Adoption web pages
Our agency really encourages families to make web pages for birth mothers to browse. I’m dreading this. Part of it is for stupid practical reasons — we don’t have a digital camera and I hate scanning pictures and who has time to muck around in html anymore than I already do and blah blah blah. The bigger reason (’cuz really, in the face of a new baby, how big of a deal is it to scan some pictures?) is that the birth mother letter was so excrutiating and this is the birthmother letter in hypertext, which is even more horrifying. (I bet that every adoptive family reading this right now is nodding their head in agreement.)
This is very much like a private adoption because while the agency works as a matchmaker and paper-pusher, it’s up to us to kindle adoption romance. This is tough for me. I’m great on the quick pick-up (”Did anybody ever tell you that you have beautiful eyes?”) but going out there and trying to get someone to actually fall in love with me is hard. Especially when it’s really her baby I’m after. I feel like the ultimate bad one night stand only instead of leaving her knocked up, I’m going to leave her bereft.
Do we do the hard sell (”Give us your baby and we promise high morals, high nutrition and higher education!”) or the soft sell. (”Listen, if you’re thinking of placing your baby for adoption, we wouldn’t mind if you chose us but really no pressure, you do what you think is best and I’ll just sit over here and wait for you to make a decision.”) Me, I’m a softer cell sort of person. Brett, too.
Then there’s all the second-guessing. Is our small house a plus (cozy!) or a minus (cramped!). Is our pet fabulous (furry friend!) or awful (rabies carrier!). Even our kid — the blessing of a sibling or a promise that your child will always be “the adopted one?”
What they tell you is to just be honest and informative and have lots of pictures with everybody smiling and doing stuff. Well, that’s a problem all of its own even without the scanner issues. There are about 4 pictures of me in our entire album because I’m always the one holding the camera. I suppose we could Photoshop older pictures in, right? Naah, I don’t think it would work.
All you can do is be honest and be yourself. Hard sell or soft sell or whatever in between, you just have to make sure your personalities shine through. If a birth mother connects with who she sees in the website, that will mean more to her than the details.
I think your romance analogy is a perfect way to describe the way the adoption relationship starts. There has to be some sort of compatability between the birth and adoptive parents. This way, the birth parents can feel comfortable and happy in their choice. And instead of feeling like the worst one night stand in history, you can feel like you’ve helped someone in their darkest hour.
Oh… our adoption letter was such a neurotic, painful, hand-wringing, oh-my-god-are-we-doing-this-right-I’m-not-sure-she’ll-like-us process.
I wish I had some magical advice, but I don’t. We survived. You’ll survive.
Cheers!
ps - don’t go for the hard sell or the soft sell. go for something like, “it’s obvious you won’t be a good parent. We’ve already got one kid as proof that we can parent. So give us yours. NOW!”
How’s that for help?
and for all those reading this, the above was a joke. Thanks in advance for laughing.
I’m still giggling about “rabies carrier!” Let some of that humour show too, it’s a very crucial, important part of who you are, and if I was a birthmom (and not an adoptive mom-to-be) I’d jump all over an ironic, funny family profile.