My wife and I began "dating" at 14 and always talked about someday getting married, having a boy, then a girl, then adopting. I can't remember why adoption was important to us then, but we did get married and did have a boy, then a girl. But when we then looked into adoption, we were stunned by how few children seemed to be "free" for adoption. We even signed up for the airlift of orphans from Cambodia in the mid-70's and hoped that we would be chosen to give a child a home. It was then we realized, it wasn't about "having a baby", but about sharing our love and lives with a child. Like our marriage, the more we gave, the more we received -- and parenting can be the same way, at least until they become teenagers. But then that is another story. Adoption is such a purposeful way to share our love and our lives.

Meredith,

Thanks you for sharing your thoughts so candidly. No matter how we come into parenting - the emotions connected to the process are life changing. Your daughters are fortunate to have such a sensitive, thoughtful mom.

Barbara

Meredith knows how to write about life and adoption. She is witty and real. My husband and I adopted our son at birth. Our experience is so different than Meredith's and yet I have connected with her writing on adoption more than any other writer.

your children are like, if all mothers who adopt think that way this would be great

I considered adopting in the early 1970's shortly after I married, not because of any infertility issue. It just felt like the "right" thing to do. I also was not seeking an infant; I called and inquired about toddler of about three.

I subsequently became pregnant and gave birth in 1974, 76 and 79!

In the interim years, between that phone call and the completion of my family, I reflected back on that call with a far greater awareness because I learned about adoptees and their mothers searching for one another.

I was stunned the first time I heard that anyone would want to meet the mother who had "given them up" (the words used at that time and my head about adoption). And so the words that blurted from my subconscious and out my moth were: "Don't you hate her?"

I was given an entirely different perspective by this adoptee and later by rooms full of them at ALMA support group meetings and the door opened for me into a whole new world.

In the ensuring 40 years, I recognized that my phone call to adopt came from a deep subconscious pain I was trying hard to ignore.

No, I am not adopted. I came to realize that I sought a three-year-old in 1971 because of a longing for my daughter who I had lost to adoption in 1968. I am one of the words you didn’t want to use….one of thousands of young women in the sixties; girls who "went away" as Fessler and Solinger have written about.

I am part of a sisterhood of unsupported women who still today lose their children because of their age, marital or financial status and social pressures to do the "right thing" and who never forget and are tormented by their "decision." Women who are today being pressured and lied to by unlicensed, untrained adoption facilitators and adoption agency business; told they will have an open adoption -- only to have those unenforceable promises broken.

I am part of a larger global sisterhood of women who are exploited because of ignorance and poverty by the growing corrupt adoption market and baby brokers who see their babies a valuable commodities and steal or kidnap them or tell different lies: that their children will go America for an education; that they will return or help them come to the U.S...or that their child has died.

The loss of my child to adoption has colored every aspect of my life, all my relationships. My life’s work is to prevent all future unwarranted adoption separations and to provide support for families torn apart adoption. I advocate for an end to profiteering, coercion, corruption and exploitation in adoption, which has become a multi-billion dollar loosely regulated industry focused on filling a demand instead of on finding homes for orphans and children whose parents are unable to provide safe care. I have authored two books and am Vice President of Origins-USA.

This is my experience with adoption. What I would have done had I not been fortunate enough to bear children I raised, I cannot say. Would have called back? Adopted a child myself? Caused another the lifelong grief, shame and guilt I and others experience? I like to think not. I like to think that if I did adopt it would have been a child from U.S. foster care, as I did also become a foster mother, and that I would have helped that child reconnect with his or her family, as I did my foster son and thousands of other families separated by adoption.

None of us can go back and undo choices we made in the past. But we can be mindful that choices that bring one person’ joy often bring another pain and sadness and that children who are adopted have two families. We can be mindful that adoption is today no longer about finding homes for orphans and children whose parents are unable to provide safe care for them. Those children are sadly ignored while adoption has become a multi-billion demand- and market-driven industry that too often coerces and exploits mothers for the “commodity” of their child. This new commercialized, privatized entrepreneurial adoption that scams many who try to adopt, is not worthy of praise or encouragement.

Thank you Meredith, for sharing your thoughts so candidly and with so much honesty. At almost 35 I am still undecided as to whether I will have children. But I have always known and believed in my heart that if I do decide to have children adoption will most likely be what I choose to do. I love the fact that you pointed out that the age of the child at adoption is not what matters-- it is the home filled with love that does.