How We Chose Domestic Adoption
Hello to my favorite people,
To kick us off here on our adoption journey, we’d have to go back to over two decades ago when as a kid I saw families who adopted and knew in my heart thats what I was supposed to do when I grew up. We’d have to go all the way back to teenage James who had close childhood friends who had been adopted. Then we’d end up at Abilene Christian University, Moody Auditorium, sitting in none other than good ole’ ACU chapel. This would be 18 and 19 year old James and Molly who were the most serious of daters (because we already knew each other was the one before we started dating, but that’s a story for another time). Chapel had ended and adoption had been the topic, I turned to James and told him that I couldn’t marry a guy who wasn’t whole heartedly on board with adopting in the future and he said he was. He has stuck by that statement. So to go back to the very beginning, this journey started decades ago. It has always been our plan to have children both through adoption and biologically, Lord willing.
To come back to more present day times, each time we have felt we wanted to add a kid to our family, we have prayed through trying to get pregnant versus adopting. The first two times we prayed we ended up with none other than the two best kids on the planet, Callum Silas and Nolan Riley. They are also the most excited older brothers for this baby. They pray for baby every day, talk about what they will do with this baby, just sit in the nursery to be in baby’s space. I am convinced God knew exactly what he was doing when he put them in our family first. When it came time to think about adding baby #3 we prayed long and hard. We weren’t sure which direction to go. On one hand getting pregnant didn’t feel like the right path when we prayed, but adoption felt daunting. We didn’t have a clue as to how we wanted to adopt and we didn’t have many friends, family or even fellow church community who had pursued adoption at the time. As we prayed about it and talked to friends and even acquaintances who had pursued different forms of adoption we found ourselves narrowing down our options. After talking with close friends who had fostered for awhile (shout out to Katie and Taylor Franklin, who are the most incredible parents on this planet) we felt like at this time in our family’s life fostering was not for us due to constraints with our jobs, schedule and even personalities (a.k.a we aren’t the most flexible/go with the flow type people). When it came to the international adoption scene, it has changed drastically not only in the past few decades but since COVID. For us it didn’t feel like a viable option due to how much more difficult it is to pursue that possibility these days and the reality that you are usually adopting an older child not an infant.
Which brings us to one of the things that we kept coming back to when considering adoption. Based on every adoptive family I’ve ever talked to or read about plus our combined 10 years of studying human development and attachment (not saying we are experts but it is what we went to school for and built our careers on) we felt it was important for us to stay in birth order. What does that mean? Great question, it means that we would keep the birth order of our children the same and just add a youngest (like how birth order would go if you were just adding kids biologically.) So Callum would not be displaced as the oldest and our adopted child would get to have the bonding and attachment that comes with being the baby of the family. This was one of the things we decided was our BIG thing and that led us for the first time to look at domestic infant adoption. Due to having a one year old at the time of starting this process having a newborn was one of the only ways to make this happen and adopting a newborn nowadays happens mostly through domestic adoptions.
Marcus Bowen, God bless him, who is more than a best friend and is truly the most understanding family member you could ever have, heard us discussing domestic adoption and offered for us to meet with his friend Aimee who was currently working at a private domestic adoption agency in DFW. Aimee so graciously offered to talk to us over Zoom one January night in 2022. We came with a whole laundry list of questions and fired away. Aimee answered them, provided years of her own experience in the domestic adoption world and at the end of it we had one of those moments. It’s like God clicks on the lights and suddenly everything is clear and the way forward is obvious. This conversation did that for us. We told Aimee we were hoping to buy a house and have our youngest get a bit older before we officially started the process but we would follow back up when we were ready. That’s just what we did 9 months later. She urged us to consider different adoption agencies, and we did, but we always kept coming back to Legacy Adoption Agency. Thanks to Marcus who led us to Aimee and God who led us through that whole decision making process.
One of the things that became our second BIG reason for choosing domestic adoption came from this conversation with Aimee: understanding that this path of adoption allows for an open adoption. In the U.S., domestic infant adoptions are most of the time open, meaning there is a level of relationship and exchange of information between the birth parents and the adoptive parents and child. The reason for this change from a few decades ago when closed adoptions were the norm and most children had no information on their bio family (or may have not even known they were adopted until they were older) is due to the research that has come out showing the better outcomes for everyone involved when adoptions are open. We heard about what open adoptions looked like and absolutely knew it was for us. We loved the idea of our child getting to grow up with as much of the complete picture of their story; who they were, where they came from, who they resemble and open adoption allows for that. We loved the idea of meeting a woman in one of their darkest, most complicated moments and saying we would love to raise your baby and for you to get to know and be a part of that babies life with us. Due to meeting other families that have pursued domestic infant adoption we know these hopes and dreams we have for relationship aren’t always picture perfect and sometimes don’t materialize in the way families or even adopted children hope for. Our agency does such an incredible, thorough job of not only preparing us for openness before we ever are matched with a mom but facilitating that relationship for the first few years of our child’s life and then for as long as we need after that. They strive to make these open adoptions benefit everyone and the stories they have of it happening are some of the most breathtakingingly beautiful stories I have ever heard. If we have a chance to pursue an open adoption it probably won’t look like what we think, most things in life don’t. We are though, fully committed to doing all we can to cultivate openness, for our sake, for the birth parents sake and most of all for our baby’s sake.
A brief defining of terms
I feel like this would be a good time to explain what exactly it means to pursue private domestic infant adoption, as in what those grouping of words mean. Again, we are not adoption lawyers but this is our understanding through our agency’s explanation of all of these terms for our specific situation.
Private: meaning a private agency not through the state (like if you adopted through the foster care system).
Domestic: meaning within the United States. Our specific adoption agency is even more local and stays within the state of Texas only.
Infant: actually includes 2 years and younger officially but for most infant adoption agencies the vast majority of their placements are newborns not babies or toddlers.
Adoption in this situation with a newborn looks like the birth parents terminating their rights irrevocably 48 hours after the baby is born (per Texas law) and we become the adoptive parents for the next 6-8 months, the adoption agency is the legal guardians and we have regular home visits to make sure that the baby is being well taken care of. After that amount of time we go to a courtroom and are declared the parents of this baby for the rest of their life. Legally we are each others’ from then on.
One misconception that people have are in regards to what an open adoption means is that it includes shared legal custody (such as you would see between parents who have divorced.) Legally we are the parents, we have full custody that is non-negotiable and irrevocable. In an open adoption we go in with an agreement to have a certain level of openness, typically emails and sending pictures at first and then work up to an in person visit during the first year. That agreement doesn’t mean that we and the bio parents share custody but that we have an agreement through the agency for sharing information and building relationship with the adoption agency acting as accountability and the go between.
That’s a lot of information I know but that’s how we ended up here. Waiting to be matched to an expectant mom. I’m thankful for all the people who have helped us get here. I’m overwhelmingly thankful for God’s providence in this.
If you read to the end you get a gold star,
Molly