Where Do [Adopted] Babies Come From?

As I covered in my last post, I've known about the birds and the bees for quite some time now. When considering adoption, though, babies can come from all kinds of crazy places. I mean, all babies come from a uterus, let's be honest, but that uterus can live in all kinds of crazy places.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have decided to adopt from a faraway, exotic land called...Sacramento County. Specifically, we are adopting through the foster care system, a process known as foster-to-adopt (or fost-adopt, as the cool kids say).

Fost-adopt wasn't even on my radar when I first started thinking about adoption as a young adult, and it wasn't even on my radar when Shane and I first discussed adoption in those very early, very hypothetical conversations. I just knew that I wanted to be a family for a child who needed a family, and beyond that I really didn't care much about the details of how that would go down.

When adoption would come up in conversation with friends or acquaintances in those early days, our consideration of adoption was often met with remarks like, "Isn't adoption super expensive?" or "I think it takes like 10 years and $20,000 to adopt a baby... are you guys ready for that?" I'm not sure I really understand the motivation behind asking questions like that. It usually just felt like thinly veiled disbelief (There's no way these idiots know what it takes to adopt a baby; this will never happen). To be honest, though, I didn't have much of an answer. I remember thinking that if spending tens of thousands of dollars was the only way to adopt a child who needs a home that something was very, very broken.

I felt confident that there had to be a more straightforward way to bring a child into our family though adoption than hiring lawyers and spending tens of thousands of dollars. Surely there was an avenue for people like us - who weren't dead set on Russia or Ethiopia or Caucasian - to adopt a kid who needs a family. I knew in my heart that there was a way, I just didn't know what that way was.

And then some friends-of-friends adopted their third child and showed us the way. We were casually acquainted with this family through mutual friends and our church, which they also attended. They had 2 children, both of whom were adopted domestically after they discovered that they were unable to have biological children. I knew they had used an adoption lawyer (translation: spent a lot of money), and I didn't really think of this family as 'adoption advocates' or anything. Many people probably didn't even know that their kids were adopted. When they decided to have a third child, however, they opted to adopt through the foster care systems with the help of an agency called Angels.

As I heard about what they were doing - becoming foster parents with the plan of adopting their foster child - I knew that this was the way for us. This is what my heart had been wanting all these years.

The practical reason that I knew this was our path to adoption is the accessibility. Bottom line: We can't afford the lawyer fees, agency fees, and potential travel fees that private and/or international adoption entail. I suppose that if we felt a strong desire to adopt from a particular country we could have made it a priority to save the $8,000 to $20,000 required to do so (see one family's Haitian adoption cost breakdown here). Our desire to adopt has never been about a connection to any particular country, though, so that kind of financial planning was never really on the table.

The sentimental reason that I knew foster-to-adopt was our path is because we are capable. While adopting through the foster care system generally won't cost you a dime, the "emotional cost" can be immeasurable. The catch, as it were, is that the county's first goal for foster children is to reunite them with their biological families. What this means for prospective adoptive parents is that we could potentially have a foster child placed in our home whom we hope to adopt - we bond with them and care for them and love them as our child - and then the county could decide that the formerly abusive or negligent parent has gotten their act together and should resume parenting. It is a daunting prospect, to say the least. For us, though, it's not a deal breaker, and the fact that it doesn't feel totally wrong kind of makes it exactly right.

What I mean is that we feel like we can afford the emotional cost. We acknowledge how painful it could be to consider a child ours, and then have that child taken away from us; we acknowledge that having a transracial family (a likely possibility) brings with it a host of challenges; we are aware that the myriad hoops that we will have to jump through will be frustrating and exhausting... and we feel like we can survive it. We have an emotional safe deposit box that holds a mind-boggling support system of family and friends, a decade-long romance built on trust and communication, and faith in the Good Lord's plan for our lives. It's not that we feel that we're strong enough or good enough or spiritual enough, it's that we feel that we have been given enough. We feel like we can be those people. We are becoming those people.