I am pretty excited about tomorrow. Our home is a total mess because we’re remodeling it, but our social worker is coming over tomorrow at 1pm to complete our home study.
I realize another step in this process will be completed, but I feel sort of frustrated at the same time. Our attorney is on a vacation/sabatical, and all we’ve done is let people know that we’re looking to adopt. This seems so strange to adopt this way, just kind of waiting for a situation to present itself. I feel a little lost about what to do next once the home study is done, and when I asked our attorney, she basically said just to send out the letters letting people know we’re adopting and wait. I have nightmares and worry a lot that we will never be matched with a birth family and we’ll have to deal with not being able to be parents and learn to live as a childless couple. If that is God’s will that is His will, but I don’t feel that that is the direction we should go right now.
I just hope once the homestudy is done we will be able to focus on another step of the adoption process.
I have my interview for a supervisor position at my job on Thursday afternoon. I’m pretty excited and nervous; I already had to interview to get into the TRAINING to be a supervisor, and now I’m actually interviewing to be hired formally as a supervisor. This week, we’ve worked on packing more things at our house, put in upper cabinets in the kitchen (Donald and my father in law have done that), and then once we get to a good place I will start painting the inside of the ENTIRE house. Yes, I am super excited (Yuck.) It will all be beautiful when it’s done, but the house better sell, as we’re going to be updating/redoing everything but the carpeting, but including a carpet allowance.
Hubby and I spent most of the day filling out our home study paperwork, copying our personal documents, and printing out photos. All we have left are the financial statements, which apparently we get from our social worker at our first orientation meeting. This was the meeting that was scheduled June 13, which had to be postponed due to my mother’s death. S.T. (social worker) emailed us tonight and advised she’s ready to schedule the orientation meeting, so that is exciting.
We have a pretty good draft of our “birth mother” book, but we still have to make a letter that we hand out to everyone we know advising that we are wanting to adopt. I worry sometimes that no one will ever pick us, and we’ll be waiting forever, but we’ll never know until we try. We keep talking about foster care adoption, but all the meetings we’ve gone to about foster care they bring up the fact that most of the children awaiting adoption are older. My husband doesn’t want to adopt a child that’s older than how long we’ve been married, and I guess I see my husband’s point. Maybe if we have been waiting a long time for a private adoption child and nothing is working we’ll go the foster care route, or perhaps we’ll decide just to not have kids, I really don’t know.
Once we get the social work side completed, I am not sure what’s next. I suppose waiting is what happens next. I am not sure when we’re going to work on the “we’re adopting” letter, I guess as soon as possible. Tomorrow I think is going to be a little busy to work on any more of this. We can’t find any copies of our marriage certificate, which is the last document we need for the home study. We’re planning on going to the county courthouse Tuesday morning to pick another copy up.
I hope this is a little easier the second time around. I think we spent so much time thinking and debating and hoping and waiting it feels like it’s taken FOREVER to get this done. I have been looking back in my blog posts and thinking back to when we started on this journey, and it seems like we have been taking such baby steps to get here. I wonder if it’s different for couples who are given a very straight answer that they will not be able to get pregnant. I wonder if what has taken us so long to move forward with each step is that the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, so there is always a hope that we will get pregnant. I think I’m okay with not being pregnant, but I’m not okay with not having any kids at all.
As we’ve been waiting and praying for kids, I just keep praying that God will make me not want to have kids and make me stop thinking about it. I’ve also been praying for it to get easier. I have been thankful that most people have been supportive and given us kind words of encouragement as we’ve gone down this path, rather than judging us or telling us what we’ve done wrong. That would make it even harder if people weren’t excited for us or supportive.
A lot of my husband’s family friends have adopted children, and there are a lot of adoptive families at our church, which is good, it makes me not feel as weird. In our circle of friends we’re the only ones, so that will be interesting as our kids get older. I definitely want to be open with them and let them know they’re adopted right from the beginning, but I just worry that they will feel weird if all their other friends are not adopted. I suppose it won’t really make a difference.
Those are things I want to start researching and reading about, now that we know this is the path we’re taking, and we’re going to keep plugging along until God definitely slams the door. I want to find out more about raising kids, how to bond with adopted babies, and how to deal with these different issues. I guess it’s not going to feel real until we have our child, I know we’re going to have a baby someday, but there is no set due date, no set time frame. When we first sat down with our attorney at the end of May of 07, we asked her how long it would take. She said about 1 year. We’ve given our birth mom book to one person and we weren’t selected, and no one else has wanted to see our birth mom book (but we also haven’t sent out the letters to all the different people we know). So, we’ll see if the time frame is a year, or longer. I’m trying not to think too far ahead, just trying to take it one step at a time, one meeting at a time.
Okay, I know it’s August, but I feel like posting about my husband.
We will be married 7 years January 6, 2008. I can’t even believe it, it’s gone by really fast. I was thinking of everything we’ve been through together….Our pastor always said when you take your wedding vows you think “Better…Richer…Health” but you promise the “Worse…Poorer….Sickness.” There are things we’ve been through that I wouldn’t ever have expected. However, through all of it, my husband’s true character has shone through.
He is a jem. I know it hurts him a lot that we haven’t been able to get pregnant, there is something in him that really wants to be a dad and have a baby. He doesn’t verbalize it a lot, but I know it hurts. Me? It hurts, but I just want a child, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much when I’m filling out adoption paperwork. I’m actually sort of relieved to not have to go through pregnancy and childbirth. Now, my hubby is all for adopting. But I think there is a part of him that hurts very deeply to think that maybe we won’t ever be able to give birth to our children. Has he ever blamed me? No. Has he ever pushed me to do infertility treatments I don’t want to do? Never. Has he been a rock when I’ve been a mess? Absolutely.
I think the “Infertility Club” is something you don’t understand till you’ve been there. Before we tried to have children, I looked at couples that had trouble having kids, and I felt badly for them, but I really didn’t understand. It’s a roller coaster, it doesn’t seem fair, and every young girl that buries her baby in the backyard with the help of her mom just eats at you. Every kid you hear of that’s killed, left in a car in the heat, or suffers from unspeakably stupid and neglectful acts makes you so angry!
My husband always says “drop them off at our doorstep” when he hears people complain about their children. He understands exactly how I feel when something about an abused or murdered child comes on the news. He is smart, good looking, sweet, kind, and he has shown himself to be wonderful, compassionate, and Godly even in the midst of such terrible pain. I guess I want to know that something good has come out of not being able to have children. The thing I see now is that I married the most wonderful man in the whole world. In the midst of pain and adversity you can really see the character of a person. My husband has been positive, supportive, and wonderful, even though I know it hurts him very deeply. He has always loved kids, and I knew from the moment I met him he wanted to be a dad.
Honey, you’re going to be a great dad. Hang in there. I love you.
I go through periods where I have reoccurring dreams. Sometimes they are nightmares, sometimes they aren’t. I have one dream over and over that a tornado is coming to my farmhouse in Illinois.
Lately, though, I have been dreaming about what our children will look like.
You would think that, being pale as my husband and I both are, that I would dream of having blonde haired, blue eyed children. Well, that’s not how it is. When I imagine my children, I imagine a group of 3-5 Hispanic/African American/Unspecified-race-children- of-color. Is that strange? Sometimes I dream that there has been a group of kids whose parents have died and we need to take them all (but at least one of them is a baby) and I’ve had other dreams where there are twins or triplets that need a good home. However, never in these dreams have these children been white. I don’t know if that’s because I associate adopting with adopting a child that doesn’t look like us or if I just really want to adopt a child of color. I am not opposed to adopting a white child, but that is not how I imagine my kids in these dreams. I also never dream about one kid, I dream about us adopting a group of kids at once. (Which is weird, since we’re traveling down the path of adopting an infant)
I was talking to my husband today about adopting children of a different race on the way to work. I brought up the fact that if we adopt a child of another race I am concerned that we will need to go to counseling to help us raise an adopted child who might face racism. My husband brought up a good point: all of us will face difficult obstacles in our lives, some of which may not have anything to do with race at all. However, I just worry about that sort of thing. I grew up in a small town with all white people and some of them were pretty closed minded. Various family members have made some comments about race that worry me. No one else in the family on either side has adopted, so that would be a new experience.
I would hope when we adopt that friends and family would accept these children as ours, because that is the way that we will look at them. I know the insensitive comments will come (as they already have about infertility) and I must be prepared. I just don’t know how I would handle it if my child had to deal with racism, or looking different from his/her parents, or looking different than most of the kids in school. I know this is a long way off in our future, and I don’t want to treat everyone and push people away expecting that they’re not going to accept our children. I just worry about these sorts of things because no one in our immediate group of friends or in our family has had to adopt, so it really does feel like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. You don’t know how people will react. You feel a lot of guilt regarding the whole thing…like “if I wouldn’t have done this or that, I could get pregnant.” Or, people tell you those things, maybe not directly, but they say “Since you did or didn’t do such and such, now you can’t get pregnant.”
To be honest, I think that is a bunch of bunk. I have made some mistakes in my life, and I will continue to make mistakes, and the only One that I can depend on is Jesus. This has been the most frustrating part : I got on FMLA leave from work expecting to go through surgeries, procedures, etc. But to go to a Fertility clinic and be told that you and your husband are fine, that they can’t find anything wrong, is nuts. To get tested by an endocrinologist and have them send you a letter that says “we can’t find anything to treat this” is not what I was prepared for. I was prepared to have messed up fallopian tubes or no eggs or something.
However, everything is fine. We know people that have done invitro and had success, and I am very grateful for those folks that InVitro has worked. For my husband and I, we have decided to not do anything invasive. If we are going to spend that type of money, we are going to spend it on adoption. Everyone has a different path they decide to take. However, I don’t want to go through hormone treatments, artificial insemination, etc. etc. etc. and THEN after all that decide to adopt. We’ve decided that we are going to skip that “final step” and go right to adoption. That is our choice, no one else’s, and we are happy with that choice.
I have wanted to write this post but it’s been hard to write about. I think I’m finally ready to write about it.
About 3 years ago a friend of mine sold me a very nice wooden crib for about $75. At athat time, I had been talking to my friend about how we were trying to get pregnant. She said “well, my other friend sold me this crib and I thought of you guys, because I imagine you’ll be needing it soon.” So, I bought the crib.
It’s been sitting in our downstairs storage room ever since. It’s been sad to look at it; it’s just always reminded me of how long we’ve been trying without success to have a child.
A couple weeks ago, I got an email from a friend at church. She periodically sends out emails asking for items for those in need. This email she needed a crib for a single mom that didn’t have enough money to buy one. Now, I will admit, at first I felt really, really angry. I had a talk with the Lord. I was thinking “Okay, my husband and I have steady jobs and we aren’t on drugs and we’ve been trying to get pregnant for years and this young gal just has a baby and can’t even afford to keep it and now she has the guts to ask people to provide for her baby?” Oh, I was so mad at the world.
I began thinking about it….there is a crib in my basement that some baby needs. I’d been holding onto it for 3 years, always thinking “Next month is the month we’ll need it.” I’ve put off buying a mattress for it because I didn’t want to take that step until we were actually pregnant. So, I thought “I’ll just email this friend, tell her I have a crib with no mattress….and she probably won’t want it anyway since there is no mattress. That way, I’ll feel good about offering it, but I won’t need to give it to her.”
Well, I emailed her and she replied back within the hour. She said “I just talked to her. This young mom would love the crib. She actually has a new mattress, but she’s just had a hard time finding just a solid wooden crib. What you have sounds perfect” I was stunned.
I remember sitting in front of the computer after reading the email and thinking. This was the crib I had bought, anticipating using it, and it had sat there unused for 3 years. There was a mom and a baby out there that could use it. I prayed and cried, I cried and prayed some more. I typed an email back stating I would be happy to let the mother have the crib.
Luckily, this friend wasn’t around on the day I dropped it off on her porch. I was a mess, bawling, unpacking a piece, bawling some more. If any of her neighbors saw me they must have thought I was completely insane. It just felt so symbolic and bizarre. Here I was, waiting on a child, a crib ready in my house, while some young woman was able to get pregnant and she didn’t have enough money to afford a crib. I was angry with myself for being jealous and angry, I was angry at God, I felt sorry for this young lady and her baby, and I felt sorry for me.
So, I gave up my crib to a mom that needed it. It was really, really hard and that person probably has no idea how hard it was to do. I think God is using this as a lesson for me in the struggle of infertility. I’m glad I did it, but man, I hate how struggling with this makes me realize just how much of a monster I can be. I am a sinner, Lord have mercy on me.
Saturday the 5k went well, I completed it in 55 minutes. (I took a short cut, and that’s the time I would have had if I stuck with the group that finished at 55 minutes). So, I can only get better, right?
The adoption meeting was tough, I just feel so tired and upset by the whole thing. We’ve decided on domestic adoption, we’re still looking for an adoption agency. I’m going to be calling a few and seeing if we can start the paperwork now before we move, or if it would really make it easier to start it all when we move to Olathe.
Honestly, I am just tired of this cycle of 1) waiting 2) hoping 3) being disappointed. I would rather be working towards something. We know we’re not doing any more fertility treatment, and I am just tired of hoping something magical will happen. Maybe it will, who knows!
So, we have a lot of packets from various agencies…I’m talking to someone from church to see if she knows anyone who has adopted domestically, as a lot of folks in our church have adopted internationally. I am sure a lot of the processes are the same, but it would be good to get recommendations on what to look for in agencies.
Anyone have any suggestions?
jeez….how much of this kid stuff is just waiting? plugging along with normal life, then waiting….forging ahead a little more and waiting some more.
Things are on hold until we get moved to a bigger home closer to our jobs. Monday my hubby and I start our new jobs….we’ll get to car pool together! We’ll get to see each other so much we’ll get sick of one another!!
I’m so excited and nervous. I can see growth and some things are “crossed off the list.” I guess I’m impatient and wish the rest of it could get crossed off!
I gained some weight this week. BLAH. Friend of my husband is selling us his treadmill, I can’t wait for that. How awesome would it be to use the treadmill while watching tv?
Monday I start walking with a friend every day at 5am. I am praying for lots of days of good weather….it makes exercise so much easier to do it with a friend rather than alone!
My husband I have been meeting monthly with someone from our church to go over our debt. This is usually a good time, and for the first time yesterday we brought up the adoption equation.
I hate to think of kids in terms of finances, but my husband and I are in a lot of student loan debt and other misc. debt. (Though, thankfully, the credit card debt and misc. we’ve whittled down quite a bit.) We are trying to be wise in our spending and follow the Crown financial principles, but my heart really aches for a child NOW. I don’t care how much it costs, or how much debt we get into, I just really want a child!
Our friend that discusses finances also brought up the fact that adoption not only has upfront costs, but the cost of parenting as well. Clothing, feeding, educating and caring for a child. I guess I feel torn with wanting to be financially responsible and have enough saved up for a child, and feeling as if I’m getting old because I will be 30 in March.
Also, a lot of our family and friends are in the Illinois/Indiana area, and we are considering moving there someday, especially if we have children. If I get a promotion here in Kansas, I will be locked in for 18 months until I can promote up into another job in Illinois (where there are more job opportunties).
Our friend from church that works with us on finances also said that maybe we aren’t meant to have children, but maybe we are just to be people who help children that aren’t necessarily our own. (I can’t remember the exact phrase he used, but it was something to the affect of maybe we aren’t meant to be parents by birth or adoption.) I guess that’s something that I’ve been praying through, if we are meant to be parents at all.
I don’t know why I want to be a mom, it’s just something I want! Maybe that’s just a selfish part of it, I can’t even explain it. I just know there are a lot of kids out there that need parents, a lot of orphans that don’t have homes, a lot of kids whose parents just don’t have the ability to care for their children. I know my husband would be a great dad, and I want to see him as a dad, and I guess that’s a big part of it. I want to be a mom, but even more than that, I really know my husband wants to be a dad.
I guess we’re just going to keep moving forward, and see where God opens and shuts doors. That was such a tough talk yesterday.
order of events
I may not be blogging for a while until something changes, my blog is depressing myself.
1. I get a higher paying job
2. Hubby get a steady job
3. We get ourselves a house (probably move to Olathe, KS)
4. Decide if we want to adopt international, domestic, foster care.
5. Take the appropriate classes.
6. Fill out paperwork
7. Pray a lot
8. pray some more
OR, someone could put a baby on our doorstep. C’mon! Email me, I’ll give you my address.
I hate having to count time in between my periods, and hoping every month that I’m pregnant.
My husband is working on getting another job, so hopefully that can lead to us buying a larger house. Then, we can start filling out home studies and work on the adoption process.
I am just tired of waiting and nothing happening, but it’s just seems like all these “things” have to be in order before we can proceed with the next step.
So, things are on hold, just plugging along until the new job for my husband shows up. Then, if we aren’t pregnant by then, I’m am sure we’ll begin all the applications full force.
Still haven’t decided what method of adoption: I’m enjoying reading others’ blogs to see what their experiences have been like. I know none of them are easy, and I don’t really know what I’m getting into until we’re in the middle of it.
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