Paper Pregnant

At some point between submitting an adoption application and actually bringing home your baby, adoptive parents are said to be “paper pregnant”. Some consider this to be as soon as the application is approved, some not until the homestudy is complete or an official match is made; but regardless of when this transition occurs, there is, at some point, a “pregnancy”. A psychological, rather than physical, pregnancy.

T-shirt from http://www.adoptionbug.com

There’s no morning sickness. Or swollen ankles. Or an unusually strong craving for Fruity Pebbles. No one offers you a seat on the subway. Or excitedly asks you when you’re due and if you have names picked out. You don’t get to go out and buy cute maternity clothes or see your baby’s heartbeat on a monitor. But you are still, in every way, expecting.

For anyone who has experienced infertility, this is extremely difficult to accept. While trying to get pregnant, there was excitement to the extent that one day we will have our baby. There was no timeline. And no guarantee. This was something that would happen in the future, but was not happening now. I felt guilty compiling potential baby names or window-shopping at Pottery Barn Kids, like I wasn’t supposed to be doing that until we were actually pregnant.

Since we’ve started the adoption process, it’s been hard to shake that feeling. We are now in a place where this is actually happening. We still don’t know when our baby will come home, but we know that we will have a baby at the end of this journey. We want to be able to enjoy this phase, and to really soak up the excitement of anticipating a new addition. I still somehow feel guilty wandering through a baby store or looking through parenting books at Barnes and Noble. I’ve looked forward to these things for so long, but it’s hard now to even allow myself to do them. Even the smallest amount of support from friends and family can mean the world though. There are a few people in our lives who, even just through simple things like discussing baby products that worked for their little one or asking us about baby names we like, have helped me feel like I really am part of the mommy-to-be club. Even these little things are SO helpful. There are so many things about this road to parenthood that are different, it’s amazing to just feel normal.

So we will be preparing for this baby during the wait. Some people can’t bear the thought of putting together a nursery or having a baby shower before you’re matched. I think, for us, these things would be really helpful. We want to be excited about this phase, as any expectant parents would be. We need time to prepare ourselves for this change so we’re not completely caught off-guard if we have to bring home a newborn with only a few weeks (or less!) notice. It’s an odd feeling knowing that we’ve looked forward to this for so long, but are now reluctant to let go of our fears and worries and just embrace the thrill of expectant parenthood. But I don’t want to look back on this time and regret that we didn’t celebrate our impending arrival simply because we were too scared of how long the wait would be. This baby deserves to be celebrated and anticipated as any expected baby would be. And we are, after all, expecting.

Delayed

I am generally not a very patient person. If you know me at all, you know that I am a big fan of efficiency, organization, and timeliness. The first time I hosted Thanksgiving (for all of 6 people) I actually made a detailed schedule of when each item needed to start cooking, what dish it would be cooked in and which rack of the oven it would go on so I could fit multiple things in at one time. I think my husband is still laughing at me. So it’s safe to say that there are few things that annoy me more than time-wasting and disorganization.

Dealing with two different adoption agencies (in addition to the government agencies, doctor’s offices, HR departments, etc.) the last few months, we have certainly had our patience tested. We went into this process so motivated to get through the homestudy as quickly as possible, knowing that we have a wait coming even after all the work is done. We spent every night reading the adoption books, writing our autobiographies and discussing parenting issues that could come up during the interview. We were determined to move this process along as quickly as we could.

Unfortunately, the efficiency of this process is just one more thing completely out of our control. I’ve spent hours being frustrated over the homestudy agency not sending out our reference letters on time, Massachusetts having virtually NO protocol for child abuse background checks, and my boss losing my employment verification not once, but twice. And now we sit here with a homestudy that’s been approved for two months, and a Dear Birthmother letter that should absolutely not take 2-3 months to finalize. We’re really at our wits end with this whole thing and are SO ready for it to be done.

I was so frustrated the other night over how long this is taking and went over to pinterest to lose myself in something totally unrelated. Nothing like photos of teacup pigs, inappropriate ecards and fattening desserts to take your mind off of something. But one of the first pins that showed up on my pinterest was this:

 

I actually laughed out loud when I saw it. It was exactly what I needed to see. Since we’ve started this journey to parenthood, I really believe that everything has happened for a reason. As hard as it was to get negative pregnancy tests month after month, I know that we had to go through everything we did to end up where we are now. So seeing this quote made me think about this delay in another light. Maybe there is a reason for it. Maybe, if we were “actively waiting” in June when our homestudy was approved, we would have ended up with a failed match this summer. Maybe we would have been matched quickly and had to worry about paying the remainder of our adoption costs all at once. Maybe we would have brought home a baby that wasn’t meant to be ours, and lost him or her a few days later. Maybe it’s just convenient for me to believe that these delays happen for a reason so I can stop being so angry about it.

No matter the reason, it helps to think of things this way. It allows me to be okay with the fact that I’m not in control of this. I’m able to let go of some of the anger and frustration from dealing with other people’s inefficiency and disorganization. It helps me to forgive the ONE person at our agency who’s holding us up, and at least consider the fact that this may be a blessing in disguise. We’re still doing everything we can on our end to move things along more quickly, but I can recognize that there may be a good reason things are delayed. Our baby will find us when the time is right, and maybe this delay is just a way of protecting us from at least some of the heartache and setbacks that are along the road. I hear that once the baby is in your arms, it all makes perfect sense. We can’t wait for that moment.

Dear Birthmother

We’ve been working on this letter in our heads since we decided on domestic adoption. But when it really came down to actually writing the letter that will be read by our child’s birthmother, we suddenly could not put the words together. How do you explain, in less than 1000 words and 12 photos, how excited you are to be parents, how much you already love your future child, and how grateful you are to this person for even considering you as parents for her baby? And to do all of this without coming across as arrogant, presumptive, offensive or fake? It has absolutely been the most difficult part of this process so far. Writing our entire life story in outline form for the homestudy cannot even compare.

Every agency handles this process differently and has varying levels of involvement in editing the letter. Our agency is VERY involved. In the beginning, we were really grateful for the help. There were things in the initial letter we wrote that would come across as presumptive to a birthmother, and that’s not something we could really understand since we have yet to meet a birthmother. They helped us trim down the letter and make some of our sentences more clear.

The more this editing went on, however, the more frustrated we became. We had read several samples before starting our own letter and could not believe how nauseating some of them were. There are simply not that many people with perfectly manicured lawns who spend all of their free time playing badminton in the back yard with the neighborhood kids and can’t wait to bake cookies with their child every afternoon. Seriously, there’s not. We felt like a lot of the suggestions we were given after the first edit were made to sound exactly like every other letter we’ve read. They vetoed all but one of the twelve photos we had sent and wanted more photos with children. Photos of us playing with children, cuddling babies, reading to children. They only wanted us to include photos of our hobbies and interests if children were included in the photo. It felt so staged and false; these are not things that we do every day!

Doesn’t really seem like a good idea to add a child into this scene

 

We spent so much time being angry over the edits that we were sent, annoyed that someone was trying to tell us how to write our OWN letter, and worried that we would be “lying” to a birthmother by including photos of things we hardly do. In our opinion, the letter was supposed to be a representation of our lives and who we are. I eventually scheduled a phone call with our social worker to talk about all of this (we had been working with a designer up to this point- she’s the one who helps edit all the letters). We were able to work something out whereby she (our social worker) would take over approving our letter (since we had already been given two edits and had gotten to the point where we were simply arguing grammar rules over email) and the designer would continue to work with us on the photos. She explained that the letter has to not only represent who we are now, but show how our lives could look in the future. From what past birthmoms have told them, it is helpful to be able to picture the couple with their baby. While we really wanted to include a lot of photos of us traveling and pictures of our home, none of that would really show how good we are with kids or how ready we are to include a child in our family. So we gave in a little. We didn’t take any staged photos (JP was already tossing my cousin’s kids in the pool for hours before he even knew I was taking pictures) and we certainly didn’t borrow any children of acquaintances to include in our photos. While some of the photos don’t necessarily represent our everyday life, they do accurately represent our personalities. JP is naturally really good with little kids for some reason, and that’s not something that would come across in our travel photos of just the two of us. I love our Godson to death and really hope that he and our little one will be close growing up; photos of us together seemed appropriate to include.

Who wouldn’t want this cutie as a playmate?

 

We did have to draw the line somewhere, especially since we are definitely at the younger end of the adoptive parent spectrum and simply don’t have that many friends with kids. I argued specifically about including a couple photos just of the two of us, and there are a couple showing our interests and hobbies. These are not all photos I would have chosen to include, but I don’t want to throw up reading our letter so I guess we’ve made some progress.

 

Once we get the final edit from our social worker tomorrow, we will order a proof for the designer. After that’s approved we can order a whole case of them to send to the agency in California, where they will then be sent to potential birthmothers. We will finally be “actively waiting”. After all we’ve been through preparing this letter and enduring the homestudy, it’s an odd feeling to know that we’ve written the final copy. It feels a little like when we pieced together some of the sample ceremony wordings that our priest gave us a few months before our wedding. When we finalized everything, it was amazing to read it over and over and think these are the words that will make us husband and wife.

Having a finalized copy of our Dear Birthmother letter is like knowing that these are the words that will bring our baby home to us. Our child’s birthmother one day will see these words and pictures and be comforted enough to know that she is making the right decision, and that we are meant to be the parents of her baby. It likely won’t be the first potential birthmother who reads our letter, and certainly not every birthmother who receives the letter, but for that one person our words and photos will make all the difference.