Why we didn't adopt

Earlier this month Klara authored a post about wanting to share the story of why she and her husband chose not to adopt.  Someone (me?) suggested that several of us might join in and share the story of why we chose not to adopt too.  Safety in numbers, right?  On Thursday Savannah kicked off the sharing of stories by writing a beautiful post about why she and her husband have decided not to try to adopt again.

So without further ado, here is the story of why we chose not to adopt......

I’m not really a baby person.  Quite frankly I think they’re sort of boring.  They eat, sleep, poop, puke, and cry and not much else for the first couple of months.  I don’t even really start to like kids until they are a couple of years old and can verbally communicate, feed themselves, and use the toilet semi-independently.  Hubs is the same.  So why did we even want a kid?  Well, partly because hubs and I felt like it would be different with our own kid and part of it was plain old curiosity to see what the combined genetic matter of hubs and I looked like, acted like, etc.  I wanted to teach our kid how to read and play soccer and drive.  Hubs wanted to teach our kid how to play guitar, martial arts, and to paint.  We wanted to help our kid with science fair projects and go to band concerts and figure out which college they were going to go to.  We wanted to be there to support our kid when s/he got bullied or failed a math test.  We hoped that our kid would get my height and nose and hubs’ cheekbones and eyes.  We hoped that our kid would get hubs’ organization, attention to detail and musical ability and that s/he would get my academic ability, spontaneity, and willingness to try new things.

But sometimes things don’t work out as planned.  We tried really hard to have a baby for a long time.  We went as far as we were willing to go and then we stopped.  It broke our hearts but we made the best decision for us and haven’t looked back one time.

So that brings us to adoption.  Did we consider adoption?  Yes.  Is something that we ever felt fully comfortable with?  No.  Did we do our due diligence anyway?  Yes.  We thoroughly investigated something that we never dreamt that we’d even have to consider.  And we cried.  A lot.  And we went back and forth.  A lot.

We are lucky to have friends who have adopted, both domestic and international.  We asked questions and they answered everything we asked.  Their candor was appreciated.  They talked about the good, the bad, and the challenges.  We looked into agencies and even talked to a few. 

We knew from the beginning that international adoption was off the table for us.  We had substantial ethical concerns with how many of the children, particularly the young ones, ended up being placed for adoption and honestly felt like many of the required fees were basically bribery.  Additionally we worried about long-term effects of institutionalization of children eligible for international adoption.  Domestic private adoption was also ruled out quickly because we were not comfortable with the idea of open adoption (meaning that some kind of relationship was maintained with the birth parent), which is very common in the United States.  Also it seems like private domestic adoption is the wild wild west when it comes to variability of laws across states. 

Adoption through the state foster care system is what we gave the most serious thought to.  Hubs and I both have professional backgrounds that would make us well suited to adopt children who had been removed from their parents for whatever reason, usually abuse or neglect.  We would have been the type of foster parents that an agency would have jumped at the chance to work with.  But in the end we couldn’t do it.  Our hearts were shattered from dealing with infertility and we couldn’t possibly imagine fostering a child, falling in love with them, and then returning them to their parent when the time came.  It would have been too much for us.

Money was never a consideration when we looked at our adoption options (or IVF, for that matter).  Both are incredibly expensive.  We always said that if it was something that we were truly passionate about pursuing or thought that the outcome would likely be good that we would have figured out a way to pay for it. 

Adoption is a wonderful thing.  It’s a great way for many couples to build their family.  There are a bunch of amazing children who have been adopted or who are looking for their forever homes by no fault of their own.  All children deserve to be loved and to have a safe home and parents that care about them, and I am so glad that there are parents called to adopt these children.

In the end we knew that we weren’t cut out to be adoptive parents.  Instead of building our family we decided to remain a family of two.  I guess I can boil our decision to adopt down to one sentence:  We didn’t want to parent a kid; we wanted to parent OUR kid.