"The Letter"

A letter I found in a book I'm reading. Feel free to read it...or not.

Dear Caseworker,

How perfectly furious it makes us that we do not have control of our own lives. Most couples decide for themselves when the time is right for a baby. Most couples need not ask for references from their parents, friends, neighbors, employers, or clergymen before planning additions to their families. Most couples have health insurance that helps to cover the financial strain of the arrival of a new child. Most couples decide on their own whether or not both of their children's parents should work outside the home. Most couples do not live each day of their lives over a span of several years of family planning with the anxious knowledge that any time, any day, the phone might ring, and, with no warning, no nine month wait, no gradual acquisition of correctly sized clothes and appropriate toys, no previous guarantees that carefully made vacation plans or education or job commitments could be carried out, a caller might say, "Are you ready? There is a one day/three month/one year old/boy/girl waiting to be yours if you say the word."

But we aren't most couples. We are an infertile couple. Frankly we came to adoption as a second choice, our primary motivation a selfish one-we wanted a baby and we couldn't make one. but this wasn't something that we felt we could openly share with you. Nor could we share with you how humiliating it felt to need to prove ourselves to you and to those whom we had to ask to fill out reference forms for us before we could have a child placed in our home. Though in our private conversation with each other we talked about what financial strategies we would need to follow in order to save enough money to "buy" our baby from you, we feared that you would be horrified and insulted if we shared with you our feeling that the fee you need to charge us was a purchase price. We got all kinds of messages from both you and from society in general about the process we were entering, and because those messages were so mixed, we felt it safer to say nothing, even when we felt strongly about something you were saying or doing. Because we acknowledged your expertise and questioned our own, we smiled and nodded and agreed to whatever you asked of us without daring to question anything in your agency's process of adoption.

Surprised at the depth of our own reactions to our thwarted family plans, we found it difficult to trust that anyone could truly understand us and the trauma to an individual or to a relationship that comes of being found to be infertile and considering the alternative of adoption. the only way this can truly be grasped is to be infertile and to want children. How we'd love to insist that all caseworkers be adoptive parents, but we know that this is both impractical and impossible.

Though in most other aspects of our lives we are assertive people, we didn't dare assert ourselves with you, Dear Caseworker. You were too powerful. With you rested our only hope of being parents.

But now that we are parents, Dear Caseworker, we need to speak, because the system we dealt with, an old and beleaguered system entrenched in tradition rather than responsive to changing needs, needs revision. As it is it hurts too much, and, having satisfied our desire for a baby, even realizing that there are other, older children out there who need us, we can't quite bring ourselves to risk again the adoption system's humiliating pain. Fix it, Dear Caseworker. It shouldn't have to be this way.

An Adoptive Couple

From: Adopting After Infertility by Patricia Irwin Johnston.