Hardly a day passes that I don’t have to explain why my two sons are only seven months apart in age. Strangers usually mistake them for twins and then are genuinely baffled when I tell them Weston is just over 2-1/2, and Samuel recently turned 2.
“How in the world is that physically possible?” they always ask.
My canned response, “Samuel’s adopted. Weston is biological.” Maybe I should turn this into a button or T-shirt to save me from repeatedly having to explain it.
Many people would follow up with, “I had a friend who tried to have a baby for years, then gave up. But as soon as she signed up for adoption, bam! She got pregnant, and ended up with two babies, just like you!”
No, that’s not just like me. Fertility was not an issue. In fact, my husband and I timed out the adoption process so that our biological and adopted sons would be very close in age. As “virtual twins,” we hoped they would play with each other and grow up to be best friends. We promised ourselves we would do our best to treat them equally.
My husband Louis says he thought about adoption long before we got married. But the idea never hit me until I saw a TV special on quarterback Dan Marino on ESPN, which profiled his four biological children and two adopted children. His story touched me so deeply that I turned to my husband and said, “I’d love to adopt, too.” He simply agreed, and that was it.
Louis and I grew up with Korean adoptee friends raised by Caucasian families. While I admire the hearts of their adoptive parents, I always felt a sense of regret for my friends who experienced little to no interaction with the Korean culture or community. Other than the souvenir hanbok and a picture book of Korea, nothing in their homes showed that a Korean child lived there. No big jar of kimchi, no rice cooker, and everyone wore their shoes in the house. Those memories planted the seeds that would grow into a “calling” later in life to adopt from Korea — a country I would learn was sadly not embracing its own orphaned children because of cultural and social stigmas that still exist.
The South Korean government has always viewed the low domestic adoption rate as a problem and an embarrassment. In recent years, the government has stepped up efforts by offering financial incentives to adoptive parents, incorporating positive information about adoption in school curriculum, and is even allowing single parents to adopt.
Our adoption process took two years through Holt International, during which we went through criminal, medical and financial background checks, a detailed home study, and parenting classes. I made sure to emphasize in our application that I worked as a news anchor for ABC in San Diego and that both Louis and I were Korean-born Americans. We were eager to adopt a boy sooner than later, and hoped those factors would expedite the process. They didn’t. Like everyone else, we waited many months for the adoption to be approved, and for the agency to choose an anonymous woman’s baby to be our son.
