As each day winds down and I rock my son to sleep to his favorite lullaby, “You Are My Sunshine,” I, without fail, tear up. Every. Single. Night. After all, when you’ve been on a journey like we have, seemingly routine tasks like bedtime aren’t easy to take for granted.
Adoption wasn’t a foreign concept to us, exactly, but more like something that orbited in another sphere, separate from our world.
If you’d asked me one or two years ago if I ever thought I’d be a mother, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a straightforward answer. My husband and I spent four years trying to become parents, attempting painful fertility treatments that left our hearts and bank accounts empty. To sum it up: five IUIs, three rounds of IVF, hundreds of shots in my stomach, 10 pounds gained, and over $40,000 spent. It never resulted in one positive pregnancy test.
Adoption wasn’t a foreign concept to us, exactly, but more like something that orbited in another sphere, separate from our world. But as our endless fertility appointments dragged on with no answers about when, if ever, we’d be pregnant, adoption was on my mind more and more. I would sit in our fertility clinic’s waiting room with all the other sad-looking couples who were stuck in there and think, why are we all doing this to ourselves?
The days and months of infertility treatments ticked by. Everyone around me seemed to be pregnant. I went from being positive about our chances to feeling completely numb, shutting out everyone and anything around me. My sister had a baby. More and more friends had babies, some getting knocked up without even trying. I started to look into international adoption. I’d volunteered in a few orphanages when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and adopting a child from abroad was something I always held space for in my heart.
But a private domestic adoption, or adopting a baby born in the United States, seemed to be our best chance at becoming parents. Around 135,000 children are adopted domestically each year, while only around 20,000 are adopted from other countries, and that number continues to dwindle.
But I, along with my husband, had to do some extremely deep soul searching to put infertility behind us before deciding to pursue adoption. Of course, it isn’t a solution to infertility. It’s a separate track entirely. In the end, we asked ourselves what we really wanted, and we decided we wanted to be parents. We would love a child, of course, no matter what. It wasn’t biology that was important to us.
We were so in love with this little being that it never felt like the end to our journey but a new beginning.
When you decide to move forward with adoption, you start the endless paperwork and go through a very thorough, and at times invasive, home-study process. We filled out forms that would make anyone cringe, checking boxes on a piece of paper including what race of baby we’d be willing to love and what medical conditions we’d be willing to accept. A social worker came and inspected our home and interviewed us. We were asked about our upbringings, how we wanted to raise a child, and even our sex life. We were asked for references and took training classes on CPR, first aid, discipline, and how to empathetically raise an adopted child. Eventually, we were approved to be parents.
In order to be matched with a birth mother, the adoption agency we signed up with had us create a profile book. Ours included colorful photos of us, our families, and our friends. I tried to tell the story of us in about 12 pages, including our interests, like traveling, running, and playing hockey, and how we liked to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween with our large, extended families.
Once the profile book was done, we started to get emails from the agency about potential adoption situations. Talk about birth moms being the true heroines of any adoption story—most of them are in absolutely heartbreaking situations, and making the decision to place their child for adoption is often an impossible choice.
We’d tell the agency when we wanted our profile book shown—those 12 pages were all a birth mom had to get to know us and choose us to be parents to her child.
We weren’t chosen about four or five times. But then one day, we got the call. We matched with my son’s birth mom five months before he was born. I was ecstatic for us, but heartbroken for her. I learned that when you adopt, it isn’t about just getting a baby but gaining a whole new perspective on life. About 60-70 percent of recent domestic adoptions are considered open adoptions, including ours, which means we have a relationship with our son’s birth mom and dad, plus his biological siblings. We keep their story private but plan to share it with our son as he grows.
He was born just after the New Year. The moment we first saw him, years of infertility and pain melted away. We were so in love with this little being that it never felt like the end to our journey but a new beginning.
Now, from the outside looking in, my husband and I probably look like any other frantic new parents out there. We spend our evenings rushing to pick up our 10-month-old baby from daycare, feed him his favorite sweet potato puree for dinner, sing “Splish Splash” during bath time, and struggle to get him in his pajamas before bed.
Adoption isn’t how I imagined becoming a mother, but I can say now that it’s better than anything I could have ever dreamed of. The blue eyes looking up at me each night may not resemble my own, but they’ve stolen my heart. Not only is he my sunshine, but he is light.
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