How did you know when to stop trying?

Another infertility blogger posted this question – so lets keep it moving around.

Naturally:
Suffering a miscarriage after years of trying to conceive naturally, after another six months (now years) – it was time to move onto adoption. This was a fairly easy choice to make.

Adoption Road 1:
Starting into adoption, we didn’t know which way to turn. After researching, we entered into a Taiwan program with a specific orphanage; the orphanage was connected with three US agencies. We chose the agency we did because it had a local satellite office. They quoted us average waiting times, and after surpassing them by 8 months…10 months…12 months….with several waiting couples in front of us, we started asking questions. We always got false, hidden, or no answers. After having our homestudy agency call and inquire, they knew we were starting to have doubts. In addition, they had all of our financial information. When we got a call from them on a “healthy” child available from a different program that costed significantly more money, we decided to pursue it. In addition to the lie that we would probably not see a young healthy infant from the program which we were involved in (you tell us this after 14 months?!), we were being deceived even more. Another couple had been to pick up their child at the orphanage, and found out the agency was sliding in other families ahead of us – families that had to wait much less time (they were there picking their child up at the same time…really, did they think we didn’t all talk?). Anyhow, they told us only a specific birthday of a healthy infant, and after much time went by (weeks), we called to ask where the referral was…after this call, we then received a referral of a different child…not so healthy, a different birth date, and older…obviously a different child than the first mentioned “healthy child”. It didn’t feel right from the start – we were being pushed out of the orphanage we wanted to work with because our bank account could afford it. We asked questions to the agency – only to get no answers. We took the referral to two physicians, only to get less than an enthusiastic response. In telling the agency we did not want to go down this road, we were told that we needed to get educated. That was the end of that – we educated ourselves more than most. Shortly after this happened, the agency had shut down both programs completely; we also know of another instance where an infant out of this foster care program had significant medical issues including microcephaly – which was indicated as a potential problem in the case we had been forwarded (really, the child is in foster care for up to 12 months and you can’t mention that they have seizures?). As for the original orphanage – it is still there and their doors are open – they are now working with only two agencies in the US (that of which the agency we had used is no longer the third…looking back, we picked the WRONG agency!).

Adoption Road 2…
After Adoption Road 1 went wrong, we moved on to domestic adoption. Oh, how the cases would come and go. So many kids… I remember after the first “no-go”, I had said I could do it six times…six. It was too painful after the first. In fact, I made it much further; there were probably about 16-18 cases presented in all. We were trying to stay away from drugs and alcohol, but it was nearly impossible. On a few cases, we just said no because they were so complex that we couldn’t feel comfortable. Trying to hold a job, sort through the cases when they were presented (always during working hours), and then waiting days/weeks until we got an answer back…then the answer was always “no”. We worked very well with our first counselor, who left the agency; we were then paired with a young woman with whom we didn’t work well at all. She started throwing cases at us that made no sense…medical issues clearly outside of our boundaries…racially diverse cases that were not asking for caucasian parents…she was just “off”. We told her that we only wanted cases in which the birth parent(s) asked for us to keep her opinion out of it…we tended to share some sort of commonality with these cases anyhow which was always comforting. The same routine kept on…case presented…review information…enter profile…not chosen; we continued to get more irritated with our counselor. At one point, she actually told us that it was not her job to be our advocate (they why the hell did I pay the agency over $10K?!). We saw complexities ranging from alcohol/drug exposure, Hepatitis C, heart deformations, and even problems with sexual functions…talk about a roller coaster. In the end, the final case was “Robert”. A little boy born just about a month before; Robert’s case was far from simple…there was alcohol exposure well into the second trimester…the possibility of three birthfathers, but yet this was a simpler case than many of which we had seen. Anyhow, time went by and we were not chosen. That was it…after everything, if we couldn’t have Robert, this was our sign that we were no longer in the right place; we were pushed over the edge. Several weeks went by, when the case came back again. Through my work, a contact in a contractor’s office had adopted a beautiful child named Robert; sure enough, when I saw the posting on our agencies website…it was our Robert. It just wasn’t meant to be. God surely was telling us this with all of these signs.