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Tania is a birth parent counselor with five years experience at a licensed child-placing agency.

She not only is a birth parent counselor, but also is an options counselor, and a post-adoptive caseworker. In addition, Tania works with teen parents in a school setting, and is, herself, a young mother.

Tania is here to help answer your questions about adoption.

 

 

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Sara

1 :: The Decision    

I was a junior in college when I became pregnant, unexpectedly. And I found out actually two days before classes were starting, in the fall semester of my junior year. School was very important to me and I knew I wanted to get through.

It was a very short-lived relationship; something that I knew wasn’t going to be long-term anyway. And originally the father of the child had wanted me to have an abortion, and I just decided that that wasn’t something that I could do. So I talked with him about adoption and he agreed that that would be fine and he would go along with that. So I decided very early on that I wanted to place the child for adoption. I knew that I could not give him (I later found out it was a him) what I wanted him to have from a family; I couldn’t give him the mom and the dad and everything that he deserved. So I decided that would be the best thing for him. So I started the process very early on. They were surprised, I know. They had said that usually people wait until much later in the pregnancy, and I was probably only about nine weeks or so the first time I went there. But for me, it was easier starting early, getting clear on what the process would be and where it would go, so I would know what to expect and so I could get myself used to the idea of it. So I did that and had a lot of support from my friends at school. I was very open and very clear with everybody what I was doing, continued to go through class both semesters.

When I was about five months pregnant, I think, the adoption caseworker had me start looking through family profiles of different prospective adoptive parents. You know, they write about themselves. They do their biographies, and then they put in pictures of stuff that’s important to them. And I looked through, I think, probably nine different profiles before I found a couple of families that I liked. And I wasn’t sure who I wanted to go with, so the caseworker agreed to set up a meeting for me with some of the parents. And the couple who I eventually … well, I decided that day, the day that I met them … I decided that I definitely wanted them to adopt my son, were absolutely incredible. We met, we sat down in the office, and talked for probably three hours or so about, you know, my life, their life, their goals, what they wanted to have happen for their children. They’d adopted one child previously, so I got to meet her and it was just a very open sort of situation.

I had let them know that I wanted to do at least a partially open adoption. I didn’t want it to be completely open, or I didn’t know that it could be completely open at that time, I guess. And so I just asked that whomever the adoptive parents were, that they be open to writing letters and exchanging pictures and that sort of thing so that I could see how he was developing and how he was doing and know that he was okay.

After that first meeting, we began writing letters back and forth. I’d write letters to them letting them know how the pregnancy was going; anything new that had happened or developed. And then they came down to visit again, I think when I was about seven months pregnant or so. I invited them to come to a doctor’s appointment, so they came and got to see a sonogram and see the baby then. And I told them that it was going to be a boy then, ’cause I had found out just a little bit before then. And so we were all very excited about that and started discussing names.

We picked out and named him together and just were very open from the very beginning. I mean I totally clicked with them and I felt like they … I envisioned them as the type of parents who I would want to be someday when I was raising my own family.