When Catherine Casey first met her daughter, she had reason to be relieved. After enduring infertility treatments and then patiently waiting nearly a year while the adoption process crept along, Casey was more than ready to meet her little girl. Finally, in May 1997, her wait was over. After a long flight to China, a chaotic six-hour van ride and a few nervously giddy hours at a local hotel with a small group of fellow adoptive parents, Casey and her husband, Stuart, met little LiAnn. "My first thought upon seeing LiAnn was that she was even more beautiful than her picture," Casey recalls. "When the orphanage nanny placed her in my arms, I think I felt that a great treasure had been bestowed upon me." Today, Casey, Stuart and 6-year-old LiAnn are happily settled into life as a family. And while Casey looks back on that day as one of the "coolest" days of her life, getting there required making some tough decisions, committing to an unknown outcome and drawing on an enormous reserve of patience. We talked to Casey recently about how she did it and what she learned. Here is her story:
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When did you adopt your child and how? |
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We adopted LiAnn in May of 1997. We used a local adoption agency recommended by someone I once worked with. She called me one day and told me she was coming to town to attend orientation for an adoption agency. At the time, I was going through infertility treatments and my husband and I weren't considering adoption. But after hearing how excited my co-worker was about adopting from Korea through a local agency, I stuffed the idea in my back pocket. When my husband and I started getting interested in adoption, I called the agency and got information. They were great. They specialize in international adoptions, and they walked us through all the options before we decided on adopting a child from China. |
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What made you choose an international adoption? |
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It seemed much less uncertain. I knew two people who adopted domestically — my sister-in-law and my boss at the time — and I had seen them both get kind of beat up by the process. In many cases, you're dealing with a birth mother who is facing an emotional crisis of her own. And you hear about adoptive parents being left in the waiting room at the hospital because at the last minute the birth mother changed her mind. It worked out great for my sister-in-law and former boss, but the whole process just seemed like something I didn't want to go through. And having a white infant really wasn't that important to us, so it was not a stretch for us to look overseas. We'd heard about the China program, and we liked the fact that babies coming from China were pretty healthy. Also, we had decided that we were only going to have one child and we would like to have a girl, which made China ideal — 95 percent of the children adopted there are girls. |
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Were there any surprises in the adoption process? |
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Well, it took longer than we had anticipated. One of the things that attracted us to the China program was that it took about four months to adopt. But between the time we first started looking at the program and the time we made a firm commitment to adopt, they had changed the rules. So the process went from about four months to a year. There was a lot of paperwork and tons of documentation, on the U.S. side as well as the Chinese side. We used to joke that you had to do everything but walk down the street naked because you have to be so open with them while they look into whether you're going to be good parents. I think we spent about two months filling out the paperwork for the application. Then we handed that over to the adoption agency, which waits until it has paperwork from several families before going to the Chinese agencies as a group. Then you sit and wait. And wait and wait. We waited about nine months from the time we submitted the paperwork to the time we were referred a baby. And then all we got was a little picture that is about 1 inch by 1 inch and some accompanying medical information, which was so vague that it was actually pretty useless. But we had this 1-inch-by-1-inch picture, which we were over the moon about. After that it was another six weeks before they approved us to go to China to pick her up, and that wait was very, very hard. |
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How about emotionally? Was the process fairly predictable or was it a roller coaster ride? |
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As far as these things go, it was pretty steady. The one thing that you can say about adopting from China is that you don't run into the unexpected snafus that you might in other countries. In China, when they say it is going to be roughly this amount of time and this is what is going to happen, that's generally what happens. But you're still an anxious parent-to-be, and because it is international you're worried about any international incidents that may happen. At one point during the process there was a bru-ha-ha about the state of orphanages in China; there were big articles in Time magazine and in The New York Times. So everyone was up in arms and we were worried that the Chinese would shut down the program before we could adopt our baby. They didn't, but it definitely added anxiety And because you're already an anxious parent-to-be almost anything can make you jump out of your skin until your baby is in your arms. |
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What was the cost of the adoption? |
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It was close to $20,000. It varies from country to country, but I think $15,000 to $20,000 is about what it usually costs. |
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Did you have any concerns about the health of a baby adopted abroad? |
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Sure. We would have liked some real health information, but we had heard that the vast majority of babies coming from China are quite healthy. So, we relied on that. And as my husband had said from the start, "You don't know if you're going to have health with your biological child either, so it's always a risk." |
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What was the most difficult part of the adoption process for you? |
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Probably two things: one — and this is probably common among adoptive couples — was agreeing as a couple that this is what we wanted to do. My husband wasn't interested at all at first, and coming to an agreement on it was a big thing for us. I'll tell you a neat story about that, too. We were wrestling with this for a number of months, and once we finally made up our minds that we were going to adopt and adopt from China, we kept it to ourselves for a little while. During that time, a childhood friend of my husband's came to visit him and was kicking around in our back yard when he found a coin. It was a 19th-century Chinese coin, and I have no idea how it got there. When my husband told me about the coin, we just looked at each other and said, "That's the sign."
The second difficulty was the waiting. That was hard. Once it was done, it was certainly well worth it, but waiting the 12 months when you're so anxious to be a parent is hard. And waiting for six weeks after we got her picture was very difficult. |
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Do you think you were fully prepared going into it? |
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I talked to as many people as I could. I did a little informal networking through colleagues and connected with other people through the adoption agency and through Families With Children From China, an association for families adopting or considering adopting from China. I guess we were as prepared as we could have been. I don't think anybody understands what it is like to be a parent until you are one. Our agency did a good job preparing us. They had an extensive orientation and hooked us up with a pediatrician's office familiar with adoptions abroad. |
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How has your child adjusted? |
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I think she is fully adjusted. All of the children I know of that come from China have had some sort of developmental delays. Usually they are underweight, or they might not be walking, crawling or getting teeth as early as American babies. But by the time they are over here for a year, they are almost all caught up. In terms of her being "American," that took no time.
One of the good things about her being a different race is that it has made it easier for our family to talk about her being adopted. It is a big thing to deal with — talking to your child about being adopted — but if you look different from each other it comes up very naturally and early on. We've been talking about this since she was 2. We talk about her birth parents and what a wonderful gift it was that they gave her to us. One thing that is interesting is that when she was around 2 years old she used to make me role-play the adoption. She would have me pretend to be her birth mother leaving her at the orphanage, and then she would have me pretend to be the director of the orphanage and then act out my own role coming to get her. And we had to do it over and over again. I think it was her attempt to understand what was going on. And I know that all children are different, but I'm hoping that because we've been talking about it since she was little, it will be easier for her to deal with. |
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What do you do to keep her connected to her heritage, and what's her response so far? |
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We do talk about it. We are members of Families With Children From China and have stayed in close contact with the other families we traveled to China with when we adopted our daughter. We try to celebrate Chinese holidays, we cook Chinese food, I read her Chinese fairytales, and we try to take her to Chinese cultural events. I have offered to sign her up for classes in Mandarin and in Chinese dance, but so far she's not too interested in that. I plan to make the option available to her, without cramming it down her throat. It's kind of interesting — when you are the parent of a child who was born in another country, you seem to become the biggest booster of anything that ever came out of that culture. And it's kind of fun to explore the culture with her and incorporate it into our family life. |
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What advice do you have for other parents? |
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Particularly for Caucasian parents adopting from Asia, you need to be sure you're ready to answer other people's questions about your family. There is another layer for the adoptive parents when you so obviously are the not the baby's biological parents. And your child is listening to everything you say and watching how you react. So, if someone says something insensitive, you may go home afterward and rail to your husband, but you can't do it in front of your kids. Having said that, I think that most parents who come up to us and talk about it are other adoptive parents. It's kind of fun to make that connection. One other piece of advice is that if people are at all worried about what I would consider normal developmental delays in international children, I wouldn't put too much stock in that. I would talk to the people at the adoption agency and pediatricians here who have worked with these children, because they do catch up. It's not a big deal. Sometimes there are going to be health problems, but this stuff about being underweight or not walking until they are 15 months old doesn't make a bit of difference in the long run. |
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Would you do it again, and if so, would you do anything differently? |
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We would definitely do it again. It turned out perfectly for our family. The only thing I would maybe do differently is sometimes I wish we had done it earlier and not wasted a lot of time and emotion on the infertility treatments. But then again, the timing was right for us. If we had done it another time, we wouldn't have gotten LiAnn. So I guess I wouldn't have done anything different after all.
Christina Breda Antoniades is a freelance writer and mother of 9-month-old Vasili. She has written extensively for Discovery.com, including the Travel Channel Online and Discovery Health Online. In her nine months as a new mommy, Christina has come to learn the joys and pains of parenthood. |
Picture: DCI |
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