The Path to Vennela

Adoption was in the conversation for Geoff and I from very early on in our relationship. He knew it was important to me, and when we talked more seriously about having kids, he was on board with adopting right from the beginning. We wanted to adopt a young child for our first jump into parenthood, knowing from my experience at work that adopting an older child is beautiful but also really challenging. Young children in foster care in the US are typically not legally free for adoption when they are placed with you, you foster them while their birth family works on whatever they need to do in order to reunify. Maybe the children will return to their family, and if not maybe you will be able to adopt them. We wanted to adopt a child for whom other options had been exhausted, and so we turned to international adoption.

Much of my work at WACAP had been with families adopting from China, where many children wait for adoption because they have medical or developmental needs. I had become really comfortable with special needs, and over time Geoff did as well, so while we never really talked about it, the assumption was we would adopt from China. Despite what people still think, the children in need of adoption in China are no longer baby girls. In fact, the majority of the children are boys! Families in China are now opening to adoption and they actually prefer to adopt girls, so the children who don't find an adoptive family within China are more often boys. Families from the US adopting from China also more commonly want to adopt a girl, so this makes the imbalance even greater. Because of this, we were 100% confident we wanted to adopt a boy. We even had his name pretty much picked out!

Then, India changed it's adoption laws. They changed their system to make it 1. More ethical and give more oversights to prevent fraud and trafficking 2. Make it so that more families could be matched with more kids, and 3. Streamline the process. Whereas previously there had been only a small number of children listed for adoption at any given time, over the course of a year or so it ballooned to hundreds- these were children who had always been eligible for adoption, but their orphanages had not had the capacity to list them for adoption. The adoption process had also been painfully slow in the past, taking years, but suddenly it was not much longer than China's- China takes roughly a year, and adoptions from India were often 12-18 months. At work I frequently talk with families who are first considering adoption and deciding what path they will take, and as I saw so many children in need of families I began talking to families about India more and more, urging them to consider the children waiting there. Many families called mostly interested in China, and it was tough to get them to move from China, which was a very predictable and stable process, to India, which, while vastly improved, still had a lot of uncertainties and delays. It weighed heavily on me that there were so many children waiting in India while families adopting from China waited to be matched with a child, until eventually the thought came up- why shouldn't Geoff and I consider India? The children all had medical and developmental needs, just like in China, which we were comfortable with, and if I was telling families to take the leap for India despite the unknowns, shouldn't I be willing to do the same? I mulled it over and watched the list of children waiting in India, until one day, I stumbled across this face, and my heart fell right out of my chest.

Can you blame me? I thought she was the most beautiful child I'd ever seen in my life. I kept coming back to her photo over the next few weeks, peeking to see if she was still waiting. Eventually, I couldn't help myself, and I emailed her photo to Geoff, two years ago today, on March 22, 2016, saying maybe we should consider adopting from India. I didn't seriously think there was a chance we would adopt her specifically, because again, she was the most beautiful child in the entire world, so surely another family would come along any moment and adopt her, but it was enough of a nudge that we started talking about India seriously, and eventually decided that it was the right path for us, and we planned to start later that year.

When adopting from India (and most countries) you complete your home study before you are matched with a child. This typically takes 2-4 months, and includes a physical with your doctor, background checks, hours of adoptive parenting training, multiple meetings with a social worker, etc. Once the home study is done, you are registered with the Indian government on the website for adoptions, and at that time you can be matched with any of the children waiting for a family. All the children eligible for adoption can be seen by all the adoption agencies, so they can be matched at any time. Knowing this, we didn't set out to adopt any specific child, we just trusted that once our home study was done, we'd be matched with a child. I did keep my eye on the waiting list, and not long after we started our home study in September, Vennela disappeared from the list of waiting children. Typically this means a child has been matched with a family, and while I was happy for her that she would be home sooner, I felt a little twinge of sadness for us. 

We plugged along with the home study, and then our process took a sharp right turn when we decided to come forward for a little boy here in the US who needed an adoptive family. When that fell through in a prolonged, painful fashion, we took a little time to grieve, and then picked ourselves up and went back to our original plan of adopting from India. We had completed our India home study right before learning of that little boy, so we were actually already registered on the Indian website, and could pick right back up and be matched as soon as we said we were ready. We didn't end up waiting very long, because as it turned out, we learned Vennela had reappeared on the list of waiting children just a few weeks before the adoption fell through. Our agency had gotten updated photos and video of her, and she was still the most precious little human:

We tried to discuss the decision rationally- she was a little bit older than we had planned on adopting, we had planned on adopting a boy, her state in India required either two trips or one longer trip when most had one short trip, the wait time until we could travel would probably be long- but ultimately none of it mattered. We wanted her. 

(In actuality, our time until travel was way shorter than expected, when we were matched with her I told Geoff "There is no way we will travel in 2017, don't even hope for it." Famous last words). 

We've since learned that when her file disappeared from the list she was not matched. We don't know why it disappeared, and we may never know. Do I think it was all meant to be, that God had our adoption fall through so we'd be right there when her file reappeared, or that he made her file disappear for that time just to reappear for us later? No. I don't think God meant for her to be separated from her birth family in the first place. I don’t really have any interest in a God that intentionally causes pain just for some grand “ta-da!” at the end, but I do believe in a God that takes situations full of brokenness, and manages to bring something beautiful out of them. I never imagined two years ago that we get to adopt that little girl who stopped me in my tracks, but I am so, so grateful that we did.