However, dissociation runs counter to the emotional challenges that then have to be met to get from infertility to adoption. There are, of course, many organizations, agencies and attorneys to take you through the steps needed to find your child. That's not where the difficulties are always found. The real difficult tasks are the emotional ones. Partners need to re-connect after enduring searing pain and loss: they need to transform dissociated isolation back to connected, bonded family life. And this happens by talking, by holding, and by daring to express feelings that risk rejection, abandonment, and humiliation. 

Like many mental health professionals working in in the field of adoption, I have my own story to tell. Here is a personal illustration of the journey that my husband and I took to grow our family. I hope my story provides both comfort and context.

My adoption story starts when I was a child and I used to love hearing the Little Golden Book version of Cinderella read to me over and over again. The story was good, but I especially enjoyed getting to the last page. As I recall, it was a picture of Prince Charming and Cinderella holding hands, the Prince dressed in his military regalia, Cinderella in what looked like a wedding dress, their backs to us, gazing off into the sunset. The caption read: "...and they lived happily ever after." I would stare long and hard, trying to get the young man to turn around so I could see what my Prince Charming would look like. I would squint my eyes to glimpse the vision of myself as a bride. I never could quite get there. While I didn't know what "happily ever after" looked like, I was certain of one thing. I would someday have a family: I would be a Mom. As all of us know, things don't always work out as we plan or expect. By the time I was ready to begin a family, I was already older. What I had dreamed would happen automatically did not happen at all. 

I was excited to have been able to get pregnant several times, but I experienced miscarriages and a devastating late-term pregnancy loss. With each day, with each loss, I felt my dream dying, along with my eggs. After the agonizing experiences of searching for Reproductive Endocrinologists with my husband, arranging and timing intercourse, taking and self-administering medications, there were pregnancies. There were even ultrasounds showing my baby alive with beating heart. And then the news I was carrying him dead inside me. I gave birth and sobbed with my husband while we held our lifeless son in our arms. I had reached the limits of my endurance: I had had enough. 

At that point no words nor touch could reach deep enough inside me to find the remaining shards of my self. I could not risk letting anyone in. To me, the chasm between my husband and me echoed with the quiet, vast emptiness of outer space.  He didn't know. He didn't know how much he didn't know. While I could do nothing else, no amount of telling the story to curious, well-meaning friends and family made me feel better. I was repelled by the anxious, simplistic optimism of pointless rationalizations that it was "for the best." I craved reading the words of women who had actually endured the same experience. I could not truly speak of my pain. I was done. It was my last best effort. No more. Our son was born still into this world. Cause of death: "Advanced Maternal Age."

I stayed in that place for months. We packed up our old house and moved to a new house purchased with the dream of bringing our new baby home. I looked alive, but I was trapped in a state of suspended animation. I decorated our new house with trips to big-box stores, while a wall of protection kept my raw emotions safely tucked away in cold storage. I'd occasionally smile—and even laugh—but not a day went by when I didn't re-visit that hospital room and drink from the well of sadness, alone. 

Then, slowly but surely, I came around. My frozen state began to thaw. I began to find the missing parts of myself and reach out to my husband. You see, the ticking clock would not stop. The little girl who loved Cinderella was still there. And what she wanted was what I wanted: I wanted to be a Mom and I wanted a family. Actually, I WANTED A FAMILY! Pregnancy was no longer necessary; I accepted that I did not need to bring another child into this world. Instead, I wanted to find a child who needed a Mom and a family, just as much as I was a mom who wanted and needed a child. 

And, out of the devastating ride of infertility and the treatments to re-gain it, came the blessed event. My husband and I re-found each other, did all the administrative and legal paperwork, made decisions together, and then found ourselves flying across the ocean to bring our child home. We found him somewhere we had never dreamed of. And we opened our hearts and allowed him in. Fully. That moment of joining, of holding him in our arms for that first time, is the day we grew our family. My husband and I had become Mom and Dad to our wonderful son. 

Mine is an adoption story, like they all are, that ends not with a Cinderella happy ending but with the real happy ending of becoming a family, with the subsequent ups, downs, and sideways experiences of raising a child. And what I learned is that getting to the real happy endings adoption provides requires confronting preconceived notions about adoption, most notably feelings of failure that can lead to blame and shame. Women entering the transition to adoption often experience a rawness and vulnerability beyond what they have ever felt, I know I did: Whose fault is it that we can't give birth to a healthy baby? Will my husband still love me if one of us is infertile? Will I be able to bond with a child who is adopted? Will my husband? Will I hate my husband if he doesn't want to adopt? Is this second best? What if my husband wants to keep trying to have a biological child and I don't? What if he is okay with not having a child? How can we decide? How do partners get on the same page when the stakes seem so high? 

The only way to answer these questions so you can find your way back to your self, to each other, and to the child for whom you must open your heart is by talking and listening; not by hiding, nor by avoiding nor by denying experience, however painful. True openness must be found to know what one's adopted child has endured so one can come to truly know who he/she is because ultimately adoption is not a journey of self-discovery with some cliched happy ending. Adoption is one of several ways to build a family and openness is the only way to hear our child's fears and come to meet his/her ghosts, demons and angels. 

Openness and shared vulnerability to a full range of human emotions is how adopted families bond into "forever families." And that's a happy ending with which I can live.