I am just now starting to put together A's baby book. We ordered a baby book for adoptive families and I am quite happy with it (I ordered it online, so I had to choose one without being able to see all the pages).
So on one of the first pages there is a place for "why we chose to adopt", and I'm struggling with how to phrase this. I want to include something like "adoption was the way we wanted to build our family", but that seems to not be the full truth. The full truth is that we tried to conceive for years and then decided to adopt. But how do I include that truth in A's baby book without it sounding like, "well, we tried the whole pregnancy thing and when that didn't work we turned to adoption."? I mean, that's the truth, but it makes the whole thing sound to me as if what we really wanted was a biological child, but you'll do. OK, that's probably too harsh. And, yes, little A will always know how much we love her no matter what we write in her baby book. But, sheesh, I'm having a really hard time summing this up. And to top it all off, there are just two lines on which to explain why we chose to adopt. How do I best recognize how much adoption means to us while also recognizing that we tried to conceive on our own for years?
I don't want this to come off sounding as if it's so important to us that A realize how long we tried to get pregnant. I don't want her baby book (or even a page in that book) to turn into a tribute to our infertility. But I do think it's important to not pretend like we decided to adopt instead of having biological children. Without medical intervention (which we chose not to try), biological children are not in the cards for us.
On a slightly different note, two of the pages in this book are dedicated to "Your adoption buddies", where there are places for pictures of the adoption buddies and the names of their parents. Am I missing something? Do all adopted children have so-called adoption buddies? Because, um, little A doesn't have any. She's also three months old, so any buddy at all is kind of pushing it. We don't have any friends that have adopted. We just want to cross out the "adoption" and put "Your buddies", or we could wait until she's got the requisite adoption buddies....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
We've got that book! I really like it.
I think baby books are meant to be written at a child's level. So don't worry about trying to encapsulate all of the adult complexity of infertility. You could put something like, "After x years of wanting to be parents, we knew we wanted to start our family through adoption." An adult would understand what that meant, so you're not hiding anything. And you could fill in the blanks for A orally as she grows older.
Our adoption buddies pages are blank right now. We'll probably end up putting in some of the kids we know who are also adopted. Babies don't really have buddies, anyway, so I figure it's ok to leave it blank for now. I think they might be geared toward kids who were in group care settings prior to adoption, like an orphanage.
Wait, your 3-month old doesn't have any adoption buddies? Uh-oh. You're really falling down there on the job! (I'm kidding -- that just struck me as so funny that I had to click through my feedreader to comment!) I'm with Heather, which is where I usually am. Because she's one smart cookie!!!
Well, if you were part of a group adopting internationally and you went with other families to pick up your children, perhaps that's when the buddies came in? Or in your case, later, maybe people who you know (and therefore their kids) through a local adoption support group?
We discussed adoption even before we started trying to get pregnant - and I'm sure you've been talking about it perhaps from the first time you realised it might not be easy to get pregnant - so it's been a parallel thought process even if it hasn't been parallel in time.
I like heather's advice. something about finding another way to build your family with love after trying on your own... I'm not very articulate right now, but I'm sure you'll come up with something brilliant. do share.
Post a Comment