HOLA! Introducing Me!
Hello—My name is Kieran and I’ve decided to document my journey through adoption here!
This is for my friends and family, for anyone thinking about adopting and especially for adult adoptees who are looking to adopt and/or singles going on this journey.
Let me start at the beginning… the day I was born. (Oh yeah we’re going WAYYYY Back)
Just kidding, because I know almost nothing. As a Colombian Adoptee of the 80s I had a closed adoption and my parents were given no information about me or my family history. The only information we have is from the paperwork, detailing my birth name and mother’s birth name and age. She was 15 on 1 piece and 16 on another. It’s not a leap to figure out why I was put up for adoption. (Though I believe the better phrase that is preferred to be used today is “why my birth mother made an adoption plan for me”, but this is how I’ve always referred to it my whole life and how my parents did so we’re going with it.)
They say to parents not to expect your adopted children to be grateful and while I might not have been as a child, as an adult I very much am. I had a good childhood, a steady, stable childhood, and I cannot imagine that to be true if I had stayed with a teenage mom, even if she did all that was humanly possible. She was still a child and deserved to ride that out and I hope that she did. (No, I have not ever initiated the process to find her. I’ll come back to this at some point.)
A trip in 2018 to Bogota (where I was born) solidified this gratitude as I saw where I could have grown up. If you have never been, it’s a very interesting city that in my lifetime has taken leaps and bounds towards progress. There are extremely modern high-rise buildings that echo NYC and then at the end of the same block there is an adobe-esque building with a tarp for a roof. It’s a city in transition. Then there are just large sections of the older style buildings that have yet to be touched.
The city is 8,660 feet or 2,640 meters above sea level. For American context, Denver is 5,280 feet or 1,609 meters. Before I traveled there, I saw the 2640 meters note and figured I’d be just fine because I had been in Denver, but I read FEET and not METERS. Spoiler Alert: I was not fine and spent my first day with elevation sickness. Shouldn’t my body have been predisposed to handle it? I digress… It’s WAY more smog filled than LA where I currently live. How could my little asthmatic lungs have handled that? Is that why I have asthma?? The traffic was WAY worse too, if my LA friends can believe it. It’s so bad there (because they don’t have 6 lane highways) that you drive on a schedule set to whether your license plate ends in an Even or Odd number. Families with 2 cars, typically have one of each, as their license plates are married to the car for its lifetime regardless of ownership (as our tour guide explained to us/how I remember what he said). Carpooling is a way of life, since people must get to work every day of the week. All this is to serve as an explanation why I very much preferred living the simple NJ suburban life. With a huge yard and playset and a large room all to myself.
Fun Fact: You can take the girl outta Jersey but you can’t take the Jersey outta the girl. But, as it turns out, you can very much take the Colombian right out, apparently. There’s like nothing Colombian about me, aside from my features and birth place…
Cut To: (oh get ready for the film/tv references people, I went to film school!)
2019 I turn 35, I’m single, SO single. And even if I met Mr. Right immediately, I’d still be a geriatric pregnancy and not even attempting kids for a while. Do-able but the clock is ticking. I make a promise to myself, to start looking into adoption. All I do is google the cost and the timeline and set it aside. I’m doing well at my job, but I’ve just been through a year of health crap, and I’ll need to SAVE. I’m not ready yet. I say to myself “at 37 I’ll start getting serious about this”.
Cut to: 2020
I mean need I say more? You get it, I’m sure, but for added context, by the end of this year I’ve quit my job and am unemployed. I take on some consulting work in 2021, but it’s not paying all the bills. I take in a roommate. I’m on food stamps. I’m 37 now, but ain’t no one give me a child when I’m barely taking care of myself. I push it aside. What else can I do?
I try not to think about how I’ll be an “old mom” something that always bothered me growing up. I still remember being in high school at Victoria’s Secret with my mom shopping for new bras and not 1 but 2, sales ladies assumed, and thought it was cute, that my grandmom was taking me bra shopping. At 37, I’m 1 year older than my parents were at the time of my adoption. But it is what it is. I take comfort in the fact that people are pushing off having kids until later so much more now than when I was a kid. So I won’t be the only older parent. (If you don’t believe this to be true, shhh, let me be!)
Cut To: 2024 and I turn 40. I’m still incredibly single, having not gotten past a 2nd date with anyone in YEARS. BUT I have started my own business, and things are going really well. Money is relatively steady and I’m feeling pretty good. Time to start looking into adoption FOR REAL. One day in the summer, it just struck me, I need to go through FANA, the organization where I had once been. On my 2018 trip, my parents and I actually went to their newer facility (so not where’d I’d once been), and met the daughter of the woman who started it and had placed me with my parents once up on a time. So I went on their website, found the people to talk to and had my first conversation with their American counterparts “Families of FANA” in July. The woman outlined the process for me and explained the basics and gave me the names of the few American Adoption Agencies they work with. She recommended Madison Adoption Associates. The costs and timelines were totally daunting, but with a 2-3 year timetable I realized I had to get started ASAP. The money piece I could figure out along the way and it’s not like it’d all be due at once anyway. I felt this would be such a beautiful way to reconnect to my heritage, and also be a way for my child and I to have a connection and similar origin stories.
In November 2024, I officially signed my contracts with both Madison (Now Gladney) and Holt International. I need to use Holt, because Gladney is not approved to complete home studies in the state of California. Great, that automatically means it costs a bit more…
If you know me at all I’m not afraid to talk finances and I’m almost always thinking about them. For my life, for my business. I aim to be crazy transparent here as I have nothing to hide! (Not talking about this stuff keeps us small, from asking for raises, from not having generational wealth knowledge and F’ that!) I crave stability and probably obsess over them a bit much. BUT, I also am pretty good with them and LOVE finding a great deal.
So, the fact that I am choosing to adopt in pretty much the most expensive way possible (looking at 50-60k) tells you how important this is to me that I find a child in a similar way I was once found. I could Foster to Adopt, where the state would even pay me. But I foster failed with my dog, and I don’t think my heart could take it since the goal of the foster system is to unite children with their birth families. You are the last option, never the first. I could go domestic or international with another country, all of which are likely to be cheaper. And that hurts a part of my brain, but my heart keeps consistently telling it to shut up and clip a coupon.
To that end - I’ve set up a fundraising page with Adopttogether.org. They are a 501c3 so whatever you donate is fully tax deductible, unlike with some other crowdfunding sites. As a self-employed person, I want to be able to take a regular maternity leave, so every penny not spent on fees, is a penny back in my pocket and incredibly helpful to me! I’d prefer this route rather than making this Substack a paid one.
And if you’re feeling super generous, poke around on that homepage and help out one of the other awesome families too.
So now you know how I got here. In future posts I have MUCH to say about this process and how all the trainings and paperwork make me feel. I have a lot of feelings, every day about it and I’m hoping writing this helps me process it all, and maybe in turn helps someone else know that they’re not alone. Buckle up! (Or rather just sit tight, because this is actually gonna take another 1-2yrs, we’re gonna go so slow you don’t really have to worry about a seat belt. Turtles will probably move faster…) Thank you for joining me on this ride (the Disney kind that is barely a ride but has a cute soundtrack). ❤️
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Know someone who might be interested in following along with me and/or thinking about going through the adoption process? Send them the link.
Cute pic from the social announcement I did with my dog, because I mean does anyone actually hate a smiling dog learning how to read???
