The long road from IVF to adoption
On paper I’m a bit old to be a first-time parent. But for whatever reason, my husband and I were not meant to have kids before now. I still don’t know why but I have to believe that is the case.
I am 42 years old and my husband is 45. We’ve been married 13 years and we started trying to have children over 11 years ago. We weren’t so sure we wanted kids at first, but things changed when our siblings had kids. If we could love our nieces and nephews, we could picture being parents. So… we went off birth control. A couple of years later, nothing.
I did have two minor miscarriages, but it wasn’t particularly traumatic. A little depressing, but nothing compared to the fertility rollercoaster I would later endure. We decided to talk to the doctor. First my OB/GYN - three artificial inseminations - and nothing...
Then, to the fertility doctor - 2 IVFs, 1 frozen embryo transfer - nothing. That was the closest I’ve ever been to being truly depressed. My husband was a big help, and he did the best he could but it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through. But I bounced back because that is just the way I am.
After all that, I, more so then my husband, felt like it was such a waste of time. How many years wasted? I think around six. Looking back, my only regret is that we had gone down the adoption path sooner. But my husband wasn’t ready to “go there”. He had to exhaust all other avenues before he could see not passing along his genes.
So, after a few adoption seminars and talking to various adoptive parents, adoption seemed like more of a sure thing… or so we thought.
The Adoption Process Begins...
We started the research. I didn’t know this at the time, but adopting a baby, whether domestically or internationally, is a dysfunctional racket. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it at all, in fact I’m all for adoption, domestically or internationally. But I think people need to know that it’s a long, frustrating haul for most people and all the stories you hear about people getting “matched” with birthmothers, or getting a baby in a few months is not the norm.
The norm is: by the time you research what agency/attorney/facilitator or combo thereof you want to go with, you have to wait a few months. Then the home study - impossible to get this done any faster then a month, but for most people it takes three or four months. Then you have to come up with $10-$15,000 to pay an agency or attorney to get the ball rolling. Then it takes a month or so to put together your adoption profile (an additional $100-$250/month). The more money you have the more exposure for you and your adoption profile. Most prospective adoptive parents also have to deal with at least one or two scams that waste a few months (we ended up enduring three scams, no money was exchanged, but it wasted a lot of time, energy and emotion).
So, a year later and we still didn’t have a baby. We had decided to go the “domestic adoption” route because we liked the fact that our child would know where he came from and that he would have a connection (of what kind we weren’t sure) with his birth family. Also, international adoption often costs a lot more. Foster care is the cheapest option but we weren’t comfortable with the often sketchy pasts of the birth families. Little did we know this was only the beginning…
See part two of Kelly’s Adoption Tales next month.