Some stories, you know in their telling, are a privilege to hear.
My coworker, Jenny, adopted two beautiful twin girls from birth. They are turning seven years old tomorrow. Since I am planning to adopt myself, I asked her out to happy hour to share her adoption story with me.
Here’s the short of it: She cried. I cried. I want this.
She gave me a beautiful and detailed narrative of her experience with a private, open adoption – from the decision to the training and the paperwork and the interviews and the waiting and the interesting circumstances on how she ended up paired with the birth mother. She told me about bonding with the birth mother and the emotional sleepless birth day.
I am so terrified to go through this long process – and the process itself is a little terrifying as I still line up all my environmental and financial ducks – to not be picked. To be a single, bisexual woman who wants to raise a child (or two) on her own.
Jenny, who adopted with her then-wife, told me something about that fear. She said that when she asked the birth mother why she picked them, she said that she recognized herself in her story. A part of Jenny’s story that she was most afraid would turn someone away was what led her to become a mother to children who were so clearly meant to be hers.
That could happen to me too, she said. In whatever way, a birth mother will resonate with my story. Or maybe she’ll see my choice, how badly and wholly I choose adoption and parenthood that I go through this process, that I pursue in without the tradition of a partner. That I want this not as a Plan B because life didn’t work out, but as a Plan A.
This is about where some tears were shed.
I don’t have this all figured out yet. The financial reality, the decisions about where I’m adopting and where I’m living when I do, the timing when I truly start . . . Jenny’s process, top to bottom, took two years.
But the more I learn, the more I see where my heart lives.
With Love,
Natalie