Our Adoption Process - The Decision to Adopt

OK, this is not going to be easy to describe. - Trying to make the least confusion possible... One of the reasons we set up this site is to make sure you had information available to you and give you a forum for questions. One of the things that we found when we first started looking into adoption several years ago is that there is a LOT of information out there, but not a lot of specifics. What we finally figured out is there are SO MANY different types of adoption so you can't really get specific answers (i.e. "how long does it take?" "how much does it cost?") The answers vary from type of adoption, state, and agency. Of course, everything on this site is based solely on OUR experience. We're certain that other people have had very different experiences.

THE DECISION TO ADOPT: When we were engaged we talked about how many children we wanted. We both felt that we would have one or two children and then start adopting some - who knows how many. When we had been unsuccessful at conceiving, and had no reason why, we decided to adopt while pursuing fertility treatment.

One way to adopt is through your state's foster care system. The children in foster care are at various stages of "adoptability" - meaning some of their biological parents have had their parental rites severed by the government, and some have not. When we lived in Virginia we went through Special Needs Foster Care training and became certified foster parents. Special Needs is very different than regular foster care. Special Needs children have already been determined to have a lower possibility of being adopted than the other foster children. This can be due to physical, emotional, or behavioral problems, or being part of a sibling group that won't be separated, or being an older child, and in some cases being a minority although usually they would fall into one of other categories as well. The training was very good and we learned a lot. We were ready to wait for a specific child to foster and then adopt. (A lot of the kids we were looking at had parental rites terminated: we were not really looking to be foster parents, we really wanted to adopt.) We got a couple of referals that were not a good match for us, and then Jim was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. This is when we learned the cause of our infertility (CF). We put ourselves on the inactive list for foster parenting and moved to Wisconsin.

Our first year in Wisconsin was very difficult in dealing with Cystic Fibrosis. There was a lot to think about in learning how to deal with this illness. We saw fertility specialists recommended by Jim's CF clinic, and took a long time (months) to think about and discuss our options. Infertility is excruciatingly painful to deal with, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you. You have to grieve over the children that you'll never have. One thing that we realized is that our thoughts and feelings change drastically with time. Sometimes we would all of a sudden see a totally different side of the situation that we'd never seen before. Then we would mull that over for a few months, and then think of something different. We determined that we wouldn't make a decision about any possible children until the end of 2004.

After our 10-year anniversary celebration in December 2004, we were in agreement that we would pursue international adoption. The reasons are pretty simple: we felt that we had been through so much uncertainty and insecurity in dealing with infertility for 7 years and also in dealing with Cystic Fibrosis. We did not want to start a program that was uncertain, like domestic adoption or fertility treatment. (The things we didn't like about domestic adoption is that the wait time varies widely - from a few months to several years - and we didn't want to have to market ourselves to a birthmother. Also, we did not want even a remote possibility that a birthmother would change her mind and upset our world once again.) We didn't think we could handle fertility treatments at this point, because you have no idea if it will even work. We felt secure with using an established international adoption program, where there would be a "guarantee" that at the other end of the process, a child would be waiting.

As Jim wrote in his adoption application "There are so many children that need families, and my wife and I have a family that needs children; adoption is the obvious solution to that quandary."