and what I have learned so far.

At the end of this journey these days will feel like a blur. This season of learning, searching, and praying will quickly fade, this is the quiet stage and not everyone talks about it. All the sudden there is a Facebook update announcing “We are adopting” or “We are home study approved”. Usually your immediate response it “where did this come from?”. These decisions usually come from an unseen season where a couple feels the call of adoption is their next step.

The cute “we are adopting” post is coming but, there are just so many things that proceeded that announcement. I want to share that with you in the hopes that you will be able to ask us the hard questions, support us, and learn along with us. Very few people wake up one day and decide they are going to do something as life changing as adoption and then post it on Facebook.

Research. That’s my jam! We had agreed to pray about the possibility that now was the season to start the adoption process. I felt a calmness as I searched for answers on “how to start adoption?”, “how do you pick an agency?”, and “what are the legal requirements for adoption?”. The large price didn’t shock me, but it did make me wonder how to start the process of saving that money.

I am definitely a verbal processor and I like to know what I am doing before I jump into anything. I set up a coffee date with a mom that I knew was pursuing domestic adoption and text another mom who had completed a domestic adoption 2 years prior and asked for their advice and help.

Here are the things that I have learned in the last 2 months as I have dove deep into the world of adoption…

• Adoption contains a triad – the adoptive parents, the adoptee, and the birth family
• Language is important – did you know that calling a woman a birth mother before she has signed away her rights is hurtful and offensive. She is an expectant parent considering and possible making an adoption plan until after the baby has been born and she makes it legal.
• It is important to adopt ethically – this phrase seems like common sense but the implications to this can be complicated and take dedication, hard work, and prayer.
• Adoption is not 100% beautiful and is it not 100% ugly – The common phrases “adoption is a beautiful picture of love”, “adoption is so pure”, “adoption is the gospel” all ignore the difficult aspects of adoption and put a rose color lens on adoption. Anyone who understands the love that parents have for their children can quickly see how hard the process of letting your child grow up with parents other than yourself. There is trauma involved for both the birth mother and the adoptee. I want to talk about this more but its going to need its own post.
• Adoption is not man’s idea – the idea of adoption is God’s, he has adopted each Christian as a child of His own and brought us into his family through salvation.

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land.

Psalm 68:5-6