[Archive]

Hi All,

It is really good to find you all and know that I am not lost from the board forever. I was starting to panic!

In case you don't remember I left the board a while back, well let's say I quit posting for a while. I found it very hard to stay away and still lurked. It is so great to see that life is going forward and everyone is still sharing.

I was trying to find the board this morning and I was thinking about how happy I was when I found this board well over a year ago. It was before we had our Homestudy completed and we were just staring classes. It was somewhere around the time that Susan and her hub had gone on their trip to see Demario.

Back then, I thought I was so savvy about adoption and also about the kind of child that would be right for our family. We had specified that we would adopt a sib group, up to 5 kids, oldest 10 or under.

Our other requirement was for Caucasian or Hispanic children.
Our reasoning behind this was that we felt our families would have a problem accepting an AA child. I got flak(?) when I posted this on the board, but we felt that the child(ren) had been through enough and did not need to be exposed to any kind of prejudice.

That said, it is really interesting how when you make up your mind that you are going to do something a certain way, life steps in and teaches you the way things really are.

Time went on and our homestudy was completed. We had several situations presented to us, but none seemed as though they were the right match for us. I kept reading the board and seeing the questions get answered for folks who had adopted transracially. There was always someone there to answer a question or direct the questioner to a website for hair and skincare or culturally related subjects. This was when I began to realize that our hesitance to adopt tranracially was more that a concern for the child about others prejudice, but a fear of our own that we wouldn't know everything.

Ha! Now, imagine that! I an experienced parent (4 kids). I wouldn't know everything about taking care of a child. I can't believe that I was so naive that I ever thought it would be a slam dunk. But, I was discovering that I had duped myself into believing that it would be all fun.

Back to the story, I began to realize that I didn't care if our families accepted our choice for adoption or not. We were the ones adopting and if they had a problem with it or any child we chose, they would be the losers. Now, I just had to convince my husband.

My DH knew that I frequented this board and I had often brought up situations and discussed them with him. It was a gradual process, but overall, I found him very easy to convince.

Then, came a call about 2 little AA girls who needed to be placed. We went to the telling and decided to consider having them join our family. But, after careful checking and some well phrased questions (the board helped me with that), we came to the conclusion that one of the girls probably had RAD. We felt very torn up over having to make this decision, but I work and we felt if we took them they needed a stay-at-home mom.

Although this was a difficult experience for us, I had a very good thing come out of the experience. I had shared with my family that we might adopt interacially and the overwhelming response was, "All kids need homes".

Shortly after that my husband shared our decision with his mom, he was stunned when he got a lot of resistance to the idea. This was the parent he thought would be more accepting. She was very upset and we anticipated a future of limited Grandma visits.

The story took a strange twist though when he told his dad. My husband had anticipated a closed door and instead got a very different response. His dad, an engineer, always lays everything out logically, so my DH expected to hear all about how difficult life was going to be for us and the kids. But, instead Dad said, "You and brydy are intelligent people and I know that you have thought this out carefully. If this is what you want to do, I'm behind you 100%".

I know this is getting long so I will cut to the chase soon. The SW soon called to present our daughter to us. She was 22 months old and she came home the first day we met her. The next morning we went to meet her paternal cousins at Grandma's house. Little "B" walked into Grandma's house straight to Grandma and put her little hands up to be picked up. You could not pry that child out of Grandma's arms for 2 hours. She had her head on Grandma's shoulder snuggling. She totally stole Grandma's heart that day.

Our adoption story has turned out so far from how we originally thought it would. We have learned so much about ourselves and other people in our lives, too. we wanted to give a home to a child that had none and I guess we did that, but, by far we have benefitted the most from this experience.

I hope that if any of the readers here are facing decisions that you will be encouraged by my story. Adoption is not an easy thing to do. One thing that I have seen in all the adoption stories I have heard, is that you need to be ready to learn, some good and some bad, about yourselves and about other people.

thanks for listening,

brydy