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Adoption
hesitant husbands?
hi all - i'm new to the forum and so thankful to have found it.
we have reached the end of our ttc chapter and have been grieving that, and slowly talking about adoption as our next path. dh and i are both very committed to family and to being and having a family, and i know that he is open to adopting. but he. is. so. scared.
did any of you deal with hesitant husbands? did you just wait/pray/hope for his readiness?
it's important to note (maybe) that i have no doubt whatsoever about this man's ability to love a child that is not ours biologically. i know him, and i know he will show up 200%. but, do i coax/encourage? or just let it alone?
This discussion has been closed.
Re: hesitant husbands?
I was in the same situation at one point. I knew my husband was open to it, but he wasn't ready to say yes. I actually sought out blogs written by adoptive dads and we had dinner with a few adoptive dads in our church that he respected and trusted. After awhile he was just ready to jump in and now is so excited to think we might be chosen in the coming year. I always encouraged him to ask questions and I also voiced my own concerns and fears about the process which I think helped a lot. Being very open with him about the fact that we are able to say to our agency what we are and aren't willing to consider in our child's history helped too. At one point he was just afraid they could hand us a baby that had been exposed to alcohol, drugs, etc throughout the pregnancy and the parents had major mental illnesses etc and how we would ever know the baby was going to be ok. He came to terms with the limits we can set and we also realized there are always going to be risks, even with a biological child!
I said many prayers during the time I was waiting for him to agree! I also did tons of adoption research and even got packets from agencies in our area during the waiting time. When he was ready, I was also ready with information!!
Good luck!
Yes, I think many of us had hesitant husbands. I handled it very poory, which is that I basically gave him an ultimatum. Not cool. Fortunately, we got through that. I still feel much more involved in the process than him, but he's totally on board. I think it just takes some men a bit longer.
Good luck!
Welcome!
I was in the same exact situation when we started talking about adoption. My husband wasn't close minded to the option, but he was really scared about it. Like you, I also knew that my husband would love an adopted child no different than a bio child.
I would keep asking him if he was ready to move forward, and he just kept saying that he wasn't sure. So I asked if he would just go to an information session at an adoption agency. We did, and some of our questions were answered. However, he was still unsure. The next step was to attend an all day training at the agency. I said to my husband, why don't we go to this training to learn more, and then we can decide. He agreed to go, but was still very unsure going into the session.
The session was great. It was a small group of couples and a few social workers, and they explained the process in detail, answered questions, and couples shared their concerns with one another. I think one of the best parts for my husband was an adoptive mother who came in for about 30 minutes to talk about her experience with the agency and adopting. She brought her adopted toddler, who was super cute and went around to everyone in the room. I could tell that this is what won DH over. At the end of the session when we were walking to our car, without any prompting from me, he said, "I want to do this."
He was still scared during the process - much more so than me. However, he never talked about changing his mind. Then as soon as our baby was born, he was so in love. It's funny because our little boy has daddy wrapped around his finger. My husband is nuts about him. He also says that he doesn't care if we ever have a bio child (we never tried any infertility treatments) and that he's completely fine adopting all of our children.
I would suggest that you just encourage your husband to do as much information gathering as possible. Talk to agencies, but tell him that it's just to learn as much as you can to help you both make a decision. I think the fear is mostly of the unknown, and it helps so much to learn as much as you can.
I also encourage you to try to talk to other adoptive couples together. It is a very cool thing to hear the adoption stories of others. The first we heard in person was during the all day training. Later we heard our home study social worker talk about her two adoptions, and then our adoption consultant talk about her personal experience. Hearing these people talk about what they went through helped create a lot of excitement about the process, because you could see how happy and blessed these people have been through adoption.
Oh heck yeah. It took 6 months from the time we started talking about it to the point that he was ready to start the process. I read Adoption for Dummies and was so excited to tell him about stuff, and he interpreted it as me wanting to start the process Right Now, and he just wasn't ready. So I told him I would back off, but bring up the topic now and again. I did that by encouraging him to read the book, and telling him about teleseminars, webinars, and other informational sessions he might be interested in. After one or 2 of those, he started to get more comfortable with the idea.
DH's biggest hesitation was the homestudy. For some reason he was convinced that our agency would poke through our closets and rifle through his underwear drawer (not sure what he thought they'd find). We ended up on the phone with 2 agencies for an hour each, getting walked through the homestudy process, so he knew what we were getting into.
Once we started the process, he was fully on board and loves DD more than life itself, from the moment he laid eyes on her.
My poor DH was hesitant for quite awhile. Probably due to the fact that I ready to start our homestudy the minute I starting getting sick from all the IF meds. I can be a tiny bit overwhelming
It really helped him to talk to some adoptive parents, and adoptees. We also have a friend who is a birthmom and she was invaluable. He needed to see that it does work out and people can go on to be perfectly happy. He was terrified that we would have a baby ripped out of our home or that our child would grow up to hate us because we weren't it's "real" parents.
Once the we got into the whole process, he was much more at ease. Our social worker was awesome.
now i am realizing i don't know how to respond to all! embarrassing! hopefully this joins the main thread (or maybe, if not, alicia_22 can give me some pointers!).
anyway, just wanted to thank you all so much for the feedback - so many of you echoed our early sentiments exactly, as well as much of what i think my dh is going through.
one silver lining through all of this is the support that's come that i really didn't know i had - both from friends/friends of friends - and from all of you. thank you.
i am looking forward to having some news to post (and in the meantime, trying to be patient!).