“Tell me a little about yourself.”

Job interviews, first dates, future in-law auditions — and prospective parenting.

If you’ve never adopted, stop for a second here.  How would you describe yourself, your marriage, your family, and your life, bearing in mind that the intended result is that a complete stranger will trust you to raise her child as your own?  If you HAVE adopted — domestically, at least — you’ve already done this.  And it’s freakin’ weird.

How big is your house?  Where is your extended family?  What kind of parents will you be?  Where do you go on vacation?  Hobbies?  Favorite foods?  Movies?  Music?  Please include 50-70 photos of yourselves, your families, and your home.  It’s like a giant Facebook survey, but with starkly higher stakes.

My husband and I perused the profiles of waiting families on our agency’s website as we began preparing for our first adoption.  We realized right away that we didn’t look like the people in the pictures, and neither did our life together.  We saw pictures of couples smiling at us from foreign convertibles, parked in front of sprawling suburban estates.  We read promises of European travel and Ivy League schooling.  We wondered if all of it was real. 

Couples in big houses have as much of a right to build their families through adoption as anyone; don’t read me as hating on the wealthy.  But the byproducts of their wealth seemed to dominate the depictions of their lives. 

We knew we couldn’t portray ourselves as anything but who and what we are — not that we would, even if we could.  So we wrote our story and put together the pictures that we thought helped to tell it, hoping that somewhere there was a woman who would look at us and think, ‘Yeah, those are the ones I want to raise this baby.’  In our minds, there was a woman out there who’d really see us.

Our profile talked about our passion for punk music, and our photos had plenty of peeks at our tattoos.  We described our favorite weekend activity as sitting together and reading the Sunday paper, and our ‘Dear Birthparents’ letter emphasized our commitment to teaching a child to respect others for the hard work they do, whether they are police officers or grocery cashiers.  We follow what is strong and true, rather than what is trendy or easy, we explained.  We laid out that we aren’t rich, and that our house isn’t huge, but we are comfortable enough, and we’re rich in what really matters. 

A week after that profile was available to expectant mothers, the phone rang.  She found us.  And the rest, as they say, is history. 

So when it came time to prepare and update our family profile to adopt again — when the weirdness of advertising ourselves as worthwhile people and parents started to pile up – there was absolutely no one better to talk to than our son’s birthmother.  (We’re in touch, for those who don’t know.  More on that another day.)  I emailed her, half out of exasperation and half out of genuine curiosity, and essentially asked what made her choose us.  And she had a lot to say.

She picked us because we didn’t wave money around as a promise of good parenting — our profile didn’t emphasize what she doesn’t have to give a child.  She said she found ostentatious shows of wealth strangely insulting — that because someone had money, they could clearly parent better than she could.  I had never thought to look at it that way.  She picked us because she felt like we didn’t construct a version of ourselves.  She said that our tattoos meant we might be less likely to judge someone because of how they look — or maybe that we wouldn’t judge her.  Where everyone else made us feel like a stay-at-home mom is a given when people adopt, she liked that I work full time and my husband would be home more, due to his work schedule as a firefighter.  She also liked that he does most of the cooking, and that we value courage, honesty, respect, and friendship above all else.  She liked that our friends come from all walks of life and that we love them like family.  She said she knew right away that we were the ones.

It will never stop feeling weird that there are, essentially, brochures of my family being sent out as we speak.  But knowing that our family’s profile is written from our guts, and from a place of genuine respect for the women who find themselves making the wrenching decision to place a child for adoption, helps us accept that these profiles have the right intentions as part of a complicated and difficult process. 

So many parents who adopt talk about how their child was meant to be theirs, but I generally avoid that angle altogether.  I don’t begrudge others their belief in fate and/or a higher power at work in building their families.  I just see it from a more pragmatic perspective.  It’s a series of choices, the difficulty of which I can’t begin to grasp.  A woman chooses that someone else will raise her child, and in the modern era of domestic adoption, she chooses that mother and father herself. 

How or why would we want to be chosen for anything but exactly who we are?

Advertisement