Day 20: Because it's more than unicorns and rainbows

When we first started considering adoption, we dove in blindly by signing up for a 3-hour class called Lifelong Impacts of Adoption*.  No agency or facilitator searching to help guide us, no sir.  Instead, some good old fashioned fly by the seat of our pants and sit down in a classroom to get schooled on a thing or 46,000 that we didn't know about adoption.  I found the class on a whim googling who knows what and off we went to learn more about the kinds of things we didn't even know to think about yet. 

Our viewpoint going in was that of an infertile couple who desperately wanted a baby, but through hell and high water and scientific gonal-f wizardry could not seem to make it happen.  I thought we might hear about some precious childhood adoption anecdotes and how hard infertility is and how wonderful that we are going to be leaving that behind and adopting because adoption is so amazing and we are going to be THE BEST parents.  I mean, we were taking a class and everything!

Oh!  Did you just see my sparkly pink unicorns shoot rainbows from their derrieres!?

Right, so I was a bit naive.  Okay, okay, and a bit of a self-centered asshole.

Try to cut me some slack.  Infertility had driven me to dreaming, wishing, hoping, praying, eating, and drinking all things baby**.  How to make one.  How to steal one.  How to be one.  It had become the all encompassing attention whore in my life.  It was the nature of the beast (for me at least) and I no longer had the capacity to think much past any of it.

The class was led by Dr. Marlou Russell who is an author as well as a psychotherapist who specializes in adoption issues working with adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents.  More importantly is that she has first hand experience to share as a reunited adult adoptee.  Her class is open to all members of the adoption triad and she spends time talking about issues surrounding adoption and how they can affect everyone involved at every stage of life.  There is also a great deal of class interaction where viewpoints are shared from all over the triad - some not yet intimately linked to adoption and others several decades in with all sorts of different connections.

To hear the firsthand accounts from adult adoptees and mothers who placed their child for adoption as well as adoptive parents of teen/adult children really opened our eyes to aspects that had not been much more than a blip on our unicorn-rainbow baby fest prior to that day.  Then someone had the audacity to tell me that adoption should always be a last resort and that we really needed to get our incompetent selfish a-hole selves a new set of priorities and motives before ever thinking any more about adoption.  I might be paraphrasing slightly, but I'm most certainly sure that this figment of my over-active imagination was so very real in the inner depths of my head because it is exactly how I felt when we left.

We left the seminar with our minds a reeling and so so so much more to think about.  We talked about it off and on through another failed treatment.  When that ended, we still had a lot of unsettled feelings and unclear ideas about adoption.  Contrary to popular belief, infertility did not give us some inside scoop on how to be good adoptive parents.  Hmmph!   

Now what do engineer types do with things they don't yet understand you ask?  Research, obsess, analyze, and dig in to the nitty gritty details like crazed starving graduate students.  They get knee deep into therapy to work through their own grief and anger.  They join pre-adoptive parent support group/classes in which they are in the minority as to if adoption really will be their next step.  They attend more adoption seminars and lectures.  They read everything they can find that helps explain ideas and thoughts they were once too scared to address.  They listen a lot.  They discuss to near exhaustion.

And somewhere along the way they get lost in cloudy thoughts and confusion.  So many opinions.  So much to think about.  So many people to consider.  Lifelong aspects.  Overwhelming overload.  And they retreat.  Sometimes together and sometimes apart.  They stop talking and start letting things just be, processing it all on their own for awhile. 

They re-visit where they are at every so often.  One of them...ahem...starts to see things as more of a whole - the ugly/the beauty, the losses/the gains, the good/the bad.  It isn't all rainbows and unicorns, but it isn't all selfish a-hole adopters either.  There is some semblance of balance.  The other one (MJ) continues to focus on each struggle separately, fully immersed in the details, and not sure he might ever sort it out enough to move forward. 

But then he did.  And now he wants every step of the process to have happened yesterday.

Some of you have asked about the details surrounding MJ changing his mind about adoption.  I want to tell you exactly why and when and how and everything under the sun as to what changed his adoption tune except I can't because I don't really know.  I'm not sure he fully does either.  I think it was mostly a combination of time to grieve and learn and try to understand things to the point of feeling more than just marginally competent.  Couple that with the desire to parent a child who needs us as well as accepting that we can't plan for how to handle every situation.

Okay, so all that AND realizing that kids have some really cool toys these days, but that's a story for another day...

*I am in no way a spokesperson for Dr. Russell and I suspect she could not pick me out of a line-up if needed (and for the record I hope there is never a need for that).  I just learned a whole lot from her class and wanted to pass it along.  And if I had my act together I could have let you know that she had a class happening this past weekend... but I didn't so next up is October 22.  My bad.

**Just so we're completely clear here:  I didn't actually eat or steal any babies.