We’ve had the opportunity to interview many families who have come together through adoption. In honor of National Adoption Month, we’ll be sharing some of those stories through our blog. First up, some thoughts on adoption from Liz, Abigail, and Joan.
Liz (and Andy) – Adopted from foster care as well as via private domestic adoption.
Liz and Andy at home with their three children.
“Before we had these guys, I wanted nothing to do with people who had kids. I didn’t want to see a pregnant woman. I would go out of my way to avoid them. I was jealous. That should be me. That should be us. We should be having kids now. That’s totally gone away now. These are MY babies. They may not have come from us, but this was God’s plan for us. It would have been really nice to know his plan ahead of time but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Abigail – Adopted internationally.
Abigail in her office in the Los Angeles area.
“I had made an appointment during the process of my second IVF for an orientation with an adoption agency for after the results of my second IVF. I got the call and the doctor said, you’re pregnant but you’re going to lose it in a couple days and I can still get teary talking about it. I, personally, am not fond of the term chemical pregnancy. It’s a pregnancy, if you got pregnant, you got pregnant. I left that adoption meeting with hope for the first time and it became very clear which direction I would go and I went. It was the right choice for me at that time. I wasn’t closing the doors to pregnancy or nursuing at that time.”
“It took 9 months from that meeting to bringing our baby home. We adopted our son from Guatemala and it was an incredible, wonderful experience and it became very clear, very fast that my son just had to be born from another body. We brought him home and I had decided that I was going to nurse him because nursing was something I was missing also. I brought him home at 3 months and 4 days. A friend of mine gave birth at the same time and she pumped extra breast milk for me. I used the Lact-Aid supplementer and I put him to the breast 5 times a day and within two weeks I was producing milk on my own without any meds.”
Joan – Private domestic adoption.
Joan holds artwork that her daughter, Josie, created.
“We wanted very definitely to do open adoption, which was essentially the wave of the future that was opening up right then and there. The process of adoption is incredible intrusive, the home study, the interviews with the therapist, it just goes on and on. You have to be willing to be incredibly transparent to become an adoptive parent. Since I’ve adopted, I’ve found that my reaction to the process has been that adoption is portrayed a lot in a very negative way. We only hear about the adoptions that fail, the adoptions that don’t work out for whatever reason and it just has a very negative connotation in many cultures.”
“There’s loss in every part of the adoption triangle. The birth mother has to grieve losing her child, her child’s time with her. The adoptive parents have to grieve losing the ability to have a biological child and be clear with that in order to be good parents and then the adoptive child has to come to terms with “being given away”.
“It’s a leap of faith in more ways than you ever expect but a wonderful leap.”