I am so sorry that you have had many losses and devastating disappointments in your life. Years ago, when we were in the process of adopting two sibling boys from Korea, their mother made the decision to parent and took them home (they'd been in an orphanage for a year), the day before they were to travel to us. At the time, we felt shocked and shattered. It took a long time and lots of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps emotionally, to admit to ourselves that she was NOT a birth mother, and those were NOT children we were entitled to have. And that while we had much to offer children in need of a second chance at a permanent home, the best interests of the child WERE served by their returning to their original family. Adoption is not easy. Not for children. Yes, they gain a new family and often, benefits of living with a financially stable family. However, losing one's original parents, extended family, and connection to ancestral history yields lifelong loss that does not heal. Therefore, adoption is only right and best for a child when all possibilities that the child could remain with his or her birth parents or another member of their extended family have been thoroughly explored.

The benefit for us, as the adopting parents is that when that has been satisfied, we can truly know for ourselves and tell our children that we were the best option, at that critical point in their lives. Later, when they are older, and ready to begin to process the information about why they lost their first family, and how they came to be members of our family, they can see that all of the adults involved in their transfer did everything possible to prevent the hole in the heart that they have to live with.

My advice to you is this: take time to rebound from the enormous grief you feel for the child who might have become yours, before you open yourselves up to another possibility. This could happen again and you will have to be strong and courageous enough to face that fact. There WILL be a child who becomes your son or daughter. He or she deserves for you to be healed enough to wrap your head around the fact that he or she will never be yours exclusively. Adoptive parenting is SHARED parenting. Both the adoptive parents AND the birth/original/natural/first parents are "real" parents whom the child needs to be able to claim and feel connected to in order to build his or her complicated, but much-needed, complete identity.

Use this experience of loss to see that the child you adopt will have equally deep and abiding losses, and help yourselves and that child to connect, psychologically on that basis. While your losses have been unimaginably horrific to endure, they can better prepare you to understand adoption from the CHILD's point of view, which is what good adoptive parenting is all about. (while in most ways it is the same as parenting a child born to you, this facet of your parenting will be different, more complicated, and will require more honesty and courage on your part, if you are to give the CHILD what he/she deserves, rather than focus on YOUR satisfaction in receiving a child to raise).

I realize that this may not be the advice your were hoping to receive. I do not know that I would have been able to really understand it and incorporate it, at the time that the children we'd wrongly believed were ours, when, in fact, they were still members of their original family who had every reason and right to raise them. (and we had no right to judge as unfit or less entitled or of lesser-quality to raise them). Yet it would have been this advice that would have best-served our future children and us, by extension, because we were at the point where we were most vulnerable-- just as our children would be at the moment that they lost their original family.

Recently, one of my sons and his wife had a baby. I was in the newborn nursery with him when he first met his newborn son-- the first person in his life with whom he shared his "genetic stuff." He was flooded with emotion. At first, the emotion was all about joy and wonder, as he looked for the physical similarities he shared with his child. Next, however, profound grief washed over his face and it took months for him to be able to speak about what that was about. "The reason I felt that way, Mom, was because even in that incredibly wonderful moment, I was STILL different from most others (the non-adopted) because while I was feeling very blessed, at the very same time, I realized that on the day that I was born, no one was celebrating my birth. Instead, it was the day when my birth mother and birth father and I were lost from one another. So as I was celebrating the joy of having this beautiful child to raise, I was grieving for what my birth parents and I missed out on, with one another. I love you and Dad dearly and would not have wanted to grow up anywhere else, but at the same time, I wish that I had not had to lose my first family in order TO grow up with you."

I am so sorry that you have gone through this. We were chosen a few times for private adoptions and then it did not turn out. We decided to pursue child's aid and now we are so blessed to be parents to our little girl. Going through the public system offers some stability. Have you thought about fostering to adopt?
I know that this is a cliche but when a door closes God always opens a window.

wow Phoenix I am impressed by your understanding of adoptees. So many people think of us as babies or little kids and then we grow up and even the most loving family does not and cannot replace your biological family. You lose your heritage your identity culture and religion. All of these are taken for granted by most people. You also lose mirroring which I know you can have with your own kids but its not the same.

I am sorry for your losses hunter but adoption appears to be a rough road and I believe parents should have every opportunity to keep their child. I know that makes it hard on you but the child's needs must come first.