It's Never Easy

November is Adoption Awareness month and as such I'm using the blog to shine a light on some topics in adoption that we all have questions about. Last time I discussed just a very, very few of the reasons that adoption isn't simple. We all want adoption to be simple, and in its most basic principle it is: a family wants and has the means to care for a child. A child needs a loving, forever family. Move the two together and you should have instant happiness. But like most things in the world, it's just not that simple. There are SO many things that complicate the situation, things that many of us are unaware of, so I hope the first post helped to open our eyes to what can make adoption anything but simple.

Adoption is also not easy. The process of adoption is certainly not easy; I can attest to that. But I think many of my friends who are adoptive parents would also say that the after is hard too. Everything doesn't magically become easy the moment the judge bangs the gavel and declares the child forever yours.... the hard stuff continues. If you think about it from a Biblical perspective, Jesus instructs us to look after and care for widows and orphans... it wouldn't be a command if it was easy and natural. A recent study said that around 33% of Americans think about or consider adoption at some point... less than 2%  actually adopt. That's obviously a very small percentage, so what happens to the other 31%? Why do they stop at just thinking? Many families that are interested in adoption turn away, and many are scared away because of the difficult process. So let's take a look at what about adopting and adoption is hard.

Adoption is always about brokenness and loss. Every day something reminds me of this truth again and again. A child who was once the oldest is now the middle child. The family birth order is broken. A child who once spoke the same language as everyone around him suddenly finds himself in a new town with people who look and sound nothing like him and no one speaks his language. The child experiences loss of everyone and everywhere he knew. When a child leaves a broken home where one or both of his parents have died or are unable to parent her, she is placed into a new home where everyone and everything is different and they call it family. Gah... that's crazy hard. Even infants experience loss. There's been a push for additional research lately into maternal separation and how the initial loss of the one person the child innately recognizes by sound and smell affects the child going forward. In the earliest moments of life, that baby knows loss. That's tough to even comprehend.  And parenting kids who have experiences with brokenness and loss is hard. If you want to read an often hilarious and witty post about parenting internationally adopted children after the airport, read this post from Jen Hatmaker's blog. Or better yet, look around you, find an adoptive mama, and ask her what is hard for her right now... I bet it boils down to brokenness and loss. Every single adoption scenario is surrounded by the theme of brokenness and loss, and that is anything but easy.

Adoptions fail. Ughh. I kind of want to vomit just typing that sentence. It's true and we all know it, but that doesn't make it less terrifying. In fact, for adoptive or potential adoptive parents, it makes it more. Studies suggest that, historically, anywhere between 10 and 25 percent of adoptions "disrupt" which specifically covers scenarios in which a child is placed with a family and then is removed prior to the finalization of the adoption. This does not include adoptions in which the birth mother changes her mind and chooses to parent prior to the placement of the child. To bring it a little closer to home, our consultant shared that she's seen about 10% of matches that occur in the last 12 weeks of pregnancy fail. That's not east to swallow and it's certainly not easy to prepare for.

Adoptions are always analyzed. Always. And anytime problems arise, the solution is a new policy or law. Those policies or laws complicate the process. They are not necessarily or inherently bad, in fact, when you think about it, most are good, or at least started with good intentions, but few if any are in place to make adoption easier. Let's look at an example: ICPC also known as the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children is a law in the US within all fifty states that requires both the state where the child is born and the state where the adoptive parents are returning to give approval before the child is moved. At first glance that sounds dumb. "It's my baby and I can go wherever I want with it," right? No one polices the movements of families after they leave the hospital if they gave birth to the child. But prior to the creation of this law, if a family left one state and entered another, they simply fell off the radar. The sending state felt it was no longer its responsibility to follow up and the receiving state had no knowledge that a family had crossed state lines with an adopted child. ICPC makes the two states communicate for the safety of the child. I would venture to say that we want ICPC and most other laws and policies to exist in order to protect our children, but those laws and policies rarely make it easier to adopt and often make it more expensive. Continuing with the ICPC example, Sam and I will most likely adopt from out of state (statistically speaking there are more scenarios outside of Georgia than within) but that will require an extended stay in another state, typically anywhere from 10 to 14 days. The policies and laws certainly don't make things easy.

Adoption is slow. And waiting is hard. Can I get an amen? My infertile sisters know this first hand. Waiting is hard. You can consider yourself a patient person, but when months turn into years, everyone's patience begins to run out. Lifeline Children's Services provides an estimated timeline for their international programs, ranging from twelve months to eight years depending on the country and the specifications for the child. Nightlight Christian Adoptions suggests that an average wait for a domestic infant adoption is one to two years. Years people. Adoptions often take years. And that's hard for anyone.

While you wait, things can change. This typically affects international adoption, but it happens in domestic adoption too. Policies are constantly being put into affect and cancelled. Everyone heard about it when Vladimir Putin, Russia's President, signed a bill closing Russian adoption to the US. You may not have heard about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since September of 2013, the DRC will not grant the children exit visas, so there are currently hundreds of children who have been legally adopted, yet cannot leave the country and join their new families. If you're looking closer to home, policies and bills are constantly put forth within a state or nationally that can affect the adoption process. Take for example the Adoption Tax Credit, in the years 2010 and 2011 it was a refundable credit. However if your adoption became delayed and finalized in 2012, the credit was no longer refundable. When things change, our expectations are often unmet, and that is never easy.

Adoption is not easy. I think that most of us agree about that. In fact, I think fear is what drives many people from considering adoption. On one hand that makes me sad, but on the other, I think a healthy fear of a situation is often good. Painting a situation to be something it's not will never help anyone. Everyone needs to know what they are stepping into before they get there. However, I'll add this: adoption isn't easy, but I truly believe it's worth it. Ask Erika how she feels right now, actually don't worry about it, she already wrote it earlier this week: She writes, "I'm constantly overwhelmed by how incredibly worth it she is. Every negative pregnancy test, every pillow sopping wet with tears, every prayer that felt unanswered, every miserable Mother's Day, every dollar wasted on doctors and surgeries, every tear, every tear, every tear. Every tear was worth it."

Whether you're thinking about adoption because of struggles with infertility or because you have a heart for orphans or because you'd like to add to your family, you probably know it's not going to be easy. We all hope we're the lucky ones that magically get a push through the bureaucracy, we want to be the ones who get fast tracked to the front of the lines, but all too often adoption stories aren't about that. They are about years of waiting, they are about failed adoptions, they are about sad situations of abuse or corruption. We hope our situation will be different, somehow easier than the one we heard about last moth, but ultimately we know adoption is hard. I have about 15 friends who have adopted and I'd put money that even on their worst day, they'd say the road to adoption and the journey after is certainly not easy, bit it is all worth it.