Having A Family – Our Adoption Experience

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Having A Family – The Road to Adoption

Part I

I love my children, in fact I adore them.

They’re the most important people in my life.  My heart swells when I see them or I think of them.  I fret, and worry, I beam with pride, I get angry, I get hurt, I defend them.

When they’re around, the incessant sibling bickering makes me crazy and when they’re gone, I enjoy “the quiet” for a couple of hours , and then I miss them desperately, the  pitter patter – or rather the stomping of their now gigantic feet!

But most of all, I am determined to give them the best of everything I can.  They are my “why”.

Pretty normal stuff right?  I’m not unique – in fact I’m a fairly normal parent.  Agreed?

Dial back 11 years when we began the road to adoption.

Having A Family and Poor Planning

I married my husband 14 1/2 years ago,  it was the 2nd marriage for both of us.  I knew that this time around, I wanted a family. I had always wanted to be a mother, ‘having a family‘ was part of my grand plan when I was in my 20s.  It’s just that my life had not run exactly the way I had planned.  My biological alarm clock was on snooze – disappointing but, I had also always wanted to adopt.  Always.

It was about this time I met Michelle and Dan Warren in a child adoption class at the Kinship Center, a wonderful non profit organization that works with the county to provide adoption services.  My husband and I had been married for 3  years and had decided on adoption; Michelle, (who has written about her adoption experience ) and Dan were clearly there for the same reasons.  Not everyone was there was thinking about having a family – some people wanted to become foster parents or respite workers.

You probably know that in order to be considered for adoption you must first attend adoptive parent training classes so that you have a clearer window into the psyche of a child that his been abandoned by their birth parent(s) – so that you know how to deal with the issues that arise.

Considering the number of the ‘children in the system’ waiting to be adopted and their stories, training for all parents should be mandatory!  My sense of outrage at the child abuse and neglect they have suffered cannot be described – and we’re talking about  “right here in California, USA” folks.  Not child adoption in China, or Russia or Romania or some poverty stricken country in the Third World. It’s right here in our neighborhoods, or 3 miles away in a slightly lower income neighborhood.

We struck up an acquaintance with Michelle and Dan, never realizing that we were neighbors in Carmel at that time. Nor did we have any  clue of the friendship and bond that would  be cemented by our common “adoption experience”.

We finished the adoption classes in June or July of 2002 (we passed !:)  We completed the home interviews with our social worker; conversations about sex education and how we would handle adolescence – all with my 80 year old Dad listening in!

Then in September, my Mother passed away, she had been living with us after suffering a stroke during surgery.  I had been blindly determined that she would ‘make it’, and my world fell apart when she died.  We put the ‘whole having a family’‘ on hold as I battled the most profound depression I had ever known for the next year.

The following summer while house hunting we bumped into Michelle.  We hadn’t seen her since our class the previous year.  With a little boy in her arms, and a slightly older, pretty girl in her the hand she had a harried expression on was the quintessential picture of a new mom.  I’ll never forget it.

We began to talk about the adoption and having a family again.  We both thought we wanted a little boy – about 6 or 7 years old. We had learned in adoption class that slightly older children were not as “sought after” as babies and sometimes languished in foster homes waiting for adoption into a ‘forever home’.

adoption

Driven by both the desire to have a family and give a home to a child who had been in the system for a few years coupled with the reality that as we were both working AND at that time we were caring for my Dad who had  come to live when my Mom died, we figured adopting a child of school age would be a better fit for us we went forward.

In December 2003, just after having back surgery, a discectomy, we contacted the Kinship Center and told them we were ready to go forward with the adoption plans. I didn’t realize I was having kids in the literal sense of the word.

Check in for Part II Having A Family – Our Adoption Experience.

Are you a parent?  Do you want to earn a little extra money to improve your family’s life – give your kids a little more.

Maybe you want to work at home so that you can spend more time your family – that was me.  When I was working at my job I never saw them, I was working all the time.

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