There are a few things I’ve found annoying lately. All of which deal with adoption. The first being the ignorance revolving around celebrity adoption. I get so tired of hearing people and the media itself rip into these people. First of all, every country has adoption laws, including our own. For arguments sake let’s assume that the foreign country expidites an adoption for a celebrity, they still have to go through the same pony dance we all do back here in the states. Which requires home study and fingerprinting and the background check and whatnot. No one can bypass this stuff just because of notoriety or money. Even still I’m not pursuaded that the foreign countries bend rules either. But, people argue, they’re only getting children because they’re wealthy and famous. Even if that’s true, who cares? It’s not like they’re taking children away from other adoptive parents. Or like they’re cutting to the front of the line. We don’t live in a world where people are waiting for children because there aren’t enough to go around, instead we live in a world full of orphaned children and not enough adoptive parents to take them home. So when people ask me what I think of all the celebrities adopting, I applaud them. They’re growing their families in the way DH and I have chosen to grow ours and they’re keeping adoption in the news. I can’t argue with that.
If you’ve struggled with infertility chances are you’ve heard, “Oh, as soon as you start adopting, you’ll get pregnant.” Or some similar thing. Everyone knows someone who’s started adoption proceedings and gotten pregnant. Sure, it happens. But most of the time when it happens it happens to couples with unexplained infertility and the release of stress from treatments or just trying can lead to an unexpected pregnancy. When you’re dealing with infertility though, it’s a different story. Okay so we haven’t had a doctor tell us we can’t have children biologically. And we have been pregnant once before. But I got pregnant with medical aide, which we will not be doing again, and I lost the baby, which I have a 60% chance of doing every time I’m pregnant. These are not great odds. And what I finally realized for myself was that the journey to motherhood is just that, a journey, it’s the stuff afterwards that I’ve been wanting my whole life. So I don’t really care how I become a mother. Yes DH and I might get pregnant someday and I might carry to term and we might have a healthy baby and when and if that happens, they will be a brilliant addition to our family, but right now my heart is with adoption.
The other annoying thing that people say, along the same lines as the previous, is something that alludes to adoption being a second choice or last resort. This frankly goes beyond annoyance for me and tends to light my fire a bit. I know people don’t mean it in the nasty way it sounds, but it certainly makes it sound like adopted children are second rate citizens in families much different from their “natural” counterparts. This is just ignorant. Sure there are people out there who might not be able to love an adopted child as much as a birth child, and if this is the case, then hopefully these people will not consider adoption. But for most of us on the adoption path, this was a choice. We all came to it differently. Some already have birth children, some, like us, do not. Adoption was our choice instead of spending more money on infertility and we hadn’t even gotten to IVF yet. Adoption was our choice before we knew we had infertility to deal with, we just had to rethink our timeline. No child that ever steps into my house and into my arms will ever be less than my child whether they came out of my womb or someone else’s.
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