I sat at a table at Starbucks, listening incredulously as a Facebook friend, a woman I knew on the most superficial of levels, told me that she wanted to meet with me to connect about our infertility/adoption journeys, but mostly because:
I just get this sense that you’re not actually happy with your decision, and I want you to know it’s not too late.
Ah. You see, my husband and I had just ended a nearly 8-year journey to become parents -- first through infertility treatment, then through donor gametes, then two years of domestic infant adoption -- and she just could not understand our decision to step off the adoption merry-go-round.
She ticked off all the reasons that I could still adopt: I wasn’t too old (she had just adopted her second child from China and she was 46), there were other ways besides domestic infant, and why didn’t I look into international adoption?
Just a month earlier, a coworker approached me in the hall and said,
Is it true? You’re stopping adoption? NO! You can’t! You’d be a great mom, why won’t you try foster adoption?
And just last month, while getting my face waxed, my aesthetician asked if we were still adopting, and when I said “No, we ended that four years ago,” she said,
But you could have done international adoption, right?
It is beyond frustrating that not only do people judge you if you do not pursue adoption, they judge you for not picking the right kind, which is whatever path you didn’t choose. There are, in the minds of the uninformed who usually have not actually adopted themselves, just SO MANY CHOICES. To them, it’s a menu of options, and there’s just so many children who need saving, and everyone knows someone who adopted or got pregnant under the unlikeliest of circumstances. When asked, “have you considered adoption?” I hear: What’s wrong with you that you couldn’t go the distance? What’s wrong with you that adoption didn’t work out?
That’s the hard part -- when you say, “Yes, we did consider adoption and it did not work out,” people don’t understand how that is even possible. When I have the energy to explain, their eyes widen.
We laid our lives out for inspection and were found wanting, or at least not as appealing as whoever got chosen, every single time. It took more than six months of waiting to even be considered for our first opportunity to be chosen (or not). When we were finally profiled, that in itself was a celebration. It didn’t really hurt when we weren’t chosen, because the gate had opened. But then the hurt amplified every time we were passed over, and over, and over. We were actually chosen once, in a blind profile (we had no idea we were being presented as potential adoptive parents). The expectant mother changed her mind, as is her right, before we knew, and they told us a month or so later that it had come and gone. Which was, I suppose, a mercy. It hurt less than if we thought we’d be parents and then weren’t.
Six opportunities over eighteen months took a tremendous emotional toll, especially after the 5 and a half years of medical treatments and losses that weakened our stamina, and eventually we just had to say . . . enough.
A lot of people seem not to understand this concept of “enough.”
Adoption home studies are not transferable. You can’t end your domestic infant adoption journey and then hop right into international, or foster care without starting over. The requirements change. In fact, people do not understand that because all the types of adoption are so different, that perhaps those of us considering it weigh each one very carefully before deciding which is the best fit for our particular circumstances, or backgrounds. It’s not like I “forgot” that international or foster adoption were options. They just weren’t the options we chose, for very specific reasons that I owe to no one.
I want people to know that it is painful to make those choices, and even more painful when they are questioned by people who do not know your situation and often do not know what is entailed and never have had to make a decision like that themselves. I also want people who actually have adopted to stop assuming that their way is the way for everyone, that they waited the magical amount of time, that if only we had done this or that the way they did we’d have a child and not what they imagine is our sad, sorry childless life, despite any evidence to the contrary.
I want people to know that in the end, it was powerful to say “enough” and then to craft a new life, without children, and dub our family complete with the two of us and our cats. I grieve the life we did not have that we wanted, and it was devastatingly hard when we made the choice, but at the same time I celebrate the beautiful life I do have in spite of our losses. I am not constantly looking for a way to remedy my childless existence; I am happy where I am. It is possible to mourn the lost life and celebrate your actual life -- these feelings do not cancel each other out; they exist concurrently. It’s a flawed assumption that if I express sadness, it means that overall my life is lacking.
Please, please, stop asking people without children if we considered adoption, or why we didn’t, or why we didn’t consider a different type of adoption. Adoption is not easy, nor should it be. If we are living a childless life, that is a resolution in itself that is one more path to success after infertility. To craft a life you love after losing the life you wanted is a beautiful thing, a triumph. There isn’t just one way to happiness.
Jessica Tennant
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash