Thursday, December 20, 2012

Why Not Regular Domestic Or International Adoption?

Trent and I made the decision to pursue adoption on July 1st of this past summer. We had talked about it as a possibility at random times for over a year but during the month of June prior to this decision, I repeatedly ran into what I truly believe were God signs pointing us in this direction (which I might write about another time).  Also during that month, Trent was gone to two camps and a mission trip.  So I was stuck at home by myself having lots of tearful conversations with God while Trent was not there.  He got home.  I gave him a day to rest up.  Then I told him all about the month of June.  And there in our living room, the evening of July 1st, we decided to pursue adoption.

I don't think I slept a wink that night.

And so began our journey of educating ourselves, figuring out what paths to adoption were available and what each would involve, praying about which way we should go.

First we looked into domestic infant adoption.
Trent and I are the type that want to serve our next door neighbors, those in need right here in our own community.  There are folks who are wired for international mission or international adoption and we believe that is so good and so needed and they have our full support in it.  But that's not really us.  So at the beginning of all this we figured we'd find ourselves adopting via an agency assisted domestic infant adoption.  This is where you sign on with an agency who does your homestudy and approves you, then works to match you with an expectant birth mother who is choosing for her child to be adopted.  This is how Trent and his sister were adopted.  We even started by researching the Edna Gladney Center For Adoption, the agency they were both adopted through, but quickly gave up on that idea when we saw that it would cost us $34,000 to adopt through them.   After some more research, we landed on Generations Adoptions, an agency here in Waco.  We met with the director to get to know the agency better and we really, really liked it.  Plus the $17,500 fee was much less scary.

Then some time passed. And we became less and less convinced that this was the route for us to take.  You see...that system is doing just fine without us.  They've got hopeful adoptive parents waiting up to three years before they are matched with a birth mother and therefore matched with their future child.  Most of these parents are turning to this agency assisted adoption as their only way to have children and build a family, due to infertility or other complications that prevent them from having biological children.   We realized we might do more to clog this system than help.  We did not decide to adopt based on our own need but rather to help fill a need.  We do believe that if God was indeed leading us to this form of domestic adoption, the child he would lead us to would be meant for us and not for someone else.  And if he put a different situation in our path where we could adopt a child here that didn't come to us through a private agency, we'd be open to that. But for the time being, he wasn't leading us to domestic infant adoption...

So we looked briefly into international adoption.
We have a place in our hearts for Haiti.  Partly because Mission Waco has a very strong tie to Haiti through mission work it does there and we have a very strong tie to Mission Waco now, since Trent's second job is there.  Partly because Haiti is right there so close to us.  Mostly because there is so much hurt and need there.  When we realized that domestic infant adoption was probably not the right route for us, we wondered if God was indeed pushing us outside of our country and this pull towards Haiti was part of that.   So we began to research adoption from Haiti.  It took all of about 5 minutes to discover that at least one of us has to be age 35 before we can adopt from Haiti.  Door >> slam.  So we have to tuck this idea away for now but who knows...maybe in 7 or 8 years we'll revisit it.

Then we looked into foster care...and God met us there.

To be continued...

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