My husband and I talked a lot about having a family. We both wanted children, so after we got married, we decided to try for a baby. After trying for a year and half without any success, I did not still get pregnant. We did not get the reason why I am not becoming a mom, so my husband and I visited the doctor. The doctor said we could try a treatment called GUI, and it might help us get pregnant quickly. At first, we were hopeful. But after trying seven times with no success, we felt very discouraged.
We then saw another doctor who tested us to see if IVF might work. The news was hard. The doctor said we could try IVF, but it might not work, and if we wanted to have a family, we might have to think about other ways like adoption or using a surrogate.
Hearing that was both sad and a little relief. Because what I did not say before is that going through all those fertility treatments felt like losing a future we dreamed about. We went through many feelings, denial, hoping it would happen; frustration and sadness when others around us got pregnant; and sometimes even anger and jealousy. We kept going to work and living our lives, but there was not much happiness. We felt far apart from each other, and this was not how we pictured our family life.
When the doctor talked about adoption, it made sense to us. We could still be parents, just differently. Both of us knew about adoption, my husband’s stepdad had adopted him, and I had a sibling who was adopted. So, it did not feel strange.
We found an adoption agency and started filling out forms. The forms asked a lot of questions, like what kind of child we would accept. It felt strange to have control over this after years of feeling like we had no control over having a baby. Should the child be a newborn or older? What if the birth mother used drugs or alcohol? What if the child had special needs? What about race or gender?
At first, we said we did not care about gender but wanted a newborn who was White or Hispanic like us. It was not about love; we knew we could love any child. We just worried about how to help a child of a different race understand the world, and we did not want to feel different as a family.
Soon, we were matched with a White baby girl, but the adoption did not work. I cried all the way home. Then a year later, we were matched with a Hispanic baby boy, but two weeks before he was born, we were told the adoption would not happen. The sadness came back hard. After all the pain, I wondered if we were meant to be parents at all.
We took some time to think and decided we still wanted a family. We thought maybe we were too limited in what we wanted. We started looking at international adoption, asking what we could learn about other cultures and how to keep our child connected to their birth country.
We looked at China, but something did not feel right. Then I heard about Haiti and started learning about it. One day, I emailed an orphanage and received a response that included a photo of two siblings, a girl and a boy.
When I showed the picture to my husband, he said, “Those are our kids.”
We started a long process to adopt kids from Haiti. It took almost three years. Meeting our children there was not what we imagined, but holding them after so many years was one of the best moments ever.
While waiting, we visited them every six months, and finally, after almost a year, they got their visas. Then, by chance, we were asked to care for a little boy from our community for a week. We agree, and not long after, he became a part of our family.
In less than two months, we went from having no children to having three. It has been a wild, wonderful ride full of love and challenges. Adoption brought us our family, and we are grateful every day.
