Adoption of love!

My Childhood Dream

From the time I remember, I always wanted to adopt a girl child. It was a childhood dream among many others I saw while very young. Giving a good life to a girl child, and giving her a family, she deserved was an underlying thought which was always at the back of my mind while growing up.
As years passed by, education, work, and career happened, the thought got lost among the many other small dreams which never materialised (like learning how to play guitar and become a rock star).

And it became ‘Our Dream’

When I met Mayank and we started getting serious about marriage, talks about family and kids started coming up, which is when this tiny little thought re appeared and came up in our conversations. It was then I realised that this was not one of the many random hobbies I had but actually wanted to pursue this further in life. Thankfully Mayank was on the same wavelength as me and it became a very big factor on us deciding to get together in life.

After marriage, life happened and we got busy in each other’s companionship and our respective careers, kids - biological or adopted were still a far-fetched thought which we rarely talked about.

As luck would have it, we got pregnant with our first child in April 2016 after around 4 years of marriage. Life changed again and everything became about managing work, pregnancy and enjoying that phase as much as we could.

My First Born arrived

Shravin, my son was born on 2nd January, 2017 and that is when my life changed forever. I had not known motherhood can bring such a big change in you physically and emotionally. You become a different person all together and suddenly are the sole caretaker for a tiny human being who looks up to you for their every tiniest need.

His Birth watered the seed of Adoption

My son’s birth re-ignited the idea of adoption again in my head. I had gone through the beautiful journey of pregnancy, childbirth, was learning how to raise a baby with each passing day. However beautiful this was, it wrenched my heart to know there are so many babies who are born with no one to give them love and a good life due to inexplicable circumstances. Such children grow up in foster homes away from love of parents and family. The pain, the child goes through, and the lack of love in their lives were too painful to even think about.

Mayank and I had always wanted a daughter (he really missed not being able to buy pretty dresses and accessories coz we had a son now :D) and hence raised the topic of adoption with each other again. We could give a beautiful life to a girl child and also maintain a gender balance in our family or else our home would have ended up like a permanent sports field with 2 men and 1 woman in the family. It was a deep hidden thought we had to look into again.

But this was a big life decision to be made. Even our friends and family to understand the concept of adopting a child after having a biological child of our own was a thought unheard of in India. We had multiple discussions, arguments, and debates on whether it was a wise decision to make or not. There were many pros and cons to it, most important being will we be able to love this child as much as we do our first born since she will not be from my womb ( a question we had no answer to at that point of time besides just believing in ourselves and our decision).

It took us 2 years to be able to finally come to a conclusion that since we do want a second child, but giving birth again was not an option coz I was not physically, emotionally and mentally ready to go through the process of pregnancy and childbirth again.

And We took a BIG STEP

In May, 2019, we decided to register on CARA for adopting a girl child in the age bracket of 0-2 years. The underlying thought being with the wait time of 2-3 years, Shravin would become atleast 4 years old. Also, we would have better clarity on what we wanted to do with life and will have bandwidth to take care our second child.

The process was quite intensive with document checks, background verification and home visits to be finally be added to the waitlist of adoption. After registration we became part of many communities where people had registered for adoption and it was wonderful to find a tribe of people who thought like us and were waiting to get their heart child home.

In the whole wait, Covid happened and the waitlist time increased from 2 years to 4 years!!
But thanks to that wait, our belief and wait for our daughter became stronger and we started imagining her in our lives.

The Wait was Over

Finally in December 2022, we got our referral through CARA. Our daughter was only 5.5 months old and was waiting for us in foster home in Chennai. We got just a small passport size pic of her with all medical reports and just seeing that tiny little face we knew she was ours. Shravin could not hold his happiness that he was becoming a big brother and told his full gang of friends about his little sister born from 3 of our hearts 😊

And We got our Heart Child

Finally in 1st week of January,2023 we got SIYA SAXENA home, we were super grateful that Siya chose us as her heart parents, and let us buy some cute little accessories and dresses 😊 So now, we are a family of four with hotwheels and dolls spread on floors across the house. There is family games with father daughter duo teamed up against the mother and son clan. Our heart is full.

Do you want to become a heart parent?

Feel free to reach out anytime and I will be more than happy to share the knowledge and nuggets of wisdom that I gained in my journey of Adopting.

(Personal Story shared by Ishita)

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