U.S. Infant Adoption

My wife and I have been following a story that has been going on about a thousand miles away from us and their experience begs the question- At what point is the baby “our” baby? It’s not something that I hadn’t thought about before, but I ache when I see the way this particular couple has been handling their situation. I’ll get back to that couple’s story in a second, but permit me to go back early into our second adoption when we were first contacted. When we met our daughter’s birthmother for the first time, she told us about the couple she had originally chosen. For reasons that are her own, she changed her mind about the couple she was originally considering… [more]

I have been very sporadic in my blogging this summer--well, not sporadic as much as absent!  Sorry about that.  I just can't seem to get in sync with all of the summer activities:  pool, camps, sleepovers, bike rides, playdates....  I find myself running from sun up to sundown.  When school is in session the kids are just as busy (or actually, more so) but at least they go to bed early, so I can get up early and blog.  During the summer, they are up really late--and so I am up late, and then I sleep in. But I saw something in the paper last week that really touched me and I felt compelled to blog about it.  I saw an… [more]

I wanted to share with you something really deep and profound that I have learned going through the process of adoption placement- I have learned that the love of a mother, whether you parent or place, is a deep bond that does not discriminate.  It is there if you choose to parent your child and it is there if you choose to place your child with a forever family. I thought that the bond would be different, like women that choose to place can automatically turn off the 'bond' and feel nothing when placing their child. I firmly believe that if they tell you they feel nothing, that may be the case at the time, but deep down, maybe buried in a… [more]

Tax day is looming!  As of this writing, it's only five days away. I'm not big on April 15th.  It's not that I mind paying my share.  For me it's really more about the paperwork.  I absolutely detest digging through all of the papers that have been scattered around the house throughout the year: the W-2s (or is it a W-4?), the forms showing interest income, receipts for charitable giving, forms dealing with the car registration, pharmacy receipts, cancelled checks for health expenses....Gathering all of these papers and taking them to the accountant drives me absolutely nuts. There is some good news this year for individuals and families who are claiming a tax credit on their 2010 tax form.  There might be some additional… [more]

My eleven-year-old daughter just discovered that her best friend (or, as she calls her, her “BFF”) since kindergarten is moving away to another state.  My daughter is devastated, and she cried and cried when she found out.  I stood by knowing that there was absolutely nothing that I can do to help her feel better.  As much as I want to be able to “fix” this problem, I can’t.  She knows it.  I know it.  She is just going to have to hurt for a while. I got to thinking about this pain that Mary is experiencing and how it might relate to the pain that adopted children might experience--either from the death of a birth parent, or if that first parent relinquished… [more]

Here’s a question to consider: What is more important, your thoughts about something or your feelings about it?   I’ve been thinking about this topic for a couple of days now….The part of me who spent more years than I care to remember at a university would say that thoughts are more important.  One of my favorite quotes of all time is the one by Oliver Wendell Holmes “A mind that is stretched by a new thought can never go back to its old dimensions.” I remember the first time a teacher asked my class that classic riddle, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?”  I thought and thought about that question.  Is a sound… [more]

When you have an open adoption and are fortunate enough, like my husband and I were, to be at the hospital when your child was born, you will probably understand this post and what I am talking about. There is a time after your child’s birth when he doesn’t have a parent.  Because he has two, he lacks the “one” person who makes medical and legal decisions for him.  Like most states (if not all), we live in a place where our child’s birth mother could not terminate her rights until after his birth.  (We had to wait twelve hours before D. could sign the papers.)  In that interim, several decisions for our son were made. Right after the birth of our beautiful and… [more]

A month or so ago I wrote about a couple that has been trying to adopt for a number of years.  They met with a prospective birth mother and were devastated when she ended up choosing another couple to raise her unborn child.  I wish I had some news on the adoption front to report about them, but I don’t.  They’re still looking.  And they’re slowly getting over the disappointment of not being chosen. Ever since the rejection she and her husband experienced, she’s been second-guessing everything including their “Dear Birth Mother” letter.  I gave her the advice that I remembered receiving, and it was that she probably shouldn’t worry about analyzing every word of the letter.  No one was going to read… [more]

I’ve been perusing a lot of adoption books lately, and I have to admit that some of the titles sort of bother me.  Consider these:  Attaching in Adoption, The Connected Child, and Connecting to Your Adopted Child to name just a few…  It’s as if adoptive parents can come to expect that they will have problems attaching to their adopted child. The books I mentioned have all been published since 2000, so when I adopted my son in 1998, these titles were not around.  The notion of "attachment" was nowhere on my radar when my husband and I first adopted.  Instead, when we adopted, we had to worry about the "primal wound" that our child would suffer from. In 1993, therapist and adoptive mother… [more]

My late husband understood me pretty well, and he knew that I don’t have a romantic bone in my body.  For our first Valentine’s Day together he cut up a potato and used it as a stamp to make me a picture of a bouquet of roses.  In the card he put two $20 bills.  (It was so funny and original.  I loved it—and I loved him.) Fast-forward fifteen years and I’m a single, harried mother of three—I’m even less of a romantic than I was before, if that is possible! Given my curmudgeonly ways, you might think that I would pooh-pooh February 14, but you would be wrong.  I don’t mind Valentine’s Day.  As a matter of fact, I look forward to it… [more]