I wrote earlier on why we decided to adoption. At the time, I didn’t feel that I was expressing myself very well. As time has gone by, I’ve been less happy with it.
Of course, I could just go back and edit that posting, but that seems wrong. The web may be an impermanent medium, but that just smacks of egregious revisionism. (Speaking of egregious, how about that last phrase?)
Instead, I will probably keep coming back to this topic. I’ll worry at it and pick at it until it’s been done to death and we’re all sick of it. Maybe by that time I’ll have it figured out. Probably not, though.
My thoughts, and my dissatisfaction with my earlier posting, have recently focused on my inability to express the fact that—although we came to adoption chronologically after trying to have a family naturally—I don’t feel that it is in any other way secondary or that we’ve somehow compromised anything in choosing this. My feeling is that this is how our family is meant to be put together by adoption, but we just weren’t bright enough to figure it out at first. That says more about us than it does about adoption.
Note:
There are several other topics that I want to deal with on an on-going basis, the way I am writing about this topic. When I first post on such a topic, I’ll create a new category for it, and when I later post on that topic, I’ll tag each posting with that category. For example, I’ve created a category called “Why Adoption,” and I’ll tag both this posting, the previous one, and any future posting on why we chose adoption with that category.
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.
