Is it (Ever) OK to Complain About the Expense of Adoption?

One of the comments on my previous post (Open Letter to Prospective Adoptive Parents [PAPs]) was this, from Reagan and Trevor's Mommy:

I have to defend the talking about expense discussions. It is a common complaint for most everything related to infertility. Most of the expense complaints I hear and my personal expense complaint have everything to do with how unfair it is that infertiles typically have to spend crazy amounts of money to become parents and it is a bitter pill to swallow. It is unfair and deserves to be acknowledged whether it be the expense of IVF or the expense of adoption.

I've been thinking about her comments and asking myself, "Is it OK to complain about the expense of adoption?" I still say no. For the most part. And here are my Top 10 reasons why (in random order):

1. It's insensitive. A parent who places a child for adoption faces incomprehensible losses for the rest of their life. You can make more money. They can't re-make the child they lose.

2. It's crass. 'Nuff said.

3. It positions your child as a commodity. There are plenty of people in the business of adoption who see your child as a commodity. You shouldn't be one of them.

4. It's not anyone else's problem. It's not. Life is hard. Infertility is devastating. The costs of adoption are prohibitive and ridiculous. I get it. I do. But it's not anyone else's problem.

5. It smacks of entitlement. Any complaint about the cost of adoption implies that it should cost less or be free. Why? Because you want it? Because you need to save your money for something else? Because you'd be a great parent, but you can't afford to adopt? Again, I get it. But we're not entitled to anything.

6. It breeds resentment. Between expectant mothers and potential adoptive parents, between adoptive parents and first parents, between friends, etc.

7. It's not anyone else's problem. See #4.

8. It's a waste of time. When women started fighting back against the barbarism of the Baby Scoop Era, someone figured out other ways to exploit adoption and make it profitable. Unless and until large numbers of adoptive parents and PAPs seriously join the fight to reform adoption, complaining about the costs is a waste of time.

9. Someday your child may read your words. Can you imagine how they would feel?

10. It's a distraction. When you're a PAP, the wait is bone-deep agonizing. Every baby shower invitation and announcement of a friend's pregnancy is like a telephone pole being driven through your gut. I remember. Money is a convenient lightning rod for anguish, anxiety, fear, and frustration. But complaining about money is a distraction from more important things like getting to know some first parents, adoptive parents and adoptees and talking to them and reading their blogs to learn how adoption has impacted them (both positively and negatively) throughout their lives. Like researching the history of adoption and getting involved with adoption reform. Like volunteering with organizations that offer support to expectant mothers and mothers who need help to be able to raise their child/ren.

All that being said, it is financially expensive to adopt a child, and of course, PAPs need to talk about the cost. But those conversations should be kept private. Complain and fret to each other over breakfast. Unload your financial frustrations to your social worker or attorney. For crying out loud, keep it out of cyberspace. Please. It diminishes everyone.

Click here to purchase Sally's adoption book, What I Want My Adopted Child to Know: An Adoptive Parent's Perspective.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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Blogging About Adoption: Adopter's Guilt

I'm ready to admit that I struggle with blogging about adoption, and the struggle surprises me. I have no mixed feelings to get in my way... no ongoing grief or frustration to impede me. In fact, I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. Twice-blessed with healthy newborns adopted domestically after meeting their birth mothers, who are two of the most fabulous young women on the planet, and an adoption attorney who is compassionate, wise, and professionally impeccable. No drama. No trauma. No hardship worth counting, other than financial, and that burden is universal among adoptive parents.

So, what's my problem? I've thought about it a lot, and I finally realize my "problem" is exactly that I have been twice-blessed with adoptions that exceeded even my wildest hopes. I call it Adopter's Guilt.

My "problem" is that when I go on the website of the adoption agency we used, I see faces and faces and faces of people waiting to adopt, eager to adopt, some desperate to adopt. Some of these faces I know personally, others I know from reading their profiles online. Though their smiling pictures beam, "Notice me! Pick us! We'd be great parents!", I know that as day after day slips away Doubt plods in with a heavy step and whispers, "Why has no one noticed you? Why has no one picked you? Perhaps you're not meant to be parents after all. Ever."

My "problem" is that adoption has brought people into my life. People like Michelle, who of everyone I know is among the most full of love and life and promise, yet she waits and waits and waits, with growing despair. People like Charlene, who waited 7 years for an adoption match and has suffered - since the day she brought her daughter home - with debilitating depression and self-doubt. People like Dara and Jeff, whose post-adoption experience has been a devastating legal nightmare. People like the birth mothers who write to me about feeling remorseful or inadequate or shut out.

My "problem" is that adoption means gain for some and loss for others. There are winners and losers, chosen and unchosen, the triumphant and the defeated. Some of us are made whole by adoption and others are broken apart by it.

My struggle to blog about adoption is really a struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable. Why me? I have no idea. Why not you? I have no idea.

I can't change anyone else's timeline any more than I could have changed my own. I do believe that everything happens in the right way at the right time (whatever that means), and that we almost never understand that until we're looking back.

I'm supremely grateful to be one of those looking back. I trust that you will be too.

Sally Bacchetta
The Adoptive Parent
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Parenthood for Me

Today I'm grateful for waiting. Yes, I'm actually grateful that adopting is a slow process, because it takes time for people to find each other.

I'm not talking about birth parents and adoptive families finding each other, I'm talking about the people who have come into my life because I'm "out there" waiting for an adoption, the people who find me leafing through the adoption books at the bookstore, the people who email me at 3:22 a.m. to say "I just found your blog and website, and for the first time in a long time, I have hope. I believe again. Thank you." And people like Erica.

Erica and her husband (AJ) are adoptive parents and the founders of Parenthood for Me, Inc. a not for profit corporation established to "ease some of the burden bestowed on people who desperately want to be parents."

Erica and AJ invested time, money, and hope in ART (assisted reproductive technology) before pursuing international adoption. In the end, their journey was a rousing success! It brought them together with their son and forged their committment to help other people build the families of their dreams.

Today I joined the Board of Directors of Parenthood for Me, Inc. I'm excited and grateful for the opportunity to work in tandem with Erica and AJ. I look forward to helping more people find their own reasons to be grateful for waiting.

Maybe you... :)

Sally Bacchetta - Freelance Writer
Freelance Writer
Parenting
Motherhood