Yes we are adopting! The fertility/baby thing is was too close to home. I have started to write about it many times only to end up in crying so to save myself the tears (happy and sad) and possibly electrocution, my amazeballs husband has not only wrote our story but expanded it beyond my original concept so with out further ado, our adoption story through the eyes of my husband and soon to be awesome sauce dad!

Note: You may want to get the tissues,, if your that way inclined, as even though I tried to save myself I still bawled as I read this.

Let the Adventure Begin!

I never really write or share personal stories, you know feelings and all that yuck, they just don’t strike me as something that others really want to read about but this one is important to me so its time to write about it. You may have already ready know that my wife and I have finally been matched with a child to adopt and join with our family after a three-year-long process.

How it works the super quick version.

Before you can even register your file with the adoption agency in Australia you have to complete four full-day courses to help you understand what your actually going to be dealing with, once you have done this you wait to be assigned a recognised psychologist who will spend 3-5 hours with you each week for 5-8 weeks who will grill you on everything, your relationship, did you love your mum, is your sister nutty, do you have good support, what would you do if your teenage child appeared to develop a crush on your best mate, the questions feel endless.

You wait weeks and weeks for the psych to write up the report but in the meantime you get the other paper-work done police clearances, full medical checkup, and background which is more complicated because of your wife’s history, the psych report finally comes in, good news your mentally sound, well good enough to raise a kid.

Nearly there, oh, wait a minute your lodging internationally time to get that massive stack of papers translated.

WOOHOO all done and just in time to wait, and wait, and wait, also did I say wait.

First, let me start by telling you what it means to adopt according to the dictionary.

Adopt

v.t 1. To choose for or to take for oneself: make one’s own by selection or assent
2. To take a child to be legally your own child.

Etymology

From the Latin root words, ad meaning to and optare meaning choose but also carrying a sentiment of wishing.

What a perfect word for what it is this adventure My wife and I are of is a wishing to add to our family and a choosing to bring this child into our life.

While I was checking the origins of this word a small sadness came over me, In that for us being matched with this little boy is a great joy for us for your little man even tho I know he is coming to our loving home that for him it also represents a loss of connection to his place of birth and biological family.

While thinking about that I realized that most children if given a choice would want to be with their birth parents and then I realized that no baby has a choice, none of us got to choose where we were born, our parents wealth, or mental stability, none of us had the choice of whether or not our parents were junkies or saints.

My thoughts on having kids (Oh no, feelings.)

Feel free to skip this section, it’s just a little bit of a ramble about what I have thought and felt about being a father.

The youngest of two kids, from the age of 7 I was raised by an amazing and strong single mother (happy mothers day for the weekend mum), with my father who of the sake of simplicity is easiest described as not a good person.

Thankfully I had a strong male role model in the form of my friend’s father and being able to see how it could be done it wasn’t long before “I’m going to do it better” became ingrained in my psyche.

I can’t recall the number of times I could be quoted as a young man saying

As long as my tombstone reads “Here lies a loving father and husband” I’m happy.

The idea of being a dad was nearly inseparable from my core.

Then I met my soon to be wife.

Just to be clear meeting my wife didn’t suddenly turn me off wanting to have children.

What did happen is that in her I found someone that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with no matter what with or without kids, I went into my marriage with my eyes wide open knowing full well that there was a very real possibility that for us biological children might not be an option for us and it was worth it.

Questions people ask?

I hope it’s not too personal but…. why can’t you have your own kids?

Um, yeah pretty freaking personal, but this truth is after a while you kind of get used to people asking.

So today I will tell you what I tell most people when they ask.

Unfortunately, my wife was really ill and had to have a ton of operations and the fact is when you die on the table the docs the docs are more concerned with saving your life than they are than making sure that everything goes back neat and tidy.

If you find that answer unsatisfying you can check out her full story Here

Did you try I.V.F?

Um, yeah we did and it turns out that my wife an I make perfect little blastocysts, If your reading this and have had successful IVF treatments let me just say congratulations, we know how hard that process is.

If you know nothing about the process let me give you my brief, cynical, and just a little bitter recounting of my experience.

After being subjected to a bunch of tests between the two of you, blood screenings, ultrasounds, and the dreaded pap smear for her and the slightly awkward porn mag and a cup test for him so the lab coats can figure out if your little blokes still swim and if her ova still ovum.

After the results are in you’ll have a five minute appointment with a Doctor if its a man he is probably wearing a Patek Philippe worth $50k if its a lady she is rocking 4ct diamond earring studs, this five minute chat costs you $800 dollars and consists of the giving you the prescription for all the injections, and hormones you poor wife is going to have to deal with and basically to come back in a month and they will wack the little cell in.

You come back a month later, the meds have made your wife crazy and you speak to some different watch wearing doc for five minutes (same costs) who opens your file, for what appears to be their first time, in fact, your a little surprised they got your name right, this turns out to be the person that will do the implanting.

You kiss your wife, tell her you love her and that you will be waiting right here but really you go for a walk because just sitting right now is too much, an hour and a bit later your leaving surgery driving what feels like 20kph slower than the limit because in your head you don’t want to shake your potential child loose.

You cross your fingers, you follow their rules, you take care of your beautiful wife who is still nutty because of the hormones but despite everything it doesn’t take.

So you’ll try again and again each time dealing with some new Dr. Watch, the hormones, the excitement and the sadness and each time feeling more and more like a walking dollar sign for a big business and Drs that appear to feel like they are god having the power of life in their hands.

Until you stop, it’s to much pain and each year you still get a bill because you have that one last perfect blastocyst on ice.

What about Surrogacy?

Honestly, much to my wife’s frustration I never considered surrogacy the laws are so complicated in Australia it’s just not funny.

First, you can’t advertise in search of a surrogate, second, they must have had their own children already, you cannot pay them other than any reasonable medical costs, add all this to the fact that there is no greater chance of successful IVF treatments.

Compound all that with the fact that under Australian law whoever carries the child to term is legally the child’s mother and if at the end of all that she decided that she could not let the child go you lose your genetic child to someone else.

Whenever I explain all that to someone the inevitable question that follows is “What about international surrogacy?” this idea appalls me even more than all the legal crap from Australia to often I have read stories of women in poverty-stricken countries essentially treated like human puppy farms, and I will never use my relative wealth to leverage someone else’s misery in order to gain some happiness of my own.

Thailand? but why didn’t you adopt an Australia baby?

I’m never really sure when some ask this question if they are considering the 40 plus thousand children we have in Australian foster care system that are in need of a home or if by “Australian baby” they are asking why we didn’t choose a little white kid.

Truth be told, we would have been happy to be matched with a purple mars baby but we couldn’t contact their agency, we did, however, have our file with both the local and Thai agencies but there is a massive difference between how those two countries can support their citizens.

In Australia local adoption is incredibly rare, this is largely due to the fact we are an amazing and lucky country with a very strong social welfare system, in many countries poverty can be a major factor for a family deciding to relinquish a child, while in Australia we have a safety net in place, payments in the form of family tax benefits, parenting payments, single parent payment, child care subsidies are taxpayer funded to help keep more families together.

As for why Thailand, well my wife and I love that place and its people, in fact, we got married there so bringing a little Thai man into our lives feels pretty natural and being so close allows us the opportunity to help him retain a connection to his land of birth.

So why don’t you foster instead?

Let me give just quickly lay out the major difference between adoption and fostering.

In order for a child to be considered eligible to be adopted a child’s parents choose to relinquish their parental rights whereas a child is in need of fostering when the state for the protection of the child has removed them from their families care these children then become wards of the state, this means that the government then becomes responsible for their well-being as safety and these children are not available for adoption but many are in desperate need of permanent care outside their family unit.

I have so much admiration for those people that bring foster children into their lives, as I mentioned before there are currently 40,000 plus children in Australia right now that are needing either permanent or temporary care outside of their home.

It was only a month before we were matched with our son that my wife and started to reconsider fostering a child after all our reassessment officer had just told us to expect another 2 years before we were placed.

We took the time and went to an information night to find out more but more importantly to examine our abilities and after learning some of the expectations of a foster parent, it put the whole process well and truly outside of our abilities.

We know we can provide a safe, loving nurturing environment for a child what we weren’t sure we had the ability to do was open our home to a child that had been removed from an environment of sexual or physical abuse and every month be expected by law to ensure that those that inflicted the abuse are granted visitation with their child, I’m miles from being a violent man but I can honestly say that might just break me.

That’s f*cin stupid why does it take so long? Two would be great parents.

Well thank you I agree, we will make great parents.

While your waiting it can be hard to remember the myriad of vital reasons for the process taking so long.

First I think is pretty clear why so long is spent vetting would be parents for suitability personally I think every would-be parent would benefit from the courses we went through and the time with the psychologist before they have a baby.

Australia is a signatory on the Hauge Convention and while much of it was designed to create a systematic approach to dealing with instances where a parent removes children across national borders it also sets very clear rules regarding international adoption.

The priorities are,

1. All effort must be made to ensure that the child is truly orphaned (Think natural disaster maybe they have just become separated from their parents)
2. Where a child is truly orphaned all effort must be made to place the child within the extended family unit,
3. When no extended family is available to care for the child all effort must be made to place the child with a family within their nation.
4. Only if all prior efforts have failed can a child be considered for international adoption.

Human trafficking is big business and sadly children are far too often the victims, it’s this Hauge Convention that works to protect those children and you can see that truly following those steps can take some time.

Australia will not adopt from any country that is not a signatory and will often ban adoption from countries where they believe the conventions are being followed.

So, like, do you just go pick one out?

What? really? It’s not a freaking marketplace, do you think we walk into the orphanage, all the little children in a neat line ready for my wife and me to inspect their teeth? No we don’t go pick one that matches the decore of our house that kind of behaviour is best left to famous movie stars.

Ok, so that strange idea or image so many people have in their heads isn’t really their fault honestly there are so few adoption stories in the entertainment media that you pretty much get stuck with three,

“Little Orphan Anne” written in 1928 where the wealthy man’s servant is sent to select a child from the orphanage to live with his master in what is essentially a public relations stunt.

“Stewart Little” set in 1950s America where the parents go to the orphanage to make their selection, don’t get me wrong just like everyone else I enjoy this movie I just wish a movie that modern could have done more to reflect actual reality but beggars can’t be choosers and we are talking about a movie with a talking mouse.

Well if you made it to the end then you have a small idea of the daily questions we get posed to us and this is before our son has even arrived. Life is about to get super interesting and I can’t wait to share some of the adventure with you in the near future. Thanks for reading!

What does a baby cost.

Got to be honest this one makes me want to slap you if you ask, let me say one more time this is not a marketplace, we did not buy a baby.

Yes, there are costs involved courses you have to attend, visa, and passports, paperwork, medicals there is a pretty big list and there are costs involved but in order to give you a clear picture the costs involved in the adoption process are roughly equal to the costs of a natural pregnancy with private health care.

There are a lot of other questions people ask.

Really there are heaps, and if you have read all the way to the bottom and happen to be considering Adoption and have any questions, fears, or excitement and want to discuss them with someone that has gone through it please feel free to contact us through the contact section or comments below.