Good morning friends! For those who did not know, our baby boy’s adoption was finalized just last week! We couldn’t be more excited! I waited to publish Chapter Two of our adoption story until the adoption was finalized due to a couple of  harassing comments I received on my blog. I’m still not entirely sure of the motivation behind these sentiments, but I know WHO wrote them because using an anonymous account or calling yourself “Lucifer” simply does not erase your digital footprint. 🙄 I’m not sure if I’m more disappointed in their cruelty or their ignorance. 

The initial horrifying shock of seeing these comments was more than mitigated by my “in yo’ face” moment of triumph when I used Google Analytics to trace their identities. It took a while but I did it. I am so very happy to say that they are not anyone involved in the adoption process whatsoever. 

I wanted to share these comments (below) with you as a way of explaining my hiatus, and also to illuminate the fact that this kind of inexplicable harassment does happen. I had read about people experiencing it on their blogs, but other than one small trolling about a year ago, I was not one of them. I don’t want you to be either. Set your security settings higher my friends! I already did. 

Furthermore, I needed to be sure these two douche canoes weren’t a threat to my kids. They are not. They are a couple of sad people, unknown to each other (I assume), who terrorize others under the guise of anonymity. One is a fellow blogger who is staunchly anti-adoption (not sure how she took an interest in me, I do not follow her) and one is someone…from high school. Yes, you heard that right! High school. Apparently, nearly 20 years ago I must have inadvertently pissed this individual off enough that they came back to haunt me, years later on my blog, “anonymously.” Curiously, I feel very sad for this person. They can’t be leading a particularly joyful life. 

 
These are shocking, but haters gonna hate, as they say. Anytime anyone posts, or writes, or contributes anything to the tangled inter webs of cyberspace, they open themselves up to unsolicited negativity. It doesn’t hold a candle to the overwhelming community and positive energy that inhabit 99.9% of this space. I have a whole lot to say and I’m going to continue to say it, right here on my very own blog. I hope you will forgive my big ol’ absence and keep reading! I’m just putting the finishing touches on Chapter Two and it’s ready to publish today!  I’m anxious to share it, and to get back to focusing on the positive. Life is beautiful. 😊

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Hello my friends!  Many of you are wondering where our adoption journey has led us and what’s in the mix. I’m sorry I left everyone hanging, but I needed to distance myself from the topic for a bit to gain some perspective and to just plain be okay. 

Our journey has been hard. They all are; infertility, adoption, it’s all an intense emotional struggle. I think ours has been a bit a touch on the extra brutal side.  We faced not only crushing disappointment more than twice, but also didn’t have the relationship we desired with the people we hired at huge expense to help us. Personality conflicts, they happen. I just wish it hadn’t happened to us. 

The time has come for me to wrap up my time here, at least for now. There are two reasons for this…Reason #1: My goal all along was to write an account of our journey in a very transparent way, leaving a blueprint for others who may follow and find it helpful and encouraging. BUT…about a month ago I received an email from a woman who is with the same agency as us and adopted almost immediately. She stated, pretty bluntly, that I wasn’t doing myself any favors by writing about the good, the bad, and the ugly. She thought that if birth mothers considering us found us online (soooooooo easy, that’s true) they would be turned off by my blog. At first, I was pretty pissed off she had the stones to lay that out there. I mean, it’s easy to judge when you adopted before the ink on your homestudy was even dry, right? But before long I realized she was right. And that very day I went and made all my “controversial” posts private so only I can see them and they can’t haunt us.  When I did that, I removed the integrity from my original purpose of transparency. And I can’t continue if I have to make sure every blasted post is positive and chipper, because that’s some serious bullshit. That’s not life. That’s not anything except saccharin-coated nonsense and that is not now, nor has it ever been, how I roll. 

It doesn’t help matters that I’m a humorist in my writing, and the adoption process has been anything but funny. My desire to write is so strong, and I may start another blog where I can still write for people who like my quirky take on things. We will see. 

Reason #2: Regarding where we are now in the adoption process: ah, let’s see how to accurately describe…oh yeah…we are nowhere. If our journey was a location, it would be Area 51. I literally have not a thing to report because absolutely nothing is happening. All of the people in our class have adopted. All of the people in the classes after us have adopted. We remain, and remain, our smiling faces moving lower and lower on the list of online profiles. It has been 7 weeks since we were presented with a situation. Our coordinator says, “I just don’t understand. Families like yours usually get picked right away! I thought you’d be gone in 2-3 months!” 

Whatever. What. Ev. Er. 

The hubs and I are doing well. I have started forcing myself to accept the possibility we may simply have one child. I grieve for E, who asks about “his baby” all the time; I grieve for the hubs, who is such a badass father and has so much awesomeness to impart onto another kid; I grieve for myself because when I became a mother I realized it was what I was born to do, strange as that may sound. I just always thought I would have more than one kid to annoy with my mothering. 😊 But the truth is if we are only supposed to have one, we will make it and be okay. We have E, and if we were only meant to have one miracle granted in our lives, I’m so insanely grateful he was just that. 

Thank you friends for following along and supporting me the whole way. If I write here again, it will be because we have adopted, somehow. 

But if you happen to be acquainted with a baby that needs a family, you know where to find us. 😉 

Love, light, and blessings to all. 

It can be a challenge to write about what’s happening in our adoption journey without making our lives sound like we move from one disappointment-filled moment to the next. I start a lot of posts I never publish, because I re-read them and think, “Wow, this sure sounds like another sad sack story.”  So I delete them. 

When we started this journey, the hubs and I were committed to making sure that adoption issues stayed below the surface, where it couldn’t affect our daily lives and certainly not the life of our sweet boy. But, adoption doesn’t work that way. Under the best of circumstances it doesn’t work that way. Under the worst of circumstances, when you’re all alone with no one to make sense of the process and encourage you to keep moving, it definitely doesn’t work that way. It infiltrates even the healthiest, most beautiful parts of your life until the day to wake up and say, “This stops now.”

Our personal experience, due to my poor choice of agency, has been like a rotten apple. Our lives are like a bowl of fresh fruit, and our journey with our agency is like the one rotten apple in the middle of the bowl that starts to “influence” everything around it, trying to make the fruit it is touching rotten as well. The hubs and I obviously aren’t going to let that happen. We have been blessed with a beautiful life and one sweet, miraculous little boy. We pray for more children, but not at the expense of our little family. So, how to move forward?

The current understanding with our agency, I believe, is that we are on the list for immediate placements. That means that if a baby is born and the mother wants an adoption, but she didn’t make an adoption plan, we will be on the list to be called. I have no idea how long this list is. I have no idea if we will really be called. This is the arrangement that seems to work best for everyone because it eliminates the need for there to be any communication between us and the agency. We just hear from them someday if there is an immediate placement, and if we don’t, we don’t. Most of their placements are from women who are 2-3 months away from delivery and the expectant mother chooses an adoptive couple. We won’t be hearing about those situations. 

(I have always loved the idea of an immediate placement. Some agencies call them “stork drops.”)

Many people have encouraged us to walk away from the agency and start anew. Or hire a lawyer to retrieve our program fee. Those are great ideas, and probably what should happen. But the very idea is exhausting. Eight thousand dollars is a lot of money to say goodbye to, particularly when it is needed for any adoption that may take place. History shows (thanks, Google!) that hiring a lawyer would result in the hubs and I still not getting our program fee back, and having our legal expenses plus the agency’s legal expenses to pay for. Oh, ick. I don’t even like to consider that outcome. Plus, I’m just not a litigious person at heart. The naive side of me feels like people should be able to handle their business without suing each other, you know?

Other than that, there is always the possibility that enough people know we are hoping to adopt and a situation may get networked back to us. I’m considering creating a page on this site that has our detailed family profile, in case someone happened to stumble upon it. I will probably wait a little while to do that just because I’m really trying to embrace the blessings that I have, instead of focusing on the ones I don’t. 

There is a lot of mystery around why the agency didn’t just fire us, since they can at will, according to the contract. I think the answer lies in this statement: “You guys are an excellent family. You’re a great resource to us.”  

At the time I was completely confused by this. We are a great resource to them?  How, exactly, is that the case?  Then I figured it out. We are a great resource because when expectant mothers are considering what agency to work with, they can show them different profiles of families they work with, and we market well. Got it. Adoption is a business, friends. For those considering embarking down the path, begin with your eyes wide open and understand the world you are about to enter. There are lots of ways to do it, just be sure you are well educated about the method you are choosing.