Thursday, March 17, 2016

What One Mom’s Journey Can Teach You About Intercountry Adoption

Source: http://pamperspaklava.com

By Beth Shepherd

International-Adoption-10-Things-I-didnt-expect Eight years ago, when we decided on international adoption, I had expectations about how things would go. And you know what? To say our adoption journey didn’t go as planned, is an understatement. Here are 10 things I didn’t expect.

We might not get a child: We investigated domestic adoption first, met with a couple adoption attorneys and spoke with one open adoption agency in our city. In each case we were dissuaded from adopting domestically due to our ages and the fact we’d only been married for one year. We were told that birth mothers would be more likely to choose adoptive parents who could demonstrate a long relationship history. I’d also heard several heartbreaking stories of prospective adoptive parents whose adoptions fell through at the last minute, on one occasion several days after they’d taken custody of the child.

So we decided to pursue international adoption. When we started out, I remember saying, “Well, the road might be long, but in the end we’ll be parents.” I’d never known anyone who adopted internationally have an adoption (or even a referral) fall through. Until us. One trip to meet a child with significant special needs who we decided to pass on, one disrupted referral, one referral that never became official, two trips to register a child only to have that adoption fall through ten days before our court trip. We made a total of five trips before we brought home our daughter. Although our story was “a first” for our adoption agency I have now heard a number of stories (all involving different agencies and countries) where adoptions were disrupted, or where the prospective adoptive parents had to travel multiple times before finalizing an adoption and bringing a child home. Which brings me to…

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