Hey guys,
Mike and LB checking
in. So far, we’ve given everyone some fairly generic information regarding our
adoption adventure. We’ve told you about
how we came about the decision to adopt and provided some answers for FAQ’s. Most recently we’ve shared our decision to change
paths and enlist the help of an agency, which we feel is a good decision and
will be the best for all involved. In
this post, however, we want to share some of the struggles and frustrations we’ve
had so far. We want to be as real as we
can, especially since we have so many people who are praying for us and sharing
our story with others. So, here we go.
First, let’s go back
to the beginning…trying to get pregnant.
This was a process in and of itself.
Mike’s family had told us after we got married that when a Compton wants
to get pregnant, it sure doesn’t take very long. We waited a few years into our marriage to
try, but when we were ready, we figured it was going to be quick and easy. Boy, were we wrong. It took us about 2 years and several hopeful,
then disappointing, months, to come to the realization that there was an issue. This is when we decided to get some testing
done to find out where the issue lied. Mike
made several very uncomfortable and extremely awkward visits to a reproductive
specialist. Then he was sent to a
urologist for further testing. At this
point, things weren’t looking very promising and we were told, in order to get
a clear and precise prognosis, that some very expensive procedures would need
to be done. Luckily, we were able to
bypass those procedures when Mike’s brother suggested going to the specialist
he had been seeing. This is where we found
out that Mike is a carrier for Cystic Fibrosis.
Men who carry this can sometimes be born with a defect that causes
certain parts of the anatomy to not be connected to others. Basically, getting from point A to point B
was not going to happen naturally. This
was hard for Mike and took a little while to grasp. Eventually he came to terms with the
situation, with the help of prayer and support from family and friends, and we
decided to move forward.
This is when we had
decided to pursue adoption. We
considered the IVF route, but decided to skip that for now. We figured, if we’re going to spend a bunch
of money, we might as well make it a little more likely to bring home a
baby. The good thing is, we had already
discussed this option for our future anyway.
This was just bringing our future into the now. This was the easy part of our adventure,
making the decision to adopt. Since it
was already something we had on our hearts, it was easy to say, “Let’s do it!”. We had always felt like we were meant to love
the children that needed it the most.
However, this was the only easy part of our adventure (we suppose “adventures”
aren’t supposed to be easy (; ). We drug
our feet a little getting things started.
Since we had decided, at this point, to pursue independent adoption, we
knew that we were going to have to share our lives with a lot of people. While Mike is a sharer (if you couldn’t tell,
he is writing this post), LB usually is not, so this was going to be outside of
our comfort zone as a family. Finally,
with the encouragement of our family and friends, we decided to announce our
decision and start this blog to help with the announcement and keep everyone
updated. This is where we felt the
struggle again.
Adoption, in
general, is a waiting game, but independent adoption feels less like a game and
more like waiting in line at the DMV.
You wait around for a long time and then when you get to the window, you
sometimes don’t even get what you needed accomplished. It’s frustrating and sometimes you just want
to scream. At this point we were waiting
for word of mouth to spread and hopefully hear back from someone who knows
someone who has a daughter or friend who is pregnant and wants to make an
adoption plan. We had a couple contacts
at first. Mostly just pleasantries or a
couple emails back and forth. We had
friends of family tell us about someone, but nothing came to fruition. We did have contact with a couple of birth
mothers we thought were hopeful, but then contact would just cease and we were
back to square one. This wait was fairly
painful and disconcerting. After Mike’s
brother and his wife decided to go with an agency for their adoption, we had
second thoughts about our path. We
prayed heavily and came to the decision to pursue agency adoption as well.
This decision came
about for a couple of different reasons.
One, the agency provides a lot of services for both, the adoptive
parents and the birth mother, which is awesome.
Two, they have birth mothers that go to them so that adoption plans can
be made, which is convenient, since that is what we were looking for, haha. We were able to meet with the same agency
Matt and Abi (Matt’s wife) went through, very quickly. They got us on board and within a week, we
were at their AES (Adoption Education Seminar).
This is where things got a little interesting. The day after our first day of AES, we
received a message from someone we knew that wanted to meet with us. We went to dinner and she told us that she was
pregnant and she wanted us to adopt her baby.
We were ELATED! We couldn’t believe
it. We had been pursuing this for so
long and here it was, right in front of us.
We were ecstatic for a multitude of reasons, but a couple were, well
BABY!, and, hopefully, soon. She was only
a few months in to her pregnancy, so we had a while to go, but we couldn’t be
more excited. That elation was deflated
a couple months later when she changed her mind. Going into the adoption process, we were very
much aware that these things were going to happen, but it doesn’t make it any
easier. When you are told that a baby is
going to be yours and then that joy is taken away, it’s devastating. I know there are plenty of people out there
that can relate.
It took a few months
of prayer and listening to what God wanted us to do. Eventually we decided to go back to pursuing
agency adoption. We were able to go back
to the same agency and start where we left off.
This is what we told you about a couple blog posts ago. About a month ago, we finished our paperwork
and turned it in to the agency.
Unfortunately, due to them moving, it took them until this last week to
go over all the paperwork, specifically our financials. We had already begun the individual interview
process and gotten our federal fingerprinting done, so we were hopeful to keep
moving forward. That brings us to our
current situation. The agency has
decided that they need to know where the entire cost of the adoption is going
to come from before they move forward with anything else. This came as a bit of a surprise, but since
we are preferentially open, a quicker placement is a possibility. This is both frustrating and exciting at the
same time. It’s like someone in their
third trimester being told that they need to prove they can pay the doctor and
the hospital before the baby is delivered.
However, the idea of a quick placement is also promising, so our
emotions are going up and down at this point.
This is where we are
now. As you can see, our adventure has
had some ups and downs. We are in the
homestretch, but we need help getting there.
This is not something that comes easy to us, mostly because of pride and
the humility it takes to ask for help.
We have been mentioning our fundraiser, The Tree of Life, in our past
few blogs. We have had some response and
we appreciate everything this far. Our
tree has 150 leaves, of which we currently have 130 available for anyone who
would like to sponsor one. We had
mentioned before that adoption costs can range anywhere from $25,000 - $40,000 and
this fundraiser is going to help us reach the end of our adoption adventure and
start a new one…BEING PARENTS!
Please know, that
anything you give is a gift beyond measure and we will forever be
grateful. Please, also know that your
prayers are equally as, if not more, important, even if you are not able to
give monetarily. We appreciate all of
the support we have received from our friends and family and even those who
know us just through this blog. We love
you so much and can’t wait to be able to share our joy with you when God
blesses us with a baby.
Mike and LB
