One thing that also pushed us to adopt was seeing the roadsigns God put up leading us in that direction.
In August 2005, after Jackie had spent a lot of time on the Internet looking up information about adoption, she thought that the name of the current president of FCC/Atlanta (Families with Children from China) looked familiar. Years before, while teaching at Duluth Junior Academy, she had taught this lady’s step-daughter. The girl was primarily living with her mother, so Jackie and the other parent had only met a few times, but Jackie still remembered the name. “What was the chance,” she wondered, “that she was looking at adopting from China when the president of the local chapter of FCC was someone she knew?”
Jackie called her. They couldn’t talk long right then, but this lady—let’s call her R—was nice enough to call Jackie back, and they talked for a long time. R gave us some great advice, and she encouraged us in our adoption. She also encouraged us to join FCCA (more about that later) and offered to mentor us.
Finding R also helped us realize that God had a plan for our family. It had taken us a while to find it, but we felt encouraged that adopting from China was the right path for us to travel to make us a family.
The first question to answer is why are Jackie and I adopting.
I wish I could say that we were one of those extraordinary, great-hearted couples who had always planned on adopting, either in place of having biological children or in addition to it.
Unfortunately, I can’t.
Instead, we came to adoption like this:
After I graduated from school, we tried to start a family. Nothing happened.
We—Jackie in particular—went through a lot of tests and poking and prodding. In the end, our reproductive endocrinologist said that he felt we had a good chance of being able to conceive. He wanted us to try a round or two of intrauterine insemination, but pretty quickly move on to in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
We looked at the chances and the emotional roller coaster IVF would be, and we weighed the pros and cons. If we went ahead with trying to have a child biologically, our odds wouldn’t be very good: each round would cost us roughly $10,000, and the emotional and physical demands are difficult. On the other hand, we could take the money, apply to adopt, and be certain to have a child. It wouldn’t be an entirely smooth process, we knew, but we still decided that was the way to go.
Emotionally, I needed a little time to come around to adoption. Jackie was really ready before I was. Today, though, I believe that we are having a child exactly the way we should. Even if a magic fairy could wave her wand and give us the ability to conceive, I’d still want to adopt a little girl from China.
Plus, the difficult time we’ve had starting a family and the length of time we’ve waited have only made us that much more ready to have a child and that much more sure that this is what we want in our lives.
We’ve also realized, through other things that have happened in the process of adopting, that God already had this path laid out for us. We were a little slow to find it, but that’s our fault.
And now we’re finally where we should be.
Welcome to this blog. It is the journal of my wife’s and my journey to adopt a daughter from China, from my perspective (she’s keeping her own blog on BabySites). Right now, we have finished the paperwork, and we’re waiting for the Chinese government to match us with our daughter. That may take ten months, it may be more, it may be less.
Since I’ve started this journal late, I have a lot of catching up to do, and I’m going to fill the time by getting you caught up.
I don’t really have a plan for how I’m going to tackle this. As I talk about what happened, I’m going to go more or less chronologically, but I will get things out of order. Some posts will be more topical than chronological, and in them I’ll wander back and forth over the months. I’m also going to try to remember and relive the emotions and stresses we were experiencing at the time, but of course I’ll be talking about these events six months or so after they happened. And I’m going to use this blog to talk about what’s happening now, why we’re adopting, and about the incredible world that we’ve stumbled across of families who have adopted from China.
We’ll see how it goes.
I’m writing this now to let my family, friends, and random strangers off the Internet know what’s happening with this process. Like any journal, I also hope this will help explain life to myself, so I’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on. And I want to record this for the future, so I can look back on the excitement we’re feeling now.
But that’s not the real reason for this blog. Really, I want to let our future daughter know how we came to her. I want to tell her about the decisions we are making, the paperwork we are filling out, and the excitement we feel. Now—before we know who she is, before we’ve even decided on a name—I want to start the conversation that will last us the rest of our lives, and because I can’t wait.
So come in. Welcome. Make yourselves at home. Read my posts. Post your own comments.
But remember: really, you’re just eavesdropping.
