Building a family through transracial adoption

I have been writing this week on how we have chosen the transracial adoption programs that we have used and how we came to build our family. I hope that by sharing this it will answer a lot of the questions I have received lately, and that it will also help some other families find the right transracial adoption program.

When I left off, we had adopted a young baby girl from Vietnam, a special needs toddler from Korea and an African American newborn from the U.S. While with six children many would have thought that our family would have been complete after our domestic infant adoption, we learned that sometimes, the right adoption path can find you.

A few months after Marcus was home, we got an interesting call from an adoption agency. It was one of the agencies that we had turned our profile into for our domestic adoption, and they were wondering if we were still looking to adopt a baby. We informed them that we had adopted our son a few months earlier.

They went on to tell us that they had a pregnant woman who wanted to place the baby she was pregnant with for adoption, as well as her two older daughters. I will not go into a lot of details of the situation for my daughters’ privacy, but the girls were coming from a difficult situation and the mother was very sure she wanted to place them (and they would have likely been placed into foster care if a family hadn’t been found for them). We told them that we were not in a position to take another newborn plus two more children.

Several weeks later we got a call again from the agency, saying that they had been unable to find a family to take all three children, but they had many families willing to adopt just the baby (who was not born yet). They wondered if we would be interested in the two older girls.

Truth be told, I had been thinking that maybe we did want to adopt again. Since our first child was born, I have had large photos of each of our kids on the most prominent wall in our living room. I had been looking at that wall, with the photos of our three biological sons, our two Asian daughters and our beautiful baby Marcus, and I was thinking about how much his one little dark face stuck out on the wall.

I had been thinking that I didn’t want his face to stick out in our family picture. I knew he would likely stick out in his Kindergarten class picture, and his soccer team picture and in many other pictures in his life, but I did not want him to stick out in our family picture.

Of course that was not reason enough to decide to adopt again, but it got us talking about the possibility.

We had talked about adopting older children. With Marcus just a few months old, we did not want another baby, and we had the toddler and preschool ages pretty well filled in with Maggie, Amanda and Shane.

So when we heard about these girls, even though the idea of adopting a sibling group was a new one for us, and even though adopting older children was a new concept for us, we felt it might be right.

We went and met the girls, and after a crazy string of events, they ended up being with us permanently just two weeks later! We didn’t even really have time to tell family and friends until the girls were home. Josh said we forgot to use our adoption birth control.

A year after the girls came home, we felt strongly that we had another son to find. A lot of researching to find a program that we qualified for and was realistic for us, lead us to Ethiopia. That is just about when I started this blog. As most of you know, when we traveled to Ethiopia to get Benjamin (who Josh swore would be our LAST new addition), we met Belane at an orphanage for HIV+ kids, and our tenth child was soon on her way home.

So what can you learn from the growth of my transracial family?

- Research your options. Finding the right adoption program is not always easy, but it is worth it.

-Don’t limit your options. While it would have been wonderful for our family if we had brought home Maggie and then had been able to adopt six more kids from Vietnam, in all honesty, I can’t imagine my family any more perfect, beautiful or “right” than the way it is. (The picture above is all of us, with an additional cousin and Disney character).

-Don’t let failed adoptions or discouragements stop you. If we had given up after our failed adoption from India, we would have five less children than we do now. We would have missed out on a lot. While the loss of our little girl from India was very difficult, we know that things happened the way they had to for us to get our baby Marcus, Mercy, Des, Benjamin and Belane.

-Sometimes, the right path for your adoption finds you. It took an agency phone call to get us on track for our domestic infant adoption, and it took another agency phone call to get us to our older girls. While we originally thought that domestic infant adoption, older child adoption and special needs adoption were not for us, they each turned out to be the right choice for some of our adoptions.

-Adoption is not easy, but it is well worth the challenges.

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