For Adoptive Couples

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Steven & Kimra

I think like so many, we were extremely skeptical with the idea of putting our profile online. It seemed like we would be making something so very private and intimate very public. Although we were very leery, we had been less than welcomed by many traditional adoption workers. We didn’t fit the mold that they were looking for. We were an “older” couple (40’s), with 3 children, with a rather unique life and parenting style…and I am overweight. Many adoption workers thought they knew best and wanted to “help” us to “revise” our profile to fit what they “knew” to work. Well we weren’t interested in that, we felt that was manipulative and untruthful.

We truly believe that the children that we are meant to raise will come to us. We wanted to be able to write and show who we are…not what some adoption worker felt that pregnant women are looking for. We wanted women who were making an adoption plan to be able to freely choose the family they want. So with the prompting of our adoption team (who by the way were NEVER negative about any of the things that other “professionals” had been and instead thought of these things as positives!) we signed up for Parent Profiles. I looked at the profiles and thought…ok some of these people sound so perfect. I remember saying to our consultant…I just don’t know – they all sound so much better than us! But we decided to write from our hearts and to do our best to try to convey who we are. We really didn’t expect anything to happen, but felt like it was something we could do to feel like we were involved in the process.

After about 6 weeks of becoming active on the site and just a day or so after signing up for Extreme Exposure, we had our first contact. Then after that, we ended up with quite a few contacts, many were not legitimate contacts, but within 3-1/2 months of being activated on the site we had been contacted by 3 legitimate, serious, verifiable, women (possibly more). And within 7 months of activation we had our new baby in our arms 6/06! I think that being on a forum such as Parent Profiles, we are often contacted by women who have a strong sense of what they want and what they are looking for. Just as we didn’t want adoption professionals telling us what we should be doing or how we should present ourselves, many of the pregnant women we talked to did not want professionals doing that with them either. Or they didn’t want someone to hand them 3-4 profiles that they thought would be best for them, they wanted to be able to look at as many as they wanted. Sometimes those things that the “experts” think are negatives are actually things that expectant woman sees as positives and is looking for in a family for her baby. And interestingly enough, the comment that we heard over and over again was that they liked that we were such a “real” family…that we didn’t seem phony or too “perfect”! I think Parent Profiles is a great thing. It gives expecting women a place to look and find what they want rather than only being given what an agency thinks they should see. We’ll definitely be back.