Why?
It’s human nature to wonder why people make the choices that they do. But it’s good etiquette not to ask about people’s personal choices about their families. What a pickle! We know that people are curious about why we—or anyone—may want to adopt, so we’re including this handy section to explain:
Cory and I first talked about adoption a few days after we started dating in 2001. Cory was in law school in Chapel Hill, I was in DC trying to find a job, and we e-mailed each other frequently. While we were in separate states, we took the time to share our hopes for the future. Neither of us knew for sure if we wanted to ever have children, but I said that if I did become a mom one day, I would want it to be through adoption. Adoption had treated me very well in the past (I was adopted by the ideal family for me when I was two months old) and it’s a legacy I’d like to share with my own child or children one day. Cory agreed that it’s not DNA that makes a family, but the love that people share and the way they care for one another. We married a little over two years later in January 2004 and grew our family with the addition of cats rather than people.
Over the years we talked more about having kids and realized that both of us think babies can be delightful, but we also think toddlers and older children are pretty fantastic. And although we have no reason to think we could not give birth to a darling fleet of pasty, dark-haired, allergy-prone, nerdy indoor kids, we would be just as happy to adopt those nerdy kids–no matter their ages. So why not grow our family while getting kids out of foster care or helping birth mothers fulfill their adoption plans at the same time?
We went to an informational meeting on adoption and foster care (which turned out to be entirely about therapeutic foster care) in 2008 or ’09, and I would regularly peruse the AdoptUSKids.org website to find out more about children living in foster care. In 2010 while looking at the site, I stumbled across the profile for young Amanda in Oklahoma, whose photo showed her proudly holding up the medal she won in a geography bee. I showed her profile to Cory, who was immediately smitten. Although we knew that Amanda most likely wouldn’t be in foster care for much longer with a photo like that, we decided the time was right to get ready for kids and began working with a private agency to begin the adoption process. Readers of this blog will know that as time passed, we widened our options (for a variety of reasons) to include infant adoption through a private agency.
And in case your “Why?” is about why we’re keeping this blog, it’s twofold. We want our friends and family to be able to keep up with where we are in our own move toward adoption, but we also want to demystify the process of adopting and challenge common misconceptions people have about it. Who knows? Adopting may be your calling, too.
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