The Crippling Obstacle

When beginning the adoption process, overwhelming is the word of choice.

Infant, toddler, older child, waiting child, sibling groups, domestic, international, foster care, agency, private, trans racial--- the list goes on.  

As a couple, there are so many options and decisions to make. This, of course, is a good problem to have; however, to the newbies, it is so, so vast.  The amount of information is crushing unless you bite it off a chunk at a time.

Brian and I had to make several huge decisions: did we want a baby or an older child? For many reasons (my need for a baby and my job situation high on the list), we decided on a baby. 

Next: did we want domestic or international? At first, we looked only at domestic and then branched out to international. We became increasingly attracted to a sibling group from Haiti. However, the reality that I would have to quit my job in order to care for them brought that to a halt. I still would like to look at this in the future, but, for now, it is impossible. So, we decided on a domestic infant.

After that, we decided that we are open to any race, but not to any medical history. We are not willing to take infants whose mothers drank or did drugs. Smoking also scares us, but we have not entirely ruled it out.

We emailed and phoned every agency in Idaho and several in Utah. We looked at several international agencies. All-in-all it seemed like we were getting our items ready for a home study.

(I make it sound like we had certain decisions. More often than not, these were never settled matters. Some days we are certain, and others we most certainly are not. In retrospect, the line can be made straight, but its true path is a wandering one.)

And then comes the cost. We know what we want; now, how are we going to get it? A domestic infant adoption costs anywhere from $20,000-$50,000.

Yes, there is a tax credit, and yes there are grants. However, the tax credit has not been renewed and the grants are not guaranteed. We feel that we need to be prepared to take on the full debt load just in case things don’t work out.

And this is crushing.

Crippling.

Overwhelming. 

How can we be prepared to take on debt that is more than my yearly salary in order to have a child? Where will we get the money, and how can we afford to pay it off?

This is the decision we need to make. And the weight of it is defeating us.