We are often asked, will we adopt again?  We always say that we are so incredibly fortunate to be parents to Little MPB that are pretty sure we are one and done.

But, honestly, when you read everything I shared last week (here are the links – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5), how can we even consider it as a viable option?

I think the best way I can explain our thought process when it comes to considering another adoption is:

It’s one thing to be sleep deprived first time parents, learning to parent in the comfort of your own home. 

It’s a whole different thing to be sleep deprived first time parents living in a hotel room, without a kitchen, while caring for an infant with no support within thousands of miles. 

And it’s a whole lot more complicated thing to be sleep deprived first time parents in an adoption situation trying to navigate copious amounts of paperwork and manage the highly emotional revocation period while laying the foundation for a lifelong open adoption relationship. 

And it’s an entirely unimaginably thing to be sleep deprived first time parents doing all of the above with an adoption agency threatening to take your child away while also constantly lying and randomly charging more money.  

While our son is the bright spot of the whole experience (obviously), it’s just not an experience either of us ever want to endure again.

It was one thing to go into an international adoption slightly naïve to how corrupt the process is (I say slightly, because reading international adoption stories you often hear of corruption in various forms). But, as two decently educated individuals I will defend that we did our homework in advance.  We investigated countries and chose the USA in part because we felt the level of corruption would be reduced due to various government requirements. We interviewed all the agencies available to us, we spoke with the agency owners and we spoke with their staff.  We talked to other adoptive families.  We talked to families using this specific agency.  We read academic literature.  We read blogs.  We read books.  We read internet reviews.  We read anything and everything we could get our hands on.  We made an educated decision.

When we made our first payment to the agency, we honestly believed that were choosing an agency that shared our morals and ethics.

To this day, I cannot believe how wrong we were.  I still feel doped.  But, I cannot dwell in this because we made the decision we felt was the right decision based on what we knew at the time.

But now, to start this process over again, knowing what we know after we experienced these things first hand?  I honestly don’t know how I could make the decision to knowingly sign up to this process again.  The moral and ethical code that Mr. MPB and I share, simply wont let us.  (Also, we don’t have $85,000+ laying around).

I will acknowledge that Mr. MPB and I have discussed the possibility of changing USA agencies, but I’ll readily admit that at the moment we just don’t want to go there again.  Personally, we don’t want to be blackmailed or emotionally tortured – nothing about that sounds fun.  And honestly, we don’t even think we have the energy to manage the torture we went through again with a toddler in tow.  But, more then anything, we cannot knowingly choose to participate in a system that doesn’t place the children’s basic needs at the forefront.  And right now, we don’t trust that other international agencies would be any different then this one (we’d like to believe others would be different, but we are rather tainted from our experience).

And while we’ve talked briefly about adopting locally where the system is much more in alignment with our morals and ethics, Mr. MPB and I still have reservations about the local private adoption system.  And, even if we found a way to move past those reservations, we both know we don’t want to wait 4+ years with the constant uncertainty of when will we be chosen hanging over our lives. A 4+ year wait sounds absolutely miserable to us, and it’s just not how we want to live the next 4+ years of our lives.

Honestly, at the heart of our current decisions not to pursue adoption again and to therefore remain a 3 person family, is that we just want to make the most of each and every day we have with Little MPB.

After everything we’ve been through to become a family of three, we just want to live and make the most of each day.

Our family may be littler then we ever expected, but we are thankful we survived everything to become a family of 3.

So for now, we are choosing to focus on loving and caring for Little MPB.

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