Devine Inspiration

In the beginning, we decided to adopt.  My wife can not have children and if she did it would put her life at risk and/or may pass on her disorder to our child.  When we decided to adopt, it was in the late 90's.  The internet was still kind of new.  We could not research to the level we can today.  We knew we did not want to adopt domestically.  We felt that there were too many issues.  That does not even include what we learned as foster parents.

We discovered international adoption after watching a news show.  The story was on children in Russian orphanages.  After that story, my wife started to look in the process.  We attended a meeting about the subject at a church.  An adoption agency explained the ins and outs of international adoption.  The country we liked was China.  Unfortunately,  we were too young.  Both parents had to be 35+.  We were in our 20's.  At this point, we felt we should wait. 

In our work lives, things were not looking good.  Angie was working at an insurance company helping with accounting and I was managing a movie theater.  Neither paid very well and being a manager of a theater requires lots of time away from home.  During the holidays, the manager is expected to give up all his/her time.  Not only that, but the news had announced that another theater corporation would be building a stadium seating theater within 5 to 10 miles of my theater.

I tried to convince management that they needed to do something.  I was hoping they would add theaters and turn my theater into a stadium seating theater.  They said to wait and I would have no problems.  I did not believe them.  My wife and I decided to move to Florida.  This move changed our lives. 

I will get into fostering in another post.   But when we moved down to Florida, we became foster parents.  If you want a crash course in adopting a child, I would say fostering would be a great way to start.  During this period, we took in may children and just tried to get our lives in order.  We had all but forgot about international adoption.

When we were working, we like to listen to books on tape/CD.  One of our favorite authors was Jeffery Deaver.  If you have not read his work, I would highly recommend his books starting with The Bone Collector.  His characters are police investigators who track down criminals through their evidence.  We had started listening to The Stone Monkey.  This book is about human trafficking from China and a killer Snakehead (person who transports them over seas).  At the end of the story, a baby is left parent less due to the killer.  Both the main characters think about adopting the child.

At this point, a lightbulb went off in our heads.  We thought about China again.  Low and behold, China had lowered the ages of the parents to 30.  Angie was just about to turn 30 that year.  This was our inspiration for starting the process.  We even wrote Mr. Deaver to thank him for the inspiration.  It was probably not the kind of thanks he was used to.