I can remember the exact day that I knew I was going to adopt. I was about 23 years old and not at all interested in having kids yet. I was temping at a hospital in San Francisco and I was bored. For some reason, I was surfing the internet and bumbled across a website for a family that had adopted from China. I was intrigued. From there I found more and more links and got my voyeristic self signed on to Adoptive-Parents-China back when it was still on Onelist.
I was always kind of familiar with the idea of adoption. When I was 3-4 years old, I spent my days with a babysitter who had a daughter who was adopted from Korea. My parents had considered adopting a little boy when I was about 7 years old, but didn’t because they were too worried about their finances. As a fourth grader I read "The Family Nobody Wanted" so many times, I eventually stole it from the classroom bookshelf. And I knew a couple kids at school who had been adopted. It just never seemed like a strange idea to me.
When I was about 24 and in the nacent stages of babylust, I had checked out some books on international adoption from the library. A saw them and kind of freaked out. I think he was as freaked out by the IDEA of any kids as he was by adoption. In the middle of the arguement that followed I said "I am going to adopt with or without you. It is not negotiable." Basically, even though I wasn’t ready for kids at 24, I was already waiting.
Despite A’s reservations four years ago, Chinese adoption just seemed like the perfect option for us. I don’t know if I have mentioned it here before, but A’s family has a very heavy dose of SERIOUS mental illness (schizoaffective disorder-similar to schizophrenia) running through it. The idea of being responsible for a THIRD generation of mentally ill family members (we already help with his father and sister) is really unappealing, not to mention the heartbreak of imagining my children suffering like that. I will take the unknown possibilities of adoption over the waiting for the next 25 years to see if Miss M is going to avoid the Russian roulette of mental illness any day. The more I love Miss M, the scarier the mental illness becomes. Plus, because A is Chinese, so hopefully, the transracial issues that come with international adoption will be a little easier to deal with.
When I found myself unexpectedly pregnant, one of my big concerns was how the pregnancy would affect my plans to adopt. I hoped and hoped for a boy, thinking (correctly) that A would be much more willing to adopt if he already had a bio son. I can remember hoping "boy, boy, boy, boy" during the ultrasound. When they told me Miss M was a girl, I didn’t think about her nearly as much as I thought about my imaginary adopted children slipping away. Two years later, I can’t even fathom ever hoping Miss M was anything other than the perfect little bug that she is, but I at the time I was very worrried.
It has been a long wait, the waiting to adopt. After some initial reservations, A talks about our future adoption plans without much prodding. We still have concerns about his parents’ reactions (mostly his mom’s reaction)and probably won’t tell her about it until the last possible minute, but besides that we are just waiting to begin.
I feel so fortunate that I found the path that I really believe we are meant to take so early and relatively painlessly. I read a lot of adoption blogs that deal with the losses of infertility right along with the joy of adoption, and it is heartbreaking to read about those struggles. I don’t think that adoption is going to be an easier road for us, but it just feels right. Deep down in my heart, I know my kid (or kids?) will be out there waiting for me. I just have to be patient enough to wait just a little longer.