This was the topic I spoke about at Thursday night’s adoptive families gathering for Open Adoption and Family Services in Seattle. 

On a scale of one to ten, how are we on our adoption journey:  one feeling discouraged, unhopeful and ten feeling exuberantly joyful about the future.  Most adoptive parents can find themselves all over this spectrum throughout their adoption journey.  At first, once the paperwork is in, there is a feeling of accomplishment and progress and adoptive parents can feel pretty high.  As time passes, and the wait extends sometimes beyond what we had thought we could handle, emotions shift to more pessimistic ones, less hopeful, some anxiousness surfaces. 

Human beings are always in an emotion.  When things are going great, it may seem like we’re not impacted by emotions at all.  Yet, we may be in the emotion of: joy, happiness, or excitement.  When our expectations of what should be happening are not meeting the reality of what is happening, then emotions like sadness, disappointment, irritation, or anger may surface. 

“We are never not in an emotion,” says my friend and colleague, Carol Courcy says, in her 20 year study of Emotional Fitness.  We do have the ability to become aware of our emotions and to shift into a new emotion that we desire and that may serve us better.

Shifting emotions requires first of all that we become aware of the emotions that we are expressing.  Awareness is the first step along the journey of emotional fitness.  Recognizing patterns of emotions that we are in is helpful in shifting to new emotions.  Sometimes we embody a predominant emotion or mood that we have a habit of living in.  We see this in people who may live in a perpetual mood of resentment, or a perpetual mood of ambition.  Over time our bodies take the shape of the moods we are most in the habit of living in.  So shifting our physical shape from contracted to open, for example, can shift our mood from one of hopelessness to one of curiosity and excitement.  Our awareness of the interplay between our moods and how we are showing up physically (our body disposition and shape) is part of developing our own somatic awareness.  This is another step along emotional fitness which I will be discussing in my next blog post.

3.  How much does it cost?

You’ve probably also heard that adoptions are expensive.  Yes, and so is life!  Truly, anything of a transformational, life giving nature will cost money.  It costs money to raise children too.

The cost of adoptions varies from less than a thousand dollars to upwards of $35,000.  Why the huge range?  The least expensive adoptions tend to be foster to adopt situations where foster and adoptive parents receive government assistance during the process.  The most expensive options are international adoptions.  In some cases there are unexpected costs such as travel costs, time away from work (loss of income), birthmother living expenses and health care costs.

Two things to keep in mind about cost:

1) What are your fees paying for and are those expenses aligned with your values?
2) Adoption is not a time for bargain shopping.

When looking at expenses, consider how your money is being spent.  Are your fees going to one person to help facilitate an adoption?  Are your fees contributing to the well being of the birthmother of your future child?  In an agency adoption for example, your fees could be contributing to on going counseling and support of birth families.  In a private adoption or facilitated adoption you may be asked to support a birth mother’s living expenses during her pregnancy.  There’s quite a range of possibilities. 

It’s important to take a look at how your adoption dollars are being spent and assess how aligned the expenses are with your values.  There are also legal implications in the question of what are you paying for.  Consider consulting an attorney (sooner rather than later) who specializes in adoption law in your State about the regulations surrounding support for birthparent expenses.

You may feel called to foster a toddler or older child in a foster to adopt process.  The staggering statistics about children in foster care can certainly pull on your heartstrings.  There are financial advantages to this option that are not available in agency or private adoptions (including international).  There are also different demands on adoptive parents in navigating the child welfare system, in managing relationships with state and county child welfare agents, and in the adoption of children with special needs.  It’s important to look at the long term picture and make choices with full awareness of what the demands of each particular situation calls for.  And back to knowing your heart, it’s important too to be honest about what you, the adoptive parent, feel capable of handling for the long term.

The good news about money is that there are ways to apply for assistance in financing adoptions.  A good resource for this is the Adoptive Families website.  There is also a tax credit that adopting parents can claim the year they finalize the adoption.  This can help reimburse some of the adoption costs.  Check with your employer to see if adoption assistance is available as an employee benefit.  I’ve known some adoptive parents to become trail blazers and advocates in their workplaces to lobby for policies that support adoptive parents in the form of paid leave (when the child is placed) and/or adoption expense reimbursement for a set amount of the costs.  Some agencies charge on a “pay as you go” schedule so that you are paying less up front and can space out payments.  Banks also offer special lines of credit or loans to cover the cost of adoptions.

It comes back to knowing your heart and allowing your passion for becoming a parent lead the way in finding creative solutions to financing your adoption.  Some families have huge yard sales, borrow from family members, charge expenses on low interest credit cards, or host fun, creative fundraisers.

2.  Time-”the big bugaboo”

You’ve probably heard that adoption takes a long time.  So what’s a long time?

Let’s start with what we know.  Having a child biologically takes minimally nine months from conception to birth.  Some couples or individuals may have been trying to get pregnant for longer than nine months.  I’ve had a few friends who tried for ten years to get pregnant.  So, how long does it take to have a child biologically?  It depends—anywhere from nine months or less to, in some cases, a decade.

How is adoption different?  Unlike a biological pregnancy, in adoption it’s hard to know when to declare conception.  In my case, from the time I thought about adopting to the time that a child was placed with my family almost four years passed.  I include the first two years which were spent in casual discovery, reading, doing on line searches and dreaming about how wonderful it would be to have a child.  I refer to this as my rose colored glasses phase—“won’t it be wonderful to have a baby?”  I thought I was committed but looking back now, I see that this was more of a trying out phase.  Which is fine.  It’s good to try it out—after all adopting is a forever event.

The moment of commitment came after a significant birthday for me.  It was a moment of reckoning with myself where I realized that if I really wanted to adopt a child, I was going to have to make a much more powerful declaration of intent.  Our research narrowed to two possible adoption routes.  My partner and I interviewed these two options carefully.  We flew down to California for the day from Seattle, to interview one organization.  And we went to an adoption seminar four hundred miles away to learn more about another adoption organization.  We declared our intention by making investments of time and money.  We committed ourselves to take action.

We made a choice, committed to that choice in the form of a financial down payment and a psychological and emotional commitment to the process as outlined by the agency we chose.  We had landed.  We were in motion.

From landing to the day that our child was placed with us, the process took another year and five months.

In adoption it’s hard to know when to declare conception.  In my personal story, I track conception back to the moment my partner and I committed to action.  So our pregnancy lasted a year and five months.  When I was in the middle of this time, I had no idea how long it would last.  I didn’t know (at least intellectually) when this process would result in a child.  I didn’t know if there would be a miscarriage or a hiccup in the process.  These happen too in the adoption world.  A birthmother can miscarry.  And/or an adoption can be interrupted and a plan go unfulfilled if one of the parties changes their mind.  That’s always possible.

Your timeline is important.  Whether you assess that you have one year or five years to become a parent will impact the choices you make and your rate of commitment along the way.  Age and health of the adoptive parents are often the two critical factors that determine how much time adoptive parents assess they have to adopt a child.  The actual age itself varies according to the parents’ own perceptions.  Some wouldn’t consider adopting past age 35 while others are quite comfortable adopting into their 50’s.  Age does become a factor with adoptions outside of the US, as some countries have certain age limits for adopting children from their country.

So, if I haven’t done much to allay the fears around time, what I hope to convey is that there is a perception that adoption takes more time than creating a family biologically.  While adoption does take time, so can becoming pregnant.  There is perhaps more unpredictability in adoption because there are more people involved and adoptive parents may have more of a sense of not having much control in the situation.  All of this can translate to:  “adoption takes a long time.” 

It’s hard to hear this at the front end of the adoption process but I am going to say it anyway, “Your child will arrive at exactly the right time for you and your family.”  That said, nothing happens until you commit to action.

Browsing in a used bookstore over the weekend, I was in the parenting section, looking for books on adoption.  My eyes scanned the pregnancy, newborn, awaiting a child books, looking for a title that would indicate adoption.  Finally, toward the bottom of the section I spotted it: the label “adoption” separated with a slash, next to the word “divorce.”  “Oh,” I thought,  “They ran out of room and they smooshed these two sections together.”

I would not have chosen to put adoption books in the same section with books on divorce but it’s telling of how mainstream society values and views adoption–not quite in the same category with books about starting a family, but more in the category of when family plans go awry.  Still, somehow, second best, not equal to.

What about those of us who choose adoption, not as a back up, but as a great and valuable journey to pursue, equal to having a baby biologically?   And what of the children who are adopted, how then are they viewed by society?  Will they struggle against the social stigma that the circumstances that created their families were somehow tainted?

Adoption is about creation.  It’s about choice.  Adoption is about love.  And this one word doesn’t stand to qualifiers and hierarchies. There is no such thing as second class love. 

This week I got to see and hear Mary Oliver read from her work at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.  It’s amazing to go to a huge concert hall and to look back, around, and up and to see every seat filled with audience members coming to feast on the beauty of words.  It was a huge treat for me, after all these years of admiring her from afar, to actually be in the same room with and listen to Mary Oliver read from her work.  She’s lovely.  Fiesty, sharp, witty, warm and profoundly deep, at 73.  She walked on stage with a pair of black jeans and a black pull over sweater.  And she read from her work and regaled us with her presence for an hour and a half.

The message I took from this evening’s reading of her poems was the importance of paying attention.  Like in her poem, Summer Day, when shes says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.”  Paying attention, easy to say, difficult to do in our world of abundant distractions.  Yet, paying attention is the source of Mary Oliver’s poetry, the source for her soul.  She sits still and watches swans for days until she understands their transcendent message which she pens into a poem.

How do we practice paying attention in our everyday lives–how the coffee smells in the morning, the first sounds when we awake, the sound of the car’s motor on the way to work, the trees, buildings, fields we pass, the sound of a friend’s soul in the tone of her voice.  What new things would we know if we stayed present in the here and now, rather than be distracted by the cacaphony of modern life?  It’s a practice.  What new decisions would I make?  How might my life be different?

 At a recent fiftieth birthday party for a friend, one of the guests shared this photograph of our planet as seen from Saturn.  It gave me pause.  We are so puny, so tiny in the universe.  Our planet looks like a station in the outback, remote, out of reach.  And if our planet is that small, then we humans are infinitely smaller in the universe.  Hard for us earthlings to imagine how insignificant we are in size when compared to the size of the universe.  We take ourselves so seriously most of the time. 

The perspective this photograph offers humbles me.  Yet, I affirm that our existence does matter.  It matters how we live each of our nanosecond long lives.  It  matters that we give it our best shot, that we leave our miniscule area of this universe a bit better than we found it.  That we clean up after ourselves. 

It’s when I listen to the evening news on the radio that I keep this image of the earth viewed from Saturn in my mind.  It helps me put all that information in perspective: the political scandals, the heads of state traveling here and there, the stock market going up or down.  In the end what really matters? 

If I were standing on the rings of Saturn, I would look at this blue planet called earth and I wouldn’t hear all the noise, I would only see its blue hue offering me hope, curiousity, and goodwill–an invitation.  I would wonder if there was life on this planet and how this life interacted.  Were they kind to their young, were they loving or were they violent, were they respectful to the planet that nurtured them with life?  This is what I would wonder.  How about you?  What matters then?

For a better look at this photo go to this New York Times article.

This evening my family and I were at a meeting of the Transracial Adoption group that we get together with from time to time.  The group had planned to watch a film created by the Mavin Foundation called “chasing daybreak.”   We huddled in a room to watch the film– all of us adoptive parents (or parents to be) of multiracial kids and/or part of multiracial families.  I found myself oddly choked up as the documentary began.  I looked around the room at all our white faces, eagerly wanting to learn about what it means to live “mixed race” in our society.  It is the immensity of our love for our children that brings us white adults together to explore and learn about this new world.  We sit in anticipation hoping that we will hear good news too, that what we hear of the challenges won’t be so overwhelming that we won’t feel able to be supportive and understanding when things get rough.   Our children of mixed races from the ages of 6 months to 6 years play just outside of the room where we watch the film.  We could hear their giggles and squeals–their joy. We hope that we will have what it takes to be able to celebrate and to cry with them as they (and we) pioneer a new way of being in this still very broken world.