...adoption interview project 2012 : mandy...

we LOVE november here in the iwrite house.   

it's national adoption month, my friends. we get to eat turkey and talk about how awesome adoption is and remember how it was in november of 2010 that we found out we would be the lucky parents of mister boog.  i remember attempting to eat thanksgiving dinner that year.  psh, i was too busy thinking about how we were meeting a prospective birth mom the next day.  no mashed potatoes for me.  it wasn't conducive to my hyperventilating. 

one of my favorite parts of national adoption months is the opportunity i have to participate in production, not reproduction's adoption interview project.  i participated last year (see here) and loved it.  this year i was paired with a fellow adoptive mamma.  nothing makes me feel better than connecting with fellow adoptive parents.  we just understand each other!  mandy, who writes a blog entitled, 'love like crazy' is a strong, amazing, lovely adoptive mom to a sweet nine year old little girl.  her story has given me more hope and her words have provided endless insight.  thank you, mandy, for being so open and candid about your experiences.  

enjoy.

it looks like adoption came on as a whirlwind for you! how was navigating the feelings of adoption so quickly? 

  

Honestly it happened so fast that times I look back and just laugh. It was crazy!!. We decided to adopt and a couple months later we were half way across the US meeting our daughter. It was hectic, fun, stressful and crazy all rolled into one! I actually wish I would have documented it a little better because up until the day Sierra was born I didn't keep records of what all happened. 

in conjunction with the first question, tell me about the 'fire' you felt.      

Up until the day that we decided to adopt neither of us has been touched by adoption. My husband thought I was crazy. We had just celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary and his 20th birthday and one day he walked in the front door after work and I told him "So we are going to adopt a baby!" He just blew me off and within 24 hours I had educated myself in almost every aspect of adoption and had convinced him that we had to do this and we had to do it now! I just woke up that morning and had this feeling that I should check into adoption. I had never ever even thought about adoption until that morning. 

was adding a child through adoption some what early on in your marriage hard? (it's hard enough to bring a child in period, but with adoption, there seems to be all sorts of crazy emotions/strains on money/relationships/etc)

We always knew we wanted to have children early in our marriage but of course never in our wildest dreams believed we would have done so by adoption. We were young, had just bought a house and car and was getting ready to drive several hundred miles to meet our daughter and my husband got laid off from his job. Talk about an eye opener. We held strong and new that this is what was meant to be and nothing was going to stop us. I think that those first months of bringing home a new baby, dealing with lawyers and waiting on word that we would get to finalize her adoption was some of the most stressful times of our marriage but also the most beautiful! 

tell me about how your families reacted. my husband and i have both received positive and negative responses when we finally decided to adopt. how did each affect you?

My parents wer on a cruise the day we decided we would adopt a baby, I called them when they were driving home and told them I had something to tell them. When they pulled in their drive way I was sitting on their front porch. I know that they thought I was going to tell them that I was pregnant. We had been trying for over a year and everyone knew it. So when they got out of the truck and I told them "We are going to adopt a baby" I don't think either one of them knew how to take it. I think they thought it would be something we would do years down the road not months down the road. The rest of our family was amazing with the exception of a few who shall remain nameless. I have always been the kind of person who doesn't let things bother me so them thinking we should wait years to pursue adoption just went in one ear and out the other!   

your daughter is 9! how have you explained adoption as she has grown? do you have an open relationship with her birth parents?   

Since Sierra was a baby we always have explained adoption at an age appropriate level. It wasn't until she was around 5 and we were on a family vacation she said "Wait a minute, I didn't come from your tummy I came from someone elses!!!?" We were driving down the high way eating krispy kreme doughnuts and my child just put it all together and out of the blue my heart stopped. I wanted to say the right thing and make sure she understood what she processing. I have always tried to be prepared when it comes to these adoption talks with her and at the age of 9 she will tell people she is a lover of adoption and wants to be an adoption lawyer when she grows up. She always working on ideas to help raise money to send to other families that are hoping to adopt. We do have a closed adoption with her birth mother and never did meet her birth father. However we are open to having a relationship with her when the time is right for her and her family. 

to read my part of the interview, go here.

 

to find other participants, go here.  worth while reading, i assure you.