Why We Chose to Work With AOW: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective

Deciding to adopt a child is a very personal decision to make.  Every family has their own reasons or circumstances that lead to adoption, for us it was secondary infertility.

Once our decision to adopt was made, we began our journey to find an adoption agency.  As most people do, we started our search online.  The moment you enter any search about ‘adopting a baby’ the national agencies appear on the top of the list.  We quickly learned there are both local and national agencies out there and we learned we had a ton more research to do.  After looking at several websites and doing lots of reading, we decided on two local agencies and one national agency to consult with.

Our first meeting was with Adoptions of Wisconsin (AOW), who is also ultimately who we choose to work with.  The tone of the meeting was exactly as the website stated.  This agency is about honoring the birth parents right to choose us.  We were informed that the journey is long and could take years before the right match and placement would occur.  We were provided much information on how AOW social workers work with mothers to ensure an adoption plan is what is best for them and the child, with the focus always remaining on the child.  There were no promises provided to us aside from the promise to have open and honest communication throughout the journey.  We were provided a list of costs associated with the agency and lots of reading materials about how a home study works, writing a family profile, adoption education and a copy of the application form that would not be required until there was an opening on the waiting list.

The next consultation was a two hour phone call with a national agency.  Prior to taking our call we were required to complete a seven page application that asked us about everything from our personal appearance to all the assets we own.  We were required to email them this completed form along with a picture of our family before they would schedule our call.

During the phone call we were made several promises.  A good-looking family like us could have a baby of our choosing in three months.  They bragged about how they come up first on all the web searches related to adoption because they pay big money to ensure they always appear to birthmothers first.  When a pregnant woman contacts them they ‘find’ a local social worker who will meet with the birthmother and then contract with the social worker to assist in the placement of the child.  If the birthmother starts to get cold feet they had a new weapon in their arsenal, a woman who placed her child for adoption years ago who will call the birthmother and talk them back into the adoption plan.  They found that she was 97% effective in ensuring placements.  They then mailed us a shiny brochure on how to contact a local professional photographer to get the best shots of our family and a DVD on how to make the best video to plead for a child.  The icing on the cake is when they gave us their prices.  They wanted $16,800 upfront to spend on marketing!  This money would not be used on legal fees or expenses for the mother, those were an additional cost.  This was simply how they would guarantee a fast placement through marketing.  We were even given advice on how to take out a 2nd mortgage or apply for tax credits to pay for everything.

After this call my head was spinning for days.  Of course the lure of a quick placement was attractive to a family who was unsuccessfully trying to have a baby for a number of years.  We just couldn’t get past how wrong the entire approach felt.  Adopting a baby is not about speed of placement, it is about making a lifelong commitment to a child and their birth family.  This is a journey not a sprint.  My heart was breaking for all the mothers out there who were being lured into the promises I can only imagine being made to them that I was sure would somehow be broken.  How can you promise an open adoption with annual visits to a woman on the other side of the country?  I know that is a false promise I could never make but wondered how many people would.

For our family, the decision became crystal clear.  We needed to work with an agency that had the best interest of all parties in mind.  This process was not all about us, it was only partially about our family and how it would change and grow through the miracle of adoption.  It was about opening our lives to not only the baby but the birth parents if that was their choice as well.  It is about keeping the promises we make and ensuring we had an agency that could support us no matter what those promises look like.  It is about the long term benefits of our family, this new baby, and the glorious mother who would place the child in our arms.

We believe that is only possible by using a local agency that is dedicated to the care and well-being of the birthmother and honoring her choice of us to parent her child.  We also know that the journey doesn’t end with placement; it is a lifetime commitment we are all making together.  It is about the mother, the child, our family and the lifelong support of the agency that brought us together.

Waiting for a match: An honest answer from an adoptive mom

I was 42 and my husband 51 when we decided that adoption was the right thing for our family of two. I had always known that I wanted to adopt a child, to me it was a beautiful way to create a family. I had been thinking about becoming a parent since my twenties but life didn’t work out to build a family until I was past 40. In essence, I’d been dreaming about becoming a parent for twenty years!  My husband and I were on the same page: adoption….open adoption from Wisconsin…infant.  It was finally happening, this life event that had eluded me for two decades, we were going to be parents and have our own family!

Initially the waiting was fun, I was always doing something for the adoption process.  I’m a doer, so working on our homestudy was something very satisfying.  I found the list of things I needed to make, prepare and fill out very rewarding.  I was actively working towards being a parent and the more I completed on the homestudy checklists the closer I was to making the reality of being a parent come true.  From taking parenting classes together, working on several birth family introduction letters/books to filling out and turning in all the paper work… this process lasted us nine months, nine months of active busyness that I genuinely enjoyed!

I remember the day when our homestudy was complete, I secretly thought, “We are going to be different then the multitudes of other adoptive parents who have gone before us, a birth family is going to see our profile in the next few weeks and we’ll be parents soon, I can feel it!”.  Then three months went by and then five and then our first Christmas in silent waiting.  We’d been shown to many birth families but no one had asked to meet with us.   The rejection started to creep in.  I would call our social worker asking, “Is there something more we could do?  Should we take new pictures?  Post different pictures on our adoption page?  Are we too old?  Do we not have the right interests/hobbies/jobs?”. I was embarrassed to tell people, even my husband, how often I was thinking about adoption and becoming a parent.  If I was honest with myself, I was thinking about it many times a day for months on end.  However, when friends or family would ask how things were going I would put on a happy, positive expression and tell them that we were certainly learning a lot about patience and the right baby would come when it was time.  I could say these words out loud but I was not able to trust in them to bring myself relief.

Days before Christmas 2014, nine months after our homestudy was complete, I had received a text from a friend saying that she wanted me to know that she’d been praying for our adoption.  Up until this point I had not let anyone know of my deepening sadness over our wait, not even my husband.  I had never shed a tear or a said a negative word, I was always the picture of positivity.  The beautiful text my friend sent and Christmas being days away I realized I had again set a timeframe in my mind without knowing it, that we’d for sure have a baby by Christmas.   And now this season was here, with all of it’s glitter and emphasis on children and we did not have a child, in fact we had had no interest from birth families at all.  I broke down.  I cried for days.  My husband had no idea what to think of my outburst, I finally told him about my silent grief.  I expressed my concern that there was no place for grief in the celebration of Christmas, how was I going to function at the very soon coming family celebrations?  I fell deep into depression for three days.  I was scared what would happen when Christmas Eve arrived, how could I possibly put on a happy face?   What if someone asked about the adoption process and how it was going? I didn’t want to cry in front of family.  I needed to allow myself to grieve, something I had not outwardly ever done, so I let myself grieve and cry, it felt like a death.  And then as quickly as it had come, this outward sadness, it seemed that I could manage and I somehow enjoyed the holiday.

Within a few months of Christmas we experienced the absolute joy of being matched with a birth family and the planning to become parents was in full swing!   And then a few months later the match dissolved, the birth family decided to parent the baby that was expected.  This news was devastating, I struggled with what I was to do with myself each day.  The past few months I was preparing for a baby and now I didn’t know how to fill my time, what was I doing, who was I?  I was dealing with accepting that we might never become parents.  I began to wonder if we weren’t supposed to be parents, had we made a mistake to pursue adoption?

By summer I was sinking, struggling somedays to function.  I had started seeing a life coach about a year prior to work on my emotions and to put into perspective my expectations of the process of adoption.   It was hard work, I often felt that it was getting harder than easier as I needed to dig deeply into why waiting for a child engulfed my emotions.  In the end, I am not sure that I did a good job with the waiting, it was hard, but I can say that I worked very hard at “waiting well”.

Listed below are a few things that I did to try to “wait well”:

• Prayer - I am a doer, so if I want something I just figure out how to get it, work hard and reach the goal. With adoption I could not use this method to get to the end result.  I had to trust, be patient, others were in control and this was tremendously hard for me.  I am a Christian and found that time in prayer, persistent prayer was really a way for me to be still and accept that I was not in control and that I could trust in the process.  It was a calming tool that I used daily.

• Be thankful for all that I already have. One day I started writing a list of everything I was thankful for in my life and I listed 74 things. 74!!!  When I was having a difficult day I would reread this list and it would bring me hope and peace in knowing that my life was pretty amazing and having a baby come home was not the only good thing in our life.

• Prepare - In the waiting I could be preparing. I had tons of time to prepare for being a parent.  Taking time to travel, read, take parenting classes, researching the best things to buy for baby, visiting family, preparing the nursery, learning more about open adoption, spending time with my spouse.

• Keep perspective….when it’s time for our baby to come home, our baby will come home. I needed to trust in this truth and had to remind myself of this daily.

• Press On! Keep moving ahead.  There are things to be done today…ways to grow, serve others and learn new things that are always right in front of us but we can easily miss them or ignore them as we are worrying about tomorrow.  The question I posed to myself is how can you grow right where you stand right now?  Don’t waste your wait!

August 2015 brought great blessing as we welcomed a daughter into our family!  The perfect little girl and the perfect birth family.  It would be easy now to say that the wait was worth it and went by fast.  Well, the wait was worth it!  But it did not go by fast and it wasn’t easy.  There is value in waiting; it builds patience and the capacity to endure.  Times of waiting for something else in the future will be inevitable, our hope is that we will not waste the wait and wait well.

A birth parent asks, "How do I manage the grief associated with making an adoption plan?"

The adoption process is one that intrinsically involves grief and loss.  When birth parents decide to relinquish their newborn for adoption, they will often go through a grief process not unlike what a person experiences when a loved one passes. The grief stages are the same (denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance); birth parents do not move through them in any nice neat order or set period of time, nor should they be expected to. Grief associated with making an adoption plan is complicated for birth parents because of the ambiguous nature of the loss.

An example of how the grief process can get complicated is that feelings such as numbness, confusion and denial may cause a birth mother to fail to recall significant details such as the date and time of the birth and her child’s birth weight.  The inability to recall such details can complicate the normal grieving process by causing guilt and feelings of shame for not being able to remember specific details.

When numbness and denial subside, often birth mothers experience an eruption of feelings such as anger, sadness, shame and guilt.  Opportunities to express these feelings in a natural and supported way are important for validating the loss and coping with the grief associated with an adoptive placement.  For birth mothers who have kept their pregnancy and adoption plan secret, the secrecy, shame and lack of public acknowledgment means that opportunities to release these difficult feelings don’t exist.  When natural means of releasing these feelings are not available, the feelings often get stifled, ignored or are manifested in unhealthy ways.

It is helpful if there is a friend, family member or counselor with whom a birth mother can share her feelings, pregnancy and adoption plan.  This person’s role is to listen, validate her grief and loss and allow for healthy ways to express difficult feelings.  This support person can also be present at the birth to record important details which she may want to remember at a later date.  It can also be helpful to journal any memories of the birth and hospital stay as soon as possible before those memories fade.  Mementos such as foot prints, crib cards and pictures can also be very helpful in having something tangible to hold onto during especially difficult times.

Giving birth to a baby and placing the baby with adoptive parents are very significant life events.  During times of grief, it is helpful to remember the time prior to the loss and the person for whom one is grieving.  Being able to call to mind details, read journal entries or hold onto mementos are helpful ways of validating the significance of the loss and can lead to positive management of the grief process.  Our compassionate adoption social workers are trained to help birth parents move through the grief process in a healthy way. We understand the special circumstances surrounding birth parent grief and are here to be a support person to birth parents (and their families) in an effort to help eliminate any barriers to healthy grieving.