, it was a brief process for me to realize that, no...skin color or race would make no difference to how I expected I was going to be able to parent a child. It helped too to meet and mingle with other trans-racial adoptive children and families in our area and see first hand that there was no difference in how the parents interacted with their adopted children. Each family we met just seemed so well...boringly normal! It helped too that living in the greater DC metro area, with it's large population density and mixing-pot demographics, allowed us to see transracial adoption as reassuringly normal, natural and everyday. You simply can't walk into a grocery store around here or visit the zoo without running into a family of mixed races.

(NB: I don't even see the difference in our skin color now...and lots of people around us have told us the same. In fact, I forget sometimes that they were adopted because, well...their my kids.)

We ended up selecting Guatemala as the foreign program we would pursue. At the time, it offered referrals of healthy infants who received private foster care in loving homes rather than the institutionalized of orphanages. The agency estimated that we could then bring baby home within 6 months of accepting a referral with only one trip required, lasting just 2-3 days.

Sign me up!
And so the paperchase began. We would spend the next 4 months compiling documents for our homestudy and dossier. For our first son, we waited 4 months before receiving a referral and he would come home 12 months later in 2003. For our second son, we would wait 2 months for a referral and he would come hom 5 months later in 2006. Two totally different experiences but the results of which I wouldn't trade for the world.

Sadly, the Guatelmalan adoption program is no longer operational. As of 2008, adoptions there have shut down. I'm incredibly grateful that we found our two boys there before they closed their doors, but I'm incredibly sad that we can't go back. My heart aches for the children there in need of homes that won't get the opportunity that once was. I take great comfort in knowing that our boys will be able to share the common bond of heritage and will (God-willing) be able to support one another as they come to learn of their origins.

Will we ever adopt again? I hope. Will we ever adopt internationally again? I hope. Those flights to Guatemala were my birth experiences. The process of welcoming a child through US customs was a privilege as well as a rite of passage. Getting off the plane and being greeted by a terminal full of people welcoming your new family home is about the best feeling in the world. Truly euphoric.

I'll never forget flying over DC at night as we were preparing to land at Reagan National airport to bring our second son home. The night was clear and the monuments lit up the landscape below. I kissed the top of my 6month old's head as he snuggled in my sling and looked out the window and thought about the days ahead when we would visit those monuments together as a family. People would say that he and his brother were lucky kids. Lucky to be adopted and have an opportunity ahead of them in this country. But in my heart, I know it wasn't luck. God hand-picked these children and gave us the way and means to find them and bring them home.

He blessed us. It had nothing to do with luck.