Our Adoption Story
Children are amazing, truthful, funny, intelligent, and so full of energy. I love kids! I’d like to share our adoption journey in the hopes it may help others who are possibly pursuing that option. It takes a great deal of work, makes you think about different circumstances, and situations, but is absolutely worth every second of stress and worry. My little twist is that I was adopted as a baby, know my birth family now, and we adopted a baby boy so I have a few different perspectives along with all my parent’s.
I grew up the youngest of 3 with all of us adopted from different families. Adoptions sounded a little easier back then from what I understand, but getting 3 children was not common. My oldest brother was in foster care for 1 month (that specific state’s rule at the time), my other brother’s birth mother kept him for 2 weeks before she decided to find a better arrangements for him, and I was adopted right away. We always knew we had been adopted even though no one believed us because we all looked biological. Back then they tried to match birth parents to prospective adoptive parents so the child looked more like them and didn’t stand out. My parents were called into the school once because my brother’s teacher wanted to talk to them about him lying. Apparently, he wrote a paper about being adopted and the teacher didn’t realize we all had been. It wasn’t like we kept it a secret, but there wasn’t really a reason to go around announcing it either.
My first roommate was adopted and her adoptive mom passed away when she was young. She had dug up quite a bit of information already and we found her birth mother. She has been in contact with her parents ever since. When I helped her find information, I found some of my own. Long story short, I ended up going through the adoption agency that I had been adopted through and at 26 years old found my birth parents. My birth parents had gotten married 3 months after they had me, are still together, and I have 2 full younger sisters! I had a whole other family! What a wild whirlwind! A few weeks later I ended up moving out-of-state to a city where my biological grandmother was living. Bizarre?! My sister had said that our story wouldn’t even get on Oprah, even in those days.
My husband and I have been married for over 9 years now and since we are both a little older, we decided to try to have kids from the start. After the first year we decided that we needed some assistance. We were referred to a fertility specialist and during all the hormones, shots, and ultrasounds friends and family were having kids like popcorn. It was so easy for other people and some days that was incredibly difficult for me. Please don’t misunderstand; I was extremely excited and happy for all of them! I was just so frustrated because kids in high school could get pregnant by accident and here we were timing things with multiple ultrasounds, making sure eggs were the right size, taking more hormones, and the doctors could not find any reasons why we couldn’t have children. I figured God was punishing me because of past mistakes or maybe He just didn’t think I would be a good mother. There were a few times I had breakdowns and I felt terrible for my husband because he didn’t know what to do to comfort me. I told him afterwards there probably wasn’t anything he could have done because I already knew he was there for me; I just needed to cry it out. Nonetheless, we kept trying and so after 5 IUI’s with no beneficial outcome (not due to the doctor, he was amazing) we decided there was a reason we weren’t supposed to have kids and gave up on the idea, kind of.
About a year later, my husband’s grandfather passed away and that had gotten my husband thinking more about adoption. I had brought it up previously, but he wasn’t quite ready and I wasn’t going to push it. We started looking into numerous agencies and found one that actually returned calls and emails. There are so many agencies with various benefits. Small ones may take longer but may have better service and bigger ones may have too many adoptive parents for prospective mothers to pick from but have quicker match times. From what we found they are all expensive, but if you think of it as paying the agency’s employees for their services it helps. When I was adopted 40 years ago, my mom said I was $500. A friend told me that was how much she paid for her dog. Times have changed and I don’t see things going back to the way they were.
The agency we picked was out-of-state, but we needed an agency in our state that could do home studies for out of state adoptions. We had been signed up with that agency for 2 years with multiple people interested but no matches. I had unexpectedly changed jobs; it was closer to home with better benefits and hours but in a completely different profession. A month later, we received a call from the home study agency asking if we were open to letting them show our profile to a prospective mother who had been looking for adoptive parents in our state. We decided that was acceptable then started figuring out money since the money we had paid to the out of state agency was of no use to this one. We had done a video for the other agency with plenty of bloopers at the end because we ended up having more footage of that than anything good. She had picked us, but then she wanted to meet us. Other than meeting my birth family for the first time that was one of the most stressful meetings I have ever had. We needed to be on our best behavior because she had until 4 working days after the baby was born to change her mind. Well, being on our best behavior didn’t really work well for us, but she picked us to raise her child anyway.
Little Q was born about 4 months after we were matched and he is amazing! We have been so blessed that our prayers had been answered. All of our family and friends love him and he is such a happy, loveable baby! It’s just a shame no one wants to hold him, make him laugh, or even play with him. (Insert sarcastic smile here) We don’t usually see him much when a lot of people are around which really isn’t bad. So I still don’t know His reason for not answering our prayers when we wanted it to happen, but I truly believe there is a reason we have Q. Maybe Q is going to be really naughty when he’s older and we needed to learn patience or we just weren’t ready. Whatever the reason, it didn’t happen in the timeframe or the way we had planned but we have a family now and we are ecstatic! Life is good.
growinglittleq.com 