Show Notes
Episode 2: Our Adoption Story: Part 2
In this Episode Heather discusses:
Links Mentioned:
Home - For The Love of Adoption
https://fortheloveofadoption.com/
Resource Library Landing Page (ck.page)
https://for-the-love-of-adoption.ck.page/resource-library
Heather Marshall (@fortheloveofadoption) • Instagram photos and videos
https://www.instagram.com/fortheloveofadoption/
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Adoption. It's surrounded with so much confusion and misinformation. And how many people never move forward with adoption because of this. Hi, I'm Heather. I'm not an adoption coach or consultant, and I'm not within adoption agency. I'm a mom to two amazing kids I've been blessed with through adoption. And on this journey, I've learned and continue to learn a lot. Most of all, I believe that if God has put adoption on your heart, it's there for a reason. And you shouldn't let all the stuff keep you from jumping in. I'm here to offer you hope and encouragement, and to talk about everything from types of adoption, things to know before you adopt, funding your adoption including grants, the home study process, making the most of your adoption wait, talking to your kids about adoption, and so much more. Adoption can be hard, but many of the best things in life often are. You know what, though? It can also be amazing! I'm here to share what I've learned. I hope hearing from someone that's gone this road before you encourages and motivates you to take a step of faith and see where it leads. I'm doing this all for the love of adoption. Let's dive in.
Hi, friends. Welcome back to the For the Love of Adoption Show. So excited to be back with you for Episode 2. If you have not had a chance to listen to episode 1, I'd suggest going back and listening to that first, just so this episode makes more sense. But I will give a little recap and also a little correction to something I said last time. At the end of the last episode, I had said how we were happy little family of three. And I had mentioned that had been for 18 months. That was wrong. It was less than a year, for less than a year, we had been a happy little family of three. And our daughter was an easy baby. She slept through the night at three months old. And we thought we were done. And, that we had what we wanted. And then I heard a story that made me ask my husband what if birth mom reached out to us and asked us to adopt again.
I heard a story about this family that had adopted, and they had an open adoption and birth mom reached out and let them know that she was pregnant with their full biological sibling and would they be interested in adopting again? And I heard that and I was like, oh my goodness, because we had set in our mind that we were a family of three. That was it now and forever. That is what we thought. So I heard the story. And I asked my husband, what if that happened to us kind of as a joke, like, haha, what if that happened to us? And he was just like, oh my goodness, wow. Like, I don't even know. Like, that's crazy.
About two months after mentioning that on our way back from our first vacation as a family of three. We were driving home from Nashville, we received an email from birth mom. We had sent her an email a couple of months before this just kind of giving her an update. And she replied, she was replying to that email. She told us how she had been nervous to contact us. And that she just wanted us to know that she had on her heart that she needed to tell us that she was pregnant again. And would we be interested in adopting this child. That it was our daughter's full biological sibling, and she thought it would be amazing for them to grow up together if it was on our heart to adopt again. I just remember being in the car and saying, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. And my husband was like, what, what? What's wrong?
I had to have him pull over. I had to have him pull over. And I told him… I read him the email. And he was just like, wow, wow. And it was so many crazy emotions. I remember we had to like stop driving for a while. We stopped at a restaurant after this. And we just kind of sat and tried to process and our minds were just like… we never imagined that this would be our story. My husband was already in his 40s and I was right behind him. We had a baby that was less than a year old. And we thought that we were done. Needless to say, this was not what we had planned. It was all God. And we had a lot of mixed emotions. Not that it was not this tremendous blessing, just that we had to adjust what we thought our "perfect little life" was going to look like and realize things were changing. Our house was small. Where were we going to put another child and just all these things. We just didn't know how it was all going to work out. But we knew that this was amazing and a blessing. And wow, just wow. So, we actually took a day or two to process and just think through everything and try to get our heads around it. And then we responded. And you know, of course, we told her, oh my goodness, we can't tell you how much it means that you would pick us all over again, what a blessing. How amazing that our daughter will get to grow up with her full biological sibling.
This is incredible. We kind of talked through to make sure this was really the decision she wanted to make. And she confirmed that it was, and she actually invited us to her ultrasound. And that was amazing. I'm like, oh my goodness, this beautiful woman is inviting us to her ultrasound, to find out with her whether our daughter will have a brother or sister. From that initial email that she sent until the ultrasound, there were some gaps in communication, as well as some gaps after. Before I talk about that, we went to the ultrasound, and we all learned together that our daughter would have a baby brother. And with her timeline for her due date, they would be 18 months apart. That's where the 18 months came in last time that I got a little mixed up on. But they would be almost exactly 18 months apart.
We went to the ultrasound, it was incredible. It was amazing that she invited us to something so personal. And I remember her referring to this sweet little baby in her belly as ours. And that was mind blowing. And just wow, wow. Now, this was a different kind of adoption. This was not an agency adoption. This was a parental or sometimes it's called direct placement versus an agency adoption. So with our daughter, we went through the agency, and they handled everything but in this case, because she reached out to us. So, she was obviously already identified, the agency wasn't doing the work to find a birth parent. For us, this was a different type of adoption.
Two of the most common types of adoption are agency adoption, and direct placement, also known as private or independent. So, our first adoption was agency. And then this was going to be a direct placement adoption. And there was a lot to learn about the different types of adoption. We had to kind of wrap our head around a lot of things, we had to hire an adoption lawyer and just figure out new terms, figure out how things were going to look. It was just a very different process. But what happened in between the ultrasound, and her actually giving birth to our son was one of the things that we weren't sheltered from because of it being a parental placement. And that was lack of communication. So, we were communicating directly with her. And there would be periods of time where we did not hear from her like months at a time. And during that time, we started to wonder if she had changed her mind. And it was hard. We had adjusted our expectations to have this family of four. And we were wondering, is that really going to happen? It was a roller coaster. We were not sheltered from things like we were with the agency adoption, because we were in it. We were the ones that were coordinating things, much more than what the agency adoption. We just kind of sat back and they handled things and they let us know when something needed to be done. So it was a roller coaster ride for a few months. And it was hard. But we just had to have faith and just say… "God, if you mean for this to be for us, then it will be." I'm not saying we didn't get frustrated and lack faith sometimes because we definitely had our moments. But, God knew what He was doing even when we didn't. And even though it was harder in a lot of ways because it was a different type of adoption, we did learn how to do what we needed to do. We like I said, we found an adoption lawyer that helped walk us through all the things and like I said, there was a lot to learn. There were new terms to learn, there was things that just seemed different, like the court appointed an attorney specifically to represent our son. We thought that was different and interesting, just new to us. But with all this said, we had to redo our home study. So, during those months, that was one of the things we had to get done. And the agency we worked with was the same agency we went through for our daughter, and they were absolutely amazing. They were thrilled that we were having the opportunity to adopt her full biological brother and they worked with us so wonderfully to just rush things along and get the home study completed so that we could have everything lined up and have no issues when he was born.
We ended up receiving a message from birth mom, that she was in the hospital or heading to the hospital to have him. And she said, whenever you guys want to come, please do.We got there a couple of hours after he was born. That was very different for us… interacting at the hospital when she had just had him because with our daughter, she was two weeks old before we met her. Again, that's in episode one. So we went to the hospital, we went to her room. She had family with her and little baby was in there. And it was different because I didn't want to overstep in any way at all. And so, we let her, you know, tell us when she wanted us to hold him. And I remember that first night, the hospital had set us up in a room. We had him in our room, and my heart just started to ache for her. And I just felt like…I asked my husband, I just said, I feel like I should go ask her if she wants to have him for the night, because I knew she was probably going to be leaving the next day or the day after and that she was not going to be there for long. And I just felt on my heart that this was something I needed to do. I wanted to do.
So I went to her. And I asked her. I said would you like to have him for the night? And she did. She was very thankful that we asked her that. I think that was a special time. I feel like that was the least I could do is to see if she would want to have him for that night. And she did. And I'm really glad that I did that. Looking back now, I'm really glad that I did that. Once everything was wrapped up at the hospital, and we brought him home, we had to experience some things and get used to some things that were very different from our daughter. So, we had this little girl that was 18 months old. And we had this brand-new baby. And he was not the easy baby that she had been. It was hard to attach to him. It's like you couldn't comfort him. There were so much attachment issues and just fussing. He was a difficult baby; it was a very different. And we went through a period of time of just like, God help us help us know how to handle this. This is so different.
And that is when, I have other another episode I'll talk about this. But I went through a little bit of a post adoption, depression, it was not easy. But here's the thing, we did not realize that our family was incomplete until our son came along. But God did know, He knew. He knew the whole time that we were meant to be a family of four, that our daughter and son were meant to grow up together. And He knew. So regardless of how hard it was and the issues we had to work through, we were meant to be a family and God knew exactly what he was doing. And we are so thankful for that. We are so thankful that he allowed us and that birth mom thought enough to reach out to us and give us this opportunity.
I just wanted to share that part of our story. So, you know how both of our adoptions went, how they started, and just so you can understand a little bit more about where I'm coming from. And now we're going to start getting into more of the nitty gritty in episodes to help you on your adoption journey. But again, the two types of adoption we personally have gone through are agency adoption, and direct placement, also known as private or independent adoption. I look forward to sharing more practical steps with you in some upcoming episodes.
Thanks so much for listening in today. And did you know that I offer a full library of free resources to help you along on your adoption journey, and I'm always adding more. This includes downloads of grant recommendations, adoption fundraising ideas, an agency questionnaire, a hospital checklist and much more. You can find that by going to ForTheLoveOfAdoption.com and scrolling to the bottom of the homepage. And if you have an idea for something you'd love to see added to this library, please send me a message and let me know. I'm always looking for ways to help you on your adoption journey. If you enjoy Instagram, be sure to find me there @fortheloveofadoption, where I love to hang out and share live videos and plenty of adoption tips. I'm always excited to support you in your adoption journey. See you next time.
