Hi! My name is Brooke (insert stick-on nametag here). My husband Tom and I have been thinking about adoption for about two years now. I’m 38 and he’s 41, so that clock is ticking. We have one biological son turning 5 this Fall and entering Kindergarten.
It took about over half a year to get pregnant with my son. We didn’t really start trying for another until he was around 3. I had my checkups and everything looked fine. But no luck after about a year. I went to the doc and she wanted me to have my “tubes blown” – you know that test where they inject dye up into your fallopian tubes to see whether there are any issues. She said that for some reason, many women will get pregnant 2-3 months after having this test. She also wanted Tom tested. I said “Him first!” After all, his test was much easier than mine. In the process of getting those things scheduled I got pregnant again. 7 weeks later I had an ultrasound and found out I had “blighted ovum”; embryonic sac but no baby. A few days later I started to miscarry and was brought in for a D&C. In researching that, I found out how very common it is and the doctor assured me that given my ability to get pregnant before and again this time, she didn’t think I had any issues but we could move forward with the tests to find out more. I had already been thinking about adoption before I’d even gotten pregnant the second time, feeling this pull that the child that was to be in our family wouldn’t come from me. After the miscarraige, we really felt like our path was in a different direction. I never had the tests and other than a home test that said he was fine, neither did Tom. I guess if we really wanted, we could go do the tests, get me on some fertility drugs and try again. I honestly think we could have another biological child if we pushed it, but that’s just not where our hearts are telling us to go.
So, full speed ahead. I’m a Project Manager and Business Analyst so I had to get data data data! I was all over the internet on site after site, reading about everything. Domestic infant adoption, international adoption… but the one area where I had the hardest time finding any clear information was on adopting from foster care. This I really couldn’t believe, because surely these children are desperately in need of homes? It’s not that I didn’t find *anything* on the internet, just that there was a large lack of how to go about it and where to start. In my local county I found the Wake County Human Services website. When you click on “Adoptions & Foster Care” under the Child & Family header, you get a page with basically two buttons – one to click for Foster Care and one for Adoptions. If you click on “Adoptions”, here’s what you get:
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Why Consider Adoption?
As you consider adoption, keep in mind:
- Both single and married people can be considered as adoptive parents.
- You do not have to own a home.
- People of different ages consider adoption for a variety of reasons.
- Income requirements are flexible, and many types of financial assistance are potentially available.
- Free post-adoptive and support services are offered through Wake County Human Services.
Who are the Children in Need?
Children available for adoption through our agency are in the foster care system and are unable to return home. We are working hard to help them find a permanent family willing to commit their love and so much more. Our children are typically school age and often part of a sibling group. We have a particular need for families willing to consider adopting older children.
The Adoption Resource Team works to bring people and resources together in order to facilitate adoptions for Wake County Human Services.
To learn more about children waiting to be part of a family, call 1-877-NCKIDS-1
or visit http://www.ncdhhs.gov/dss/adopt/index.html
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Now, once you click the link to go into the NC site it has some good information on adoption in North Carolina. I guess my problem was not figuring out that the process on the NC page was what applied to all counties in NC? I didn’t understand that the five agencies listed there were who you had to use (unless you pick a private agency), that HHS did not handle any adoptions from foster care. I don’t know what my problem was, but I just didn’t get it until after the meeting we attended. There is also a great page within the NC site telling the steps to adoption from foster care. While this page says the counties handle the adoptions, the agencies operate within the state and interface to all counties (some more than others). This whole state/county thing confused me at the beginning.
Wow. That got me off on a tangent. Anyway, Tom tended more towards adoptiong from foster care in the beginning. I was looking more towards international adoption since my brother and his wife adopted two children from Russia and a coworker has two beautiful girls from China. Tom is concerned about his age when our children are graduating high school and college and wasn’t very keen on adopting a newborn if we had a choice. I didn’t mind so much, but was thinking that since there were so many people out there that did want newborns, maybe it would be better if we adopted a child here that wasn’t. When we attended the HHS meeting and talked with the case workers, they said they encourage parents to “maintain the birth order” of their children – i.e. if you have biological children, adopt children younger than they are. I wanted to do this anyway because, hey… I don’t really have experience parenting a child older than 4 right now! But because he’s so young yet, that puts our age range at 3 and below… not a huge amount of kids in the system that age. And what makes it even harder is that we don’t want to take a moderate to high legal risk child to foster before adopting (which is how a lot of younger children are adopted out of the system – by their foster parents) because of having our son and worrying about us all bonding together only to possibly have to give her back. Over half of the children who enter the foster system are eventually reunited back with their biological families. I’m just not ready to be able to do that. So, that means both parents have to have signed a TPR (Termination of Parental Rights) or that one parent has signed a TPR and an exhaustive, documented search has been done to locate the other parent in order to have them sign, or the courts have removed custody completely from the parents. We would like for the child to already be “adoptable” when we’re matched. This narrows the field down even further. Which is why it was important to us to find an agency that would work with all continental states, which Lutheran Family Services does, just much more so with Texas than with other states. Though due to the hit-or-miss nature of finding matches inter-state, I’d rather go with one agency that has huge success in one other state as well as NC (especially one as big as Texas) than another agency that says they cover them all but really doesn’t do many inter-state adoptions.
So, here we are. We have our application to LFS which I have 80% filled out and we’re in the process of digging up long-buried info to fill out the rest of it. I don’t know at this point what our chances are for finding one little girl age three or under who is elligible for adoption whose foster parents couldn’t adopt her. Hopefully we’re not asking for the impossible. If we can cast a wide enough net maybe we can find her. Right now we’re going with a public agency, but if we have to move to a private agency that may give us better chances, then we’ll do that too if there’s a need. I really am so anxious to be done with the paperwork and classes so we can start looking. I’m just afraid the looking period will take a few years. I sincerely hope not.
Keep looking and don’t lose hope. It is very confusing how hard it is to find out about adopting children from state custody. It seems as if our government has had two competing ideas. At one time, the focus was to search for and prepare people ready to adopt. They were not going to be foster parents, but go straight to adoption. Then a few years ago, their focus became to develop foster families. I suppose to have children adopted by their foster families. I agree with you, fostering a child, and then having to return that child to it’s birth parent/s takes a different mind set. In any case, as you know, it can be a long and difficult process, but sometimes it can happen quickly. Best wishes, and I know you child will find you:)