Dearest friends —
This letter comes to you in a moment of clarity and vulnerability. As some of you may know, and many more of you yet may not know, we are on a journey to parenthood through adoption. We have been together for eight years, and since we have known that we have wanted to have children we have known that we wanted to adopt. We can say without a doubt that we were meant to be adoptive parents and are hoping you will support us on this journey. In lieu of a baby shower, with the urging of many friends and family, we are using Adopt Together, a non-profit, crowdfunding website to help us with the financial aspect of adoption. As you might guess, adoption is pretty expensive. The average cost of a domestic infant adoption in the US today is $39,966. To put that into perspective, 6 years ago we bought our home for $85,500.
To go back a little, we have been focused on building our family for over 5 years. For three of those years we attempted with medical intervention, unsuccessfully, to conceive our own child. We know that some of you know personally what that means and how it feels, and still others can appreciate that pain; but to further clarify, three years of infertility treatment entails a great deal of stress - physical, financial and emotional. Literally thousands of injections, dozens of surgical procedures, two significant hospitalizations, two devastating miscarriages later and we had to quit. As it turns out, due to previous surgeries, I (Lindsay) am unable to have children naturally even with medical intervention. All of the hormones, hospitalizations, heartache, central lines, surgeries, pain and more have lead to this moment and we truly feel like this has all happened for a reason. We have always wanted to adopt as well as have our own biological children because we have so much love to give. Although the journey has been difficult at times so far, we have always tried to look at this as positively as possible. Our struggle with infertility really only served to redirect us back to this original point: our children are meant to join our family through adoption
You might ask — if you knew you wanted to adopt, and you knew you were having difficulties conceiving, why not just adopt from the beginning?
To answer that question we need to address two things. Firstly, realizing that you are unable to have a child with the person you love is more difficult to come to terms with than we had initially anticipated. Secondly, and unfortunately, is the financial constraint that comes with adoption. As we already touched on, adoption is a wee bit expensive. No, fertility treatments are not cheap, but plainly speaking, we just felt at that time that we could not afford adoption. So we tried to push through the trials of fertility treatment. Unfortunately after three years of trying and failing, we had ultimately spent roughly $25,000 out of pocket to no avail.
Luckily, as we move forward, we have found an outstanding adoption agency in Central NY that has agreed to help us. We are currently an approved adoptive family, which means that we have successfully completed our education requirements, our home study and we are now just waiting for a “match” (a match is when a birth family chooses us to place their child with). The total cost of this endeavor (legal fees, agency fees, medical costs) stands at about $21,000 - so well below the national average (and for that we are grateful), and yet far from inexpensive.
Simply, the reason that we are sharing so many details of our story, as painful as it may be for us, is to ask for your help. It was not an easy decision to come to you with this request, but we have been encouraged by a number of friends and family to reach out to our community for support. Admittedly, we also realize that there are many causes that need support right now, and we encourage you to explore those as well. However we would ask that if you would think of giving us a shower gift for a new baby, perhaps consider instead donating a small amount to our crowdfunding drive. We are blessed to have a household full of useful items that have been donated to us during our time as foster parents, so we are thankfully not necessarily in need in that area. Please know that we appreciate any donation amount that you may wish to contribute toward our goal of bringing a little one home with us.
Although we are reaching out to ask for help, please do not feel any pressure to donate - we certainly also appreciate your love and concern, warm thoughts, prayers and the crossing of fingers as well while we wait for a placement.
If you would like to share our story with family or friends, please feel free. If you yourself or someone you know is dealing with infertility or considering adoption, consider either of us a sounding board; we’d be more than happy to talk and share resources.
Most of all, thank you. Thank you for being a part of our lives, and thank you for taking the time to read about and consider our struggle. It means a great deal to us and to our growing family.
Love,
Jarrod and Lindsay
