This week, I’m sharing another special interview with an adoptive family. They were able to adopt with the assistance of Adoption & Beyond agency completing their adoptive home study! In today’s post, you’ll discover why Meredith and Adam turned to adoption, their experience with interracial adoption, and why they chose to adopt with the assistance of our agency. Hear what they had to say about the adoption process and glean from their wisdom in this interview!
Steffany: I have Meredith and Adam with us today. They had done part of their adoption process with Adoption & Beyond. They did their home study and so they’ve agreed to meet with me today… just to give families a little more insight about the adoption process and to help families along in their journey.
Meredith & Adam: … We are in southwest Missouri and we are the parents of a 13-month old son [Theo] who we adopted at birth.
Steffany: Great… So why did you guys choose to adopt a child?
Meredith & Adam: We struggled with infertility for about two years and we reached a bit of a crossroads where we had some decisions we needed to make. We figured that we would have one chance at IVF and statistically that probably wouldn’t work. We knew that adoption was an option and we knew that not becoming parents was an option. And so we decided that if we were destined not to be parents, we didn’t want it to be because we didn’t try. And so we decided that we would look into adoption and see what that would hold for us…
Steffany: Great! What are your feelings about the birth family and what is your relationship like with them?
Meredith & Adam: We were only in contact with the birth mother and the birth father was unknown… We really wanted to be in contact with Theo’s birth mom and we’re doing the best we possibly can in that regard. We knew that she had a very difficult life and we did not want to press upon her when she didn’t want to. We wanted her to reach out to us… She was very appreciative of that. We text her every once in a while to see if she’s okay. We want Theo to always know where he comes from…
Steffany: Great. Very good. Thank you. What do you wish you knew before going into the adoption process that you know now?
Meredith & Adam: … There were so many people in our lives that we didn’t know adoption had touched in some way. And so that was really encouraging. But we also learned a lot about the anti-adoption movement. And in particular for us, because we’re a transracial family, our son is black, kind of learning that some people have very, very strong feelings about that. So you have to know that going in and you have to be prepared for that.
As much as it’s amazing to be supported by people around you, you have to be prepared for the fact that even though it’s not their lives, there are going to be people who have opinions about that.
Steffany: That’s just something you have to be prepared for… and we have our families go through transracial training. Did you find that helpful?
Meredith & Adam: Yes. That was one of the things we were gonna mention. Obviously, in the pre-adoptive stage you have no idea what’s about to happen, but even watching some of those documentaries and learning just a little bit about black hair care; when we found out about Theo and we found out that he was black and we only had one month between matching with his birth mother and him being born, that’s not a lot of time to prepare but at least that set the foundation for us. And so we’ve been working really hard to build upon that. He has a black pediatrician, he has a black barber, he has a black swim instructor. Just having as many different cultural guides for him and what we call windows and mirrors. We wanna make sure that we’re providing him a connection to his history and his culture, not just our family’s history, because our family history now includes his family history.
So having that basic introduction during the pre-adoptive stage ended up being much more helpful than we ever could have realized.
Steffany: Yeah. A lot of families will balk about having to do the education, but then everyone in the end says, “Oh, I’m so glad we had to do that.”
Meredith & Adam: An important thing for folks to realize is that when you’re at the start of this adoption process, we have an idea of what we want for our family. Everybody has this mental picture as to who they are as a parent, mother, father, single mother, single father, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Everybody has an idea of what they want to have for a family. But what you get is entirely different and it’s going to upend what you think. It could be that the child has some kind of thing that you didn’t prepare for, didn’t anticipate, and it’s something that is very important to pay attention to because it turns you into a better person. But you also have to be realistic about it as not all matches are for everyone. And so that was something that was really pressed upon us during the pre-adoptive training as well. Of course we would’ve loved to have been parents, but we had to be very realistic about emotionally, physically, financially, what we could handle.
Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.
When looking at adoption, just remember, you gotta start somewhere.
This blog post is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Our services are not financial, business, or legal advice. The information presented here is not a guarantee that you will obtain any results or earn any money using our content. Adoption & Beyond, Inc. owns all copyrights to the materials presented here unless otherwise noted.