My Story - Prologue

For almost two years now, I have been working on a book about our adoption experience and ICA as a whole. My original plan was to make it a commercial venture for publication, with the intent of using half of what I earned for non-profits and the other half to go into my kids' college fund. But life is too busy and I can't ever seem to get to editting it. Some day I may publish it, and there are some possibilities on how it may be reworked in the future. But for the time being I figured what the heck, why not share it.

Each week, I will post one section of it to Guatadopt. This week is a short one, the prologue. As this develops, feel free to comment on it. My hope is that it will help some folks understand their own feelings and stories, be of valuable information, and provide some solace. Those who have followed my writing on Guatadopt know that at times I can be pretty controversial. Feel free to comment on things you disagree with. But I will post one point of caution - this is a very personal story from the deepest depths of my heart. Our adoption experience changed me in more ways that I can mention. So please, depite my thick skin and love of a good fight, remember to be kind...

Prologue
What an amazing year 2003 proved to be. For me, it is a year of great contrast. In most every way, it was one of the worst years of my life. War in Iraq, SARS, Mad Cow, the loss of a grandfather, a tough year for my employer, and more all contributed to a general malaise not only personally but also for the world at large. I’ll admit, I felt burnt out and depressed, not the norm for a pretty jovial fellow. This wasn’t really caused by all the things mentioned above, I was able to handle a world gone mad and some personal turmoil. It was caused by the fact that virtually the entire year was spent in the intercountry adoption process. I remember telling a friend as the process neared to an end that in a way, I almost wished that the adoption would not be completed until 2004, so that nothing could change my memory of the year that shouldn’t have been. In the end, on December 17, 2003, the whole year became one of the greatest I could possibly ever know. For on that day, Isabel finally was home.

The year changed me forever, and not only in becoming a father. Maybe it was because of the year it was. Maybe it was because of the person I am. Maybe it was because of the person I wish to be. Whichever the case may be, the intercountry adoption experience, my experience, left me with a changed outlook and focus in my life. This book is about that change. I write it for myself as much as for anyone else who may read it. My hope is that it will help to serve as a guide for all stakeholders in the adoption community. I hope that my story may give some insight not only for fellow adoptive families, but also for those more deeply involved with the institution and its processes. But most of all, I hope that it serves as testament for myself to prevent me from losing my passion, interest, and desire to make my own contribution to an institution for which I owe so much.

As you embark on reading this, please be forewarned. There will likely be some parts that will anger and offend you. There will be some parts that make you laugh, and possibly others that make you cry. At times, you’ll need to put the book down and think about what it is you just read and what are its implications. You will be forced to challenge the paradigm in which you generally feel comfortable. It will raise uncomfortable questions for families like mine that have been formed and grown through intercountry adoption. But by the end, my first ambition is that you don’t wish to strangle me. Beyond that, it is that you will have been put through some introspection and are better able to form your own perspective.

While admittedly I have very strong opinions and they inevitably will come out as I write this book, I do not claim them to be any sort of gospel. Opinions belong only to the person who holds them.

In college, I wrote an opinion column for the school newspaper and had the dubious honor of setting a new record for letters written to the editor in a semester. Only a selective few were in support of what I had written. Nonetheless, I was voted “Best Opinion Columnist” by the newspaper staff. My last column before graduation tried to leave things on a conciliatory note. In it I wrote, “Why be offended by what some shmuck writes in the opinion column of a college newspaper” and went on to describe how hearing opposing views should make one more secure in their own beliefs. I take that same philosophy to this endeavor. You don’t need to agree with me and you don’t need to be offended by what I believe. I use passionate, at times inflammatory, verbiage and hold very strong beliefs. Trust in good faith that I am an ethical person whose self-pride comes from a dedication to morality, honesty, and conviction that can at times be to my detriment.

If you come away thinking that I am some sort of radical, left wing, unpatriotic, tree-hugging ideologue, that’s okay. It’s your opinion and you own it. Hopefully the book will not have been for a loss. If nothing else, now you can better understand the psychology of the radical, left wing, unpatriotic, tree-hugging ideologues of the world. Though it is more than likely that those who begin this book coming from a mindset quite different from my own will depart from it realizing that we aren’t so different after all. We all have a similar vision for what “should be”, especially when it comes to the well being of children.

The world of adoption is not what it should be. After all, children are the most precious of all god’s gifts. Somehow, it would logically seem that it should be fairly easy to reach consensus on decisions regarding what’s right for children. Everyone agrees children deserve special protections and rights. However, if this was so obvious and unworthy of debate, I wouldn’t be writing this book. My experience would not have been what it was. I wouldn’t have become actively involved in the world of intercountry adoption. And I wouldn’t know how fortunate I still was because my experience was nothing compared to what others I know have been through. There are questions, there are topics in need of debate, and there are many gray areas where common sense, immediate versus long-term goals, and practical reality don’t see eye to eye.

We all have a natural tendency to view adoption issues through the specter of which we are involved in it. Parents, adoption agencies, lawyers, bureaucrats, and humanitarians all come from different perspectives as they approach any of the hot-topic issues. While I too am guilty of this by default, I have tried to overcome this and approach adoption from a different mindset – that of the child born in an impoverished nation like Guatemala. Even more so, I’ve struggled to keep the well being of the child alive in the macro sense while not sacrificing any child in the micro sense.

With all these warnings in the open air, I must remember this is also a heartwarming story. It is a story that I’m ecstatic to reveal has the happiest of endings. My daughter is home, happy, and healthy. She is the joy in my life. We now have the family we sought out to create years ago. My lovely wife can finally call herself a mom. And through the process my wife and I had many different adventures, many of them wonderful and unforgettable. From being unexpectedly swarmed by a bus full of children as we gave away tie-dyed tee shirts in an indigenous village on our first ever full day in Guatemala to the tears in the eyes of our foster family at the airport as we left with Isabel on her way home to the joy in my parents’ smiles as we exited customs and Isabel officially became a citizen, there is a lot to rejoice about in the pages that come.

With all this said, I hope the idea of this book has captured your interest. If it has, I’m sure you will enjoy the hours spent reading it. In order to make it easier to read, and allow the reader to flip channels between CNN and Lifetime so to speak, I have broken the book up into different sections. The content of the sections will intermingle and I apologize in advance for any redundancies. But I felt it would be better to separate the saga of our adopting Isabel from the larger societal issues facing intercountry adoption. So if you are someone in the process of an adoption, you can read the tale of our adoption to help you know that you are not alone in your emotions and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But when that same person suddenly realizes all that surrounds international adoption and wants to understand it more, the other sections will be a welcomed read.

I dedicate this book to my wife Sheila and my daughter Isabel who not only gave me some days alone in the house to write this, but also serve as my strength, inspiration and purpose. Some day, I know Isabel will have questions about what brought her to us. This book serves as one piece of that understanding in a personal as well as societal sense.

Being the rebel I am, I also have a counter-dedication for this book. Because while I do not wish to thank them or promote their agenda, it is true that without them this book would likely never have even been conceived. So to the kind folks at the Hague, UNICEF, Casa Alianza, and others whom in my opinion all allow their idealistic vision to blur their common sense and humanity, I couldn’t have done it withoutcha!