I learned a lot about obstacles and how to overcome them as we went through the process of having a baby. Having a clear vision and not wavering from it was the key to our success. This experience has taught me how to persevere in all situations.
If we would have doubted that we could be parents, we could have easily been discouraged at least 5 times. Every time an obstacle was placed in our path, we smashed through it.
We made the decision to adopt. But we didn't know where to begin. It took us a good week to figure that out. Then we needed to make decisions. Did we want a local baby? Or an international baby? The variable between the two was time and money. The more money we spent, the quicker we could achieve our objective. If an international adoption, what country did we want to adopt from? Each country had different issues and regulations to facilitate the adoption. The social worker who was assigned to us, always using the cover your ass strategy couldn't give us direct advice. She would point us in the right direction and then we would have to figure things out for ourselves. We had to fill out document after document. The pile was 4 inches high when we were all done. Just the documents took us 3 weeks to fill out. And we worked on them every night to keep things moving forward.
Once the documents were filled out, they were analyzed to see if we would get an approval to move to the next stage, which was the home study. We got approved! A stranger came to our home and evaluated us over 4 visits that lasted about 3 hours per visit. The questions were really hard. Luckily she was nice and made us feel comfortable with our answers.
Once the visits were finished, we waited another 4 weeks for the social worker to write a report to the province recommending us for adoption. Just when we thought the hard part was done, we got another surprise.
Now it was time for us to find an adoption agency in our country of choice: United States. After talking to another couple in Moncton, we got a recommendation for American Adoptions out of Kansas.
The process doesn't seem complicated now, but it took us 18 months to get to this stage. All the while, we are being approached by other people for potential private adoptions.
One young teenager, who had family ties, had lost her baby to the province. She had asked the province to let us adopt her baby. We spent $1000 in legal fees trying to get a judgement in our favour. But to no avail, the baby was to be adopted by another lucky couple.
Each time, it seemed like babies were being moved around and we were being passed over.
Once we established a relationship with American Adoptions, we got another pile of documents that had to be filled out. Again at least 4 inches thick. We completed it all and had to compose a profile document. The profile was used as a brochure to birth mothers. The profile was the only information a birth mother would use to make a decision on the placement of her child. We spent another 3 months on this profile.
Finally, we had jumped through all of the hoops. We got activated on the list January 27. We were told the average match took about 2-6 months. It was so close we couldn't help it. We were so excited.
With everything we had done, this last part seemed too easy. Something wasn't right. We got the next slap in the face less than a month later. The company I worked for restructured its marketing department. On February 23, I lost my job.
To be continued...
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