Chapter 7: My Tribe
Happy New Year! It’s 2013, and we made it. We survived the year of possible divorce, massive heartache and marriage breakthroughs. Christmas came and went without dramatic displays by my emotional self, which led to my family and friends continuing to speak to me. Success. I’m sure the increase in depression medication added to that success.
It became clear that I needed to find support. I needed to stop counting on my family to attempt to begin understanding what we were going through. I needed to stop putting pressure on them to just get it. They could not “get it” because they were not in it. They were watching it, which I’m sure was painful enough, and there was nothing they could to do to fix it.
A friend and I had an idea to create our own support group. So we advertised a meetup online for waiting adoptive parents. Within a month we had met 20 families in the exact position we were in. Boom. Support created. It turned out, I wasn’t alone. I’m not the only person on the planet that desires a child that can’t physically have one.
There were husbands and wives dealing with the same pressures we were dealing with. There were single women dealing with infertility in completely different ways, tired of waiting for a husband and ready to become a mother. Having a tribe in this with me filled my lungs with air. I could breathe again. I had people to call when I was having a bad day. I had people I could comfort when they were having a bad day. I could be real. I didn’t have to hold back, because they felt the same things. Their hearts hurt as much as mine did. Support, this is what I’ve been missing. I found my tribe.
We began meeting once a month to talk about adoption situations that had come up and situations that fell through. We talked about our frustrations with the infant adoption process. Many of us realized that we had to be our own advocate, our future birth mother’s advocate, and our future child’s advocate. So many of the agencies we were dealing with were understaffed and had high turnover. So many of the agencies promised post adoption care for birth mothers, yet everything we were hearing proved otherwise. Once a child was born, a birth mother received a few counseling sessions, then was set free into the abyss of loss and grief.
We talked a lot about how to deal with in utero drug exposures and talked about how we wouldn’t have to deal with drug exposures if we could just have our own children. But this was our chosen path, so we researched. We were all in the same boat. We could talk about our infertility without the agency telling us that we needed to “get over it” -- many agencies were telling families they needed to finish grieving their infertility before adopting. I guess I’m just not sure how someone gets over their barrenness. I’m not adopting to cure my infertility, I’m adopting to cure my deep desire to become a mother.
I do not expect this child to fill the hole that infertility has dug deep into me. I’m not sure how I’m going to fill that hole, but it’s not my child’s job to do that. I am not adopting to save a child from their biological families, that’s not my job either. I’m not doing a good deed or charitable act. I just want a child to love. If I wanted to do a good deed, I would get into foster care.
Unfortunately, I’m not ready for foster care. I’m terrified of foster care. I’m not in a place to take a child and love them temporarily. I know that about myself and my grief in my infertility journey. This is my limitation and I have some serious guilt over it.
We created a Facebook group so we could continue chatting in between meetings. That Facebook group grew quickly. It seemed support for waiting and adoptive families was non-existent. Once you are certified to adopt, you are done in the agency’s eyes. Your training is complete. Now you just wait, sometimes not hearing anything for months. There was so much more we needed to know though. We couldn’t just go on with our lives as if nothing was going to change. Everything could change in an instant!
We had speakers come talk to us about what adoption was like for them. We had adoptees, birth mothers, other adoptive parents, and even an adoption lawyer come in and talk. We educated ourselves in ways our agencies wouldn’t do. We learned to stand up for ourselves. We talked to each other about situations out of state where agencies were requiring tens of thousands of dollars up front, before a baby was born, with a non-refundable policy. How can financial policies be placed on adoption? Where is all this money going? How is this legal? We all struggled between the desperation of wanting a baby and the ethics of these adoption situations. We learned when to report an agency and to whom to report them too.
The adoption program is broken. It’s a private system where money exchanges hands and babies exchange hands. The ethics within adoption in the United States are certainly questionable, yet still we wanted a child. We decided to continue forward and help each other filter out the crooks, but many of us still got burned financially. Each state has different laws and each agency has different policies. There were birth moms that lied about being pregnant to get funds from agencies, who got their funds from hopeful adoptive parents. Some states set limits on birth parent funds while others did not. Some birth parents needed the funds to live, others did not. How do we decipher what is truth and what is not? Adoption is complicated. Infertility is complicated. Life is complicated.
Each time we would have a sister, cousin, friend, or enemy get pregnant, we called each other for support. We encouraged each other to be patient as we helped each other build our profile books. We continued to tell ourselves that our child will come. For most of us adoptive parents in the infant adoption program, the biological parents get to choose the adoptive parents. Thus our family profile books (i.e resumes). Everyone had an opinion on how many pictures to put in, how many words, what color, what size. Do we make them online or do we do a scrapbook of sorts? Do we make a video? What will our child's birth mother and father want to see? It was a stressful time to make each book perfect. Our future children are coming to us based on this book. No pressure.
One by one the families in our group brought home their forever children and we would learn more and gain more insight. Each situation educated us. One by one we celebrated each other. For the first time in many years, I was legitimately happy and excited to hear about these “expecting” families, many who will be with us the rest of our lives. We started a journey together and have bonded so deeply, that we can never fully be apart. Our children will know other adopted children. We will not go through this complex adoption journey alone.
I was finally ok with where we were in the whole process. I was finally ok in our marriage. I was settling in to my real estate career. I was getting less anxious every time the agency would call me with a potential situation. I would be less devastated when they would call to say we were not the chosen parents.
About five months into waiting, I told a friend I was ready for a baby shower. She had said she would throw me one when I was ready and now I was ready. This is something people don’t think about with adoptive families. There is no belly, so there is no shower. She asked how many people I wanted to invite. I said 75. Sorry sister, this ain’t your grandma’s baby shower. This is a celebration of family planning survival. Bless her. Luckily she only had to order and mail invitations. Still not cheap. I didn’t want games, I wanted gifts and food. This is like a baby shower BBQ on steroids. The best part was, the expectant mother could partake in alcoholic beverages. Also, no one had to guess the circumference of my belly. Who comes up with these games??? Yay for adoption!
