not many people ask the hard questions

Before we decided to foster-to-adopt we were in the process of adopting internationally. During one of my visits to the vet of all places, the assistant heard about our international endeavors. She asked me why we weren’t adopting here in the good ole USA.

Her question didn’t catch me off guard because I had read about adoptive parents, who were going international, being asked this numerous times. Some would call those asking this naive, and some would just say they are inquisitive. I balance somewhere in the middle.

I answered her right away with the response I had planned in case this situation ever arose. “There are many children in other countries who need homes, and that’s what we feel we are supposed to do.” I didn’t add that foster care scared me to death, and that there seem to be thousands of couples waiting in line for newborn infants here in America. A more important reason for me was, my heart had gone out to the unwanted little girls in China.

Fast forward to the present; we have adopted through foster care once, and are about to do so again. When I was driving our babysitter home the other day, she asked, “So, are you going to do foster care again?”

I responded, “We would like to wait until the kids are older, but, yes we will adopt again. Though I’m not sure if we will do foster care again, I would like to adopt internationally.”

She dove in with another one, “Why do you want to adopt internationally?”

I fumbled and grasped for an easy answer. “I feel pulled towards the kids in orphanages. I would really like to adopt from a place like Russia or Kazakhstan. Some want to adopt from those countries because they think the children will look like them, but some are scared by the possibility of the child having FAS. In Ethiopia the kids age out when they are twelve, kicked out on the street with nothing. I just feel pulled toward an out-of-country adoption. Who knows what will happen.”

In the end, I am glad that she asked me. She may have been asking just to ask, or she may have wanted to know why we would go out of country when we had done foster care twice. Whatever the reason, it made me think of what my answer would be if someone else decided to pop one on me. There is a HUGE need for good foster homes in the US, but there is also an ever growing need in other countries as well.