Leap of Faith

Good morning everyone. It's been several days since I last posted, so I thought it was time to put my thoughts out there again - as I know you've been counting the days since my last post :-)

Over the past 3 weeks Jason and I have learned a lot about what it takes to have a child for a couple in our situation. We started out just knowing that we wanted to have a child. So, the next obvious thing was to make the baby - oops....nature doesn't work that way for us. Consider the children you have had in your life and how relatively simple it was to create them. Our hearts break every time we here a story of how someone "accidentally" got pregnant. If only it could be that easy.

Actually, our next step was a visit with an attorney - someone that specializes in adoption and assisted reproductive technology (ART) law. This visit, to say the least, was overwhelming as we had a lot of information presented to us in only an hour and a half. I walked away from this meeting angry, confused, and overwhelmed. I think the anger came from the fact that I was having a pity party, asking "Why do I have to go through this just to have a child". Luckily, today, I am no longer in that mode of thinking.

The next thing we had to figure out was what we wanted to do - adoption or gestational surrogacy (GS). Note: we only considered GS as this is a type of surrogacy where the woman carrying the child does not use her eggs - so, there is no biological relationship to the child - and the law gets too tricky when you use traditional surrogacy (TS) where you actually use the carrier's eggs.

There are pros and cons to both, running the full gamut of considerations from emotional to financial:

• How can we ask someone to carry a baby for us and then expect her to give it up even though it is not biologically hers?
• What kind of impacts will there be on her family?
• Where are we going to find the estimated $60,000 - $80,000 to make surrogacy happen?
• Will our state allow us to adopt?
• If we adopt, will our baby feel normal (as normal can be - whatever that is)?
• Where are we going to find the estimated $25,000 to make adoption happen?

I could go on and on. Just know that we seriously considered both options, and there was a lot more discussion involved. After several weeks we narrowed down our choice to Domestic Adoption, which means we are looking to adopt a baby within the United States.

The next decision we have to make is if we want to use an agency to help us with the adoption search or if we want to try a private adoption and not involve an agency. I think we are leaning toward trying the private adoption first, for a limited timeframe, and then adding the services of an agency if we are unsuccessful on our own.

So, where does that leave us today? We have to pick an agency to do our homestudy (which is a process of a social worker deeming us (or one of us since we can't adopt together in the discriminating state of Virginia) acceptable candidates for adoption. Then, once approved, we (or one of us) can legally adopt and start "advertising" ourselves.

Sounds easy, right? Well, this is where we are having trouble. We want to make all of the right decisions upfront, so we don't have any mistakes along the way. This isn't so much about being perfect; rather, it's about time and money. We don't want to waste either, which is why we are being so meticulous during this initial phase.

At some point, though, we just have to take that leap of faith and make a decision. I only hope once we leap, we land on solid ground.

~Anthony