My husband and I made the decision to adopt shortly before we were married and were to leave for Peace Corps. When preparing for what we wanted to do for birth control in a third world country, it was proposed that my husband get a vasectomy. We both knew this is essentially a permanent fix, so we looked at how we would build a family in the future. After an assessment of the weird health issues on both sides of our families, we agreed we’d be doing humanity a disservice by keeping these genes in the pool. Additionally, as two young, naive adults looking to save the world (years later we still have this ideal in mind…but perhaps more practical solutions for such), we thought providing a home and parents to children who were in need was perfect. Besides, the world has too many people anyway, so this way we’d only be providing a home for people already around. (I said we were naive, right?) Hubby went through with giving his swimmers a dead-end, we left for Peace Corps, and that was the last we spoke about family building.
When working for an adoption agency, I did pretty damn well not to let the sweet pictures of children everywhere and the happiness of bringing families together get to me. I even fared pretty well when coworkers began having kids. But when my friends started popping out sons and daughters, the baby-crazy seed finally planted itself into the fertile soil of my mind. Since we were still too young for the China program, I initially looked at Taiwan as an option. I knew deep down inside that it wasn’t good timing for our family to be doing this, but still found myself answering the baby-crazy siren song. Thankfully, my husband was reluctant about starting, so it never moved further than collecting information. I was sure frustrated and pissed off at the time, but this is one of those moments where it’s good to have the spousal veto to prevent stupid decisions to be made.
Here we are today, more than a year and a half after we seriously started talking about starting the adoption process, and this time we’ve actually begun the process. We’ve already turned in significant amounts of paperwork (seriously, it’s ridiculous how much paperwork with about the same information you need to turn in. Absolutely ridiculous. But, I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to be a circus performer and jump through hoops). Additionally, my baby-craziness has thankfully been tempered, while my husband is really excited to start. I guess, in the end, I just can’t stay away from the adoption community for long, and now going through the process from the other side of the coin ought to be interesting to say the least.
