Why Adoption?

It is a question we have heard from those closest to us and those who have just met us.  Usually for those who do not know us well it follows with "is your son adopted?" to which we say no and then we get the "then why are you adopting?" question.  There are lots of reasons we could list like the religious one: we felt there was a child out there that was supposed to be part of our family or the fertility card: fertility treatments did not work or a funny one: We already have 2 sets of triplet nieces and nephews and decided quads were out for us.  We could give a travel reason: We always dreamed of going to Siberia or the one that makes the most sense to us: this is where we ended up.  I don't think we started out planning to adopt, although I have heard from my family that I said at a young age that I was going to adopt (and that my younger sister told me that I had to give birth at least once to go through the pain).  When my husband and I dreamed about what our family would look like, we usually thought it would have at least 2 kids in it but back then, we had no idea how hard that would actually be.   Once we decided to adopt, it did not take us long to be pulled towards adopting an older child.  There are so many people who want babies, long lines of people who can't wait for a little bundle of joy but those lines dry up as the children get older.  I want to be honest, we were nervous about considering an older child.  Anyone can search online or get an unsolicited story about someone that they knew or heard of that adopted an older child and all of the horrible things that happened.  One person told me that would be taking on someone else's problems.  The thing is that a lot of these children are pretty amazing and the only thing they want is a family to call their own.  When we first started looking into older adoption we started with calling our local foster care agency, they told us that their goal was reunification and if we were looking for adoption then we were at the wrong place.  We hired a consultant to go through all of our options, domestic, foster, international, special needs and spent a lot of time talking together about what our family could look like.  When we found the hosting program that we participated in, we finally felt like we were headed in the right direction.  That is not to say that this journey has been smooth.  There are days I want to pull my own hair out because nothing seems to be going our way or there is an arbitrary rule change or we are getting our 3rd round of chest x-rays done, or yet another round of blood tests because the results expire within 3 months and I can't see the end in sight.  Then I pull out our photo album from this summer and I remember why we are doing this, that there is a child out there who needs us and wants us as much as we need and want her.