How Did I Get to Here?

I’ve thought about adopting for a long time but it never went anywhere farther than just thinking. A couple of things happened in the last year or so that finally set me in motion.

The first was I turned 40. Your life doesn’t always turn out the way you think it will. I always thought that I’d find my prince, get married and have kids – in that order. Over the years I’ve been on a ton of blind dates and even tried online dating (which I now refer to as the parade of frogs) but never met anyone with whom I wanted to share my life. Hitting 40 made me realize I didn’t want to wait any longer to start a family and since I hadn’t found my prince it was up to me to do it alone.

The second thing is something I consider to be fate. One of my friends intermittently ran a woman who was in our sorority in college. One day last June when my friend was dropping off her kids at a gymnastics class she ran into this woman who now had a new toddler. It turns out that our sorority sister had adopted not only this child but two others from Russia. My friend put me in touch with this woman who has been an invaluable help to me in my process. She gave me a lot of good advice and ideas on where to find information online.

The first thing I had to decide was whether to do a domestic adoption or an international adoption. I attended a couple of seminars put on by adoption agencies to see the differences. There were a lot of things I did not like about domestic adoption. First, the way domestic programs are set up the birth mother gets to choose the parents. You put together a little pamphlet type thing about yourself and they look through them and pick. Essentially you wait until someone picks you (if ever) - there is no set timeframe and no guarantee that you’ll end up with a child. From my perspective I would think realistically birth mothers would be much more likely to pick a two-parent family over a single parent. Second, the adoption laws are structured so that birth mothers have a relatively long time (I believe it is 30 days in Maryland) after they give up the baby to change their mind. So you could get a child only to have it taken away. That would be too heartbreaking for me. Third, the trend in domestic adoptions these days is for open adoptions. That’s where the birth mother gets visitation rights to the child. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I’d be with that type of arrangement.

After ruling out domestic adoptions I had to decide which international program would work for me. I quickly found out that as a single prospective adoptive parent you have fewer options. A lot of countries (like China) no longer allow single women to adopt. After a lot of time doing research I found that singles could adopt from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Guatemala (for some reason I didn’t know about Vietnam but that program is about to close so it’s a good thing I didn’t consider it). I immediately ruled out a couple of countries: (1) Ukraine because they only allowed singles to adopt older children or children with special needs and (2) Guatemala because there were rumors that their international adoption program was going to be shut down due to the US’s implementation of the Hague Convention (Guatemala did in fact close and is still shut down). That left Russia and Kazakhstan. Initially I was more interested in Russia since I had met a bunch of people through an organization called Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA for short). I contacted several agencies and spoke to them about their programs. The main problem with Russia was that the government had decided that all agencies had to be reaccredited so adoptions from Russia were moving REALLY slowly. At the time Russia had just started reaccrediting agencies and was only doing a few at a time. In addition, I was told that the wait for an infant girl was 18 months to 2 years. That would mean that I would have to do all my paperwork twice (because the paperwork all expires after a year). The long wait and having to redo things did not sound appealing to me.

One of my sisters works with a woman who had adopted children from both Russia and Kazakhstan (I believe she’s now gone on to adopt some additional children from Uzbekistan). This woman said she had a better experience adopting from Kazakhstan and told my sister to suggest it to me. I looked into and was pleased by what I found - the Kazakhstan program seemed established and from what I had read the children are very cared for. I spent some time researching agencies and ultimately decided this is was what was right for me.