It's a little strange to think that we really have a choice in the matter of what gender our child will be. However, that is one of the things that adoption affords you. You have the opportunity to make a number of decisions about your child that biological parents don’t have. As part of the process of our home study we had to describe our preferences for our prospective child. This information helps our agency match us with a child that best suits us. Some of our decisions were limited by restrictions of the Indian’s central adoption agency (CARA), but many of them were up to us. This process included gender and age, but it was much more, including a lengthy description of the child’s general health.
Gender and age are the first things everyone asks about; and they are the easiest to talk about, so we’ll start there. We decided to leave gender to fate because each of us has a different preference, big surprise. However, when it comes down to it, we both can see ourselves happy with either a boy or girl. However, we’ve learned that about 70% of the children waiting to be adopted in India are girls, so we have a somewhat higher chance to add a little girl to our family. As for age, there are a whole pile of requirements for prospective parents and what age child they can adopt listed on the CARA website. For example “The minimum age difference between the child and either of the prospective adoptive parents shall not be less than twenty-five years”. We’ve generally been told that the Indian government limits adoption of infants to Indian residents. Therefore, we knew right away, more than likely we weren’t going to get an infant. We still prefer a younger child, because to a certain extent, it limits some of the developmental delays that occur in orphanage and foster care. We elected to specify our preference as a child form 0-36 months. The amount of time that can pass between accepting a referral and us bringing our child home could be as long as 6 or 7 months. So in reality our child could be a bit older by the time we first meet them in person.
It’s one thing to specify a gender or age preference, the health aspect was something we hadn’t really talked all that much about before starting the process and it was by far the most challenging. When a family expecting a biological child is asked about the gender of their child, it feels cliche for them to respond, "We don't care as long as it's a healthy baby". Obviously we would love that too, but that’s not always the case in international adoption. The children are often orphaned because of the physical or developmental disorders that their birth families cannot handle. We, in fact, went through a six page list of different medical, developmental, and emotional conditions that our child might have. The list included everything from skin conditions, limb deformities, Hepatitis, HIV, heart conditions, just to name a few. We had to go through this list and select level of openness to adopting a child with each condition. Every "no" we marked felt like we were denying a child a home and it really beat us down emotionally. Some of the conditions were life threatening or very severe disabilities and it scared us. Caring for children with severe cognitive or physical disorders can be very rewarding, but we had to really do some soul searching about what we could handle from an emotional and financial standpoint. Even so, every "no" felt crushing and we constantly second guessed ourselves. This packet took us days to fill out because it felt like such an overwhelming challenge and made us ask ourselves hard questions about what we feasibly can handle as first time parents.
When you have a biological child you don't get to pick what conditions you are willing to take in your child and our thoughts often turned to this fact. Would we love our child and care for our child if it was born to us with this condition? The answer, of course, was "yes" to everything. But, the truth is our child will likely have some level of developmental and emotional delays due to spending critical developmental years without primary care givers. How much more can we take on beyond that? Also, when we get a referral, we’ll have a list of known medical conditions. But due to limited resources at the agency or an unknown medical history of the child, we can’t even be certain how accurate the medical assessment of the child is. We had to do our best to try and find a happy medium between our confidence in our ability to care for a special needs child and our desire to give a deserving child a home.
So we finished the paperwork describing our “ideal” child, who will be coming from a very non-ideal situation. We sent it in to our social worker with the stack of other intrusive paperwork, and we’re still mostly left to wonder. We don't know what gender, we don't know exactly what age they’ll be, and we really don’t know how healthy they will be. After all of this you would think we would be totally discouraged, and admittedly at times it was discouraging. But coming out the other side we’re both still certain we’re making the right decision. We don’t know much about our future child but we are so excited to meet them.
Photo of a child and care giver from the foster home Leah spent time at in Hyderabad. She wrote a little bit more about that trip here.
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