Instant Mom by Nia Vardalos Page B

research. A barrage of unfamiliar terms had hit me. I couldn’t see the difference between domestic infant adoption and private adoption. I didn’t know if open adoption is what we wanted, or what it was, really. I didn’t know if the statistics on drug-addicted babies were correct. I learned that in some states the birth mother can change her mind for up to six months. So I’d finally get a baby and then have to give it back, like in a Lifetime movie?
    If you do an Internet search on “adoption,” you get taken to sites that look credible. Many are. And many are not. Some have words that make you think, Oh, this company is real, but after getting on the phone with them and finding out they want a $75,000 retainer with no guarantee of a “match,” ever, you start to wonder how the adoption process can be so unregulated. It was impossible to know which website might actually match you with an out-of-state birth mother and which one would lure you to a hotel room to harvest your kidneys. I’d stumble on sites that showed videos of babies playing in a crib. Cute babies in a foreign orphanage! It was so adorable it looked Pixar-animated. I’d watch for hours. I started to look into hiring an interpreter to try to adopt from Romania. But then a friend went there to be matched with a baby she saw on the website. When she got there, she was told that baby had just died. Just. Died. Of AIDS. She shook her head in disbelief at this very convenient story. Then they tried to convince her to go back to the States with a four-year-old boy. It took six weeks to go through the red tape and . . . she did it. Days later, she found out he had a nine-year-old half-brother. She took him too. They’re both children with special needs. I admired her. I considered doing it. My family told me they’d support whatever I wanted to do. My siblings were all parents by then and I could tell in their sympathetic eyes they’ve discussed my situation and would support anything I tried. I got us on the waiting list for Greece, even though I was advised the wait from an orphanage was four years.
    But nothing worked. Every site I registered with didn’t pan out. I met several people who adopted Romanian and Russian children and had very good experiences. I took down the name of the agencies they used and got us on the waiting lists.
    I was surrounded by positive stories of adoption, but of course the scary ones kept me up at night. And the media did a good job of it too. It’s just human nature to pick up on the things that cause us anxiety. I could hear a hundred fantastic adoption stories in a row and then be stopped in my tracks by the negative one. There was always some story of some drifter who’d decapitated a store clerk because he’d once been adopted. Or wasn’t adopted. Or something. Googling “adoption” took me to strange places. It was all a late-night Internet search haze.
    Ian and I had written our profile, attached a pleasant picture of ourselves, paid a fee, and registered with many domestic adoption agencies, in many states. I dug for info and found out “open” adoption means contact with the birth family after the infant is placed. “Closed” means the birth family does not know where the infant is placed. “Adoption Agency” means a licensed group who matches prospective parents with birth mothers. “Private” means parents and birth mothers are matched via an attorney. I learned the amount of time a birth mother has to change her mind varies from state to state, and, many people assured me, a birth mother taking her baby back is actually quite rare. But it happens, so I worried about it. Another thing I learned is that it’s the birth mother who chooses the potential parents for her baby.
    We’d waited a whole year for a birth mother to pick our profile. We then changed our profile picture, hoping we looked more appealing in the new one. We waited on many countries’ adoption lists. We waited to be matched.