Continuing the Adoption Journey
In sharing our personal story of the last two years, I hoped that for some people this story would prove helpful in their own path to creating a family. The response has been incredible and I want to thank all of you for sharing publicly and privately. Sally and I have been very touched by the responses. (Please refer to Personal Story 1, 2 and Final.)
Is it our age or could there be some truth to Pat Barker's 'Children of men'? I don't know but it sure seems like a lot of people have been going through the same experiences as us. Maybe and hopefully, it's a more acceptable story to share today than in the past and it's not a greater force than that.
Our path to getting our baby has been an obstacle course to say the least, so it should be no surprise to us that just when we think we've got it all wrapped up, a new chapter is thrown in to our faces. Last week we got a text from our birth mother asking how far a particular place was in Southern California from San Francisco. Sally looked at me and said, I think they have taken a trip to California and want to come and see us. Given the circumstances our birth mother and her partner are in, this scenario seemed highly unlikely.
Emotional free-fall then ensued. After some discussion, we understood that a lawyer from Southern California had actually payed for them to leave Texas and move to California. This lawyer had a family for them. Our involvement was over. Accept fortunately for us, our birth mother revealed our existence to the lawyer and even though the lawyer suggested that it would best if all contact with us be terminated, she went against the lawyer's advice and called us.
What followed was a whirlwind tour of fear, upset, disbelief and quite honestly bitterness towards the lawyer, the birth mother's partner who had come up with the idea and of course the agency back in Texas who had let this all happen. This last comment needs some clarification because everything else will make sense after you understand the relationship with the agency in Texas.
As you can imagine, you pay a pretty sum of money when you take on a birth mother through an agency. You have the agency's fees, all living expenses including accommodation of the couple you are sponsoring, all medical costs and the post placement payment to help the birth mother on her way. When we visited our birth mother in Texas we were shocked with her living conditions. We were also concerned that she was far from the designated hospital she was going to give birth in. We asked for the couple to be moved and were told they couldn't be because the birth mother had no physical ID papers. They had asked her on numerous occasions to get the papers but this takes a lot of work, a lot of bureaucracy, and she was heavily pregnant. Her partner had papers but apparently this was not good enough for them. It was clear to us that the agency had become impatient with the demands of this couple. There's no doubt that the birth mother's partner is a character and a schemer but they didn't handle him well. The end result was that our couple saw an ad in a magazine and made the call that has taken them from 2 star to 4 star living.
Yes it does mean that we potentially lose everything we have invested with the agency in Texas and we will no doubt have a battle with them to recuperate any money. Yes it also means that the lawyer in Southern California is now going to charge us an even larger sum of money to get the baby we were due to have originally. This is why there was bitterness towards her. Her reason for telling our birth mother not to contact us was due to this bitterness she knew we would feel towards her. Her concern that this would affect her reputation was justified.
The strain of this situation once again tested our relationship. Sally was in a new city after leaving NY after 10 years. Her work is primarily focused on NY and she likes to be three hours ahead of people not three hours behind. I had just joined a new job with new people, new challenges and much expectations. It was a tough week to say the least but once again we held together and this story weaves a new tapestry for us.
Sally and I seriously considered pulling out of the relationship with this couple. There were many unanswered questions and our emotions were a mess. We managed to get hold of the lawyer and started the conversation that has drawn us back to our birth mother. We agreed that we would have done the same as them given the circumstances. We then heard that the firm we used in Texas has had a number of birth mothers skipping State, which leads to another question I will pose below. We had the choice to pay the new sum as if we were new adopters coming in for the first time or to walk away. She told us that she had explicitly asked our birth mother to not call us so the fact she did must be a good sign. She did have another couple ready but they were very understanding of the situation.
We then spoke to the agency in Texas who revealed that they had suspected something had happened over the weekend but had not informed us. It later turned out that they were tipped off over the weekend and knew exactly where the birth mother was going. None of this is fare. None of this makes sense if you look at it through a rational lens. It's unchartered territory both in understanding how this plays out and understanding how to respond to the situation. I'm sure others have dealt with this but there's no way of knowing their stories, their decisions, their conclusions because such information does not exist.
We were left to make tough decisions ourselves and we made the decision to continue.
This week we happened to be traveling down to Southern Cal for a conference and met our birth mother. Their living conditions are far better. The lawyer is amazing with them and is very experienced in adoptions. We've been informed that she's one of the best in the country and actually created the first list of fraudulent birth mothers in the country. She would be representing us and through conversations with her we could tell that she was very attuned to our couple. She already knew them inside out.
Apart from the financial implications, we are actually feeling tons better about the situation now than we did with the previous agency. The mere fact that we are so much closer to them - easily reachable by plane - is a huge plus. Do we feel any more confident about the agency? I think it’s fair to say that we don’t know anymore but what are our options?
I want to find a way that we can create a social space where people can rate agencies, share experiences, get legal advice from volunteers, perhaps even share first year stories. I don't want it to be a crowded space because at its core it should be helpful to people who want to find a good agency and for people who have experienced what we have experienced in the last week. Without this, much is unaccountable and many potential adopters are left in the dark about decisions they will have to make along the way.
I want to create a TripAdvisor type site for adoptions. It would rely on people offering up their experiences and their ratings. It would be a dynamic social space but I’m guessing that we would have to make it somewhat like Facebook in its openness. You join and present your situation to the network and people choose to befriend you as an offering of help. The dialogue remains private among the participants. Or maybe it should be fully open. These things need to be worked out but does the concept make sense? I want to hear from you as to whether this makes sense and would be valuable?
