In the Very, Very Beginning...

Hi everyone!

I am going to retrace our steps through our open adoption experience, one blog at a time. I hope to reach others and let them know how absolutely life changing open adoption is. Sure, you become a parent, but it also shift something deep inside of you. Your heart and mind open in ways you never knew possible. We are an open book and passionate about open adoption so please, ask anything you'd like! I am going to start at the very, very beginning...how we decided on open adoption.

Briefly, my husband and I have been together almost twelve years, married for over four. We are in our mid-thirties and live in the bay area with our two dogs, a cat, and now our son. Adoption was something my husband, S, and I always knew we would pursue one day. He is adopted and we met his birth family (birth mom and five siblings) six years ago. S's first reaction was, "Christmas just got a lot more expensive!" Beyond that we were excited to have this new family in our lives and we still are. To us, it is just family and you can never have a big enough family.
I'm a teacher and many years ago I had a student who was adopted from China. I got to know her and her mom and something in my heart told me I would adopt one day. Then I met S and it all made sense. Having his birth family in our lives now, we knew the only way we would want to pursue adoption is through an open adoption. This means we would know the birth mother. She would choose us in a pool of waiting families. We would have ongoing contact depending on her wants and needs after the baby is born. For us this felt like the healthiest way to adopt, for all involved.

When we decided we were ready to venture down the road to parenthood, we decided first to try having our own, then would adopt a second child. After a year of trying with no luck (we tried everything under the sun that was holistic), we decided to pursue adoption. It was a personal choice not to pursue any type of infertility treatments, if needed. When the words came out of my mouth, the sense of peace I immediately felt was immediate. The stress of "trying" to get pregnant was overwhelming and bringing us down. In October of 2009 we attended our first meeting at an adoption agency. One month later we spent a weekend there signing papers and learning a bit about the journey we were about to embark on. The reality is nothing or nobody can actually prepare you for how your story will unfold.

 We played scenarios out in our head. We heard what the agency had to say, we heard stories from those who have adopted. In the end our story would be our own and nobody can predict what that would be. It is a big leap in to the unknown. How long will this take? What will our birth mother be like? Where will she live? What will our baby be like? You have to wait (and sometimes wait and wait and wait) and see. You have to believe in fate and all things meant to be. Otherwise you may just lose your mind asking questions and trying to predict what you absolutely cannot. For us, there is no greater test of patience than an open adoption.

So...we now have a beautiful son, we'll call him, "porkchop", the nickname he has earned due to his feeding habits. It was a very long road, sometimes hard, sometimes quite easy, it depends on the day (or sometimes just the hour). It took over two years from the day we walked in to the adoption agency until the day we brought our son home. We would do every single frustrating minute of it all over again to bring porkchop and his birth family in to our life.

Will post again very soon and continue our story!