What The Nay-Sayers Say

In every journey you are faced with opposition. Sometimes it's an obstacle, sometimes it's an annoyance.

When you have a public blog everything you write is open to the world. Any person with internet access on the globe can see it. It can be a wonderful connection to far away lands or it can be an unfortunate opening for an attack.

How you deal with the opposition is a choice. For us and our adoption journey, we choose to provide correction and truth when needed.

Yesterday, at 6:30 pm (or so) we received 2 comments on our blog. Both from the same person, both highly suggestive and negative, and both very insulting. The author, KateK, is obviously not a reader of our blog and didn't actually read the screens that she posted on. Her posts were ripe with inaccuracies and falsehoods that were hidden behind a persona that can not be contacted or found.

While we don't need to respond to such an unprompted attack, we want to make matters clear so that anyone who reads our blog and follows our journey knows the truth.

As we said when we started the blog, we wanted to keep a record of all our financial expenditures so that others considering the same adoption path could have an idea of what to expect. We keep our Money Matters page up to date and explain where all the payments are going.

So, let's look at the posts:

The first post was on our most recent post "Stuff." We deleted it as a reflex, before we could decide how to handle it. But luckily the blog sends us emails of all comments.

The post said:

It's great that you're spending money on lil trinkets for your future child -- wouldn't that $$ be better spent on your adoption? Seeing as you don't want to adopt badly enough to do the responsible thing and spend YOUR hard-earned pennies to procure a Russian child? As opposed to fun little toys??

No, of course not! You're totally entitled to someone else's kid! It's acceptable to spend YOUR cash on fripperies and OTHER PEOPLE'S on adoption fees. Because adoption is clearly not worth YOUR money.

I feel sorry for the poor kid you will eventually be matched with - growing up unwanted is bad, not TRULY wanted (like a down payment or college tuition) by even your adoptive parents is worse. More so for years to come, so family and friends can tell the kid that they gave amommy n daddy cash to buy you!!

Classy, isn't it?

At first glance it's just something to brush aside, but the suggestions that our child is not wanted is too much to dismiss.

Additionally, the post suggests that international adoption is like buying a child. Not cool.

Obviously the people who follow our blog, and who have actually read it, know how ludicrous this entire comment is.

Then there's the second comment, which was made on our Money Matters page. It's still there.

It said:

It's so very responsible to be unwilling to spend YOUR money to adopt. I'm assuming you've saved up and paid for stuff that was really important to you -- a down payment, university education, maybe a car??

Interesting that a child isn't important enough to save up for. Planning is soooooo important - and you're too lazy (or uninterested) to bother!!

This post was less troubling as it was blatantly obvious that KateK didn't even read the page she was writing on. You know - the page that says how we're paying for the adoption.

We responded to this post by saying:

This is the only comment from you, whoever you are, I'm not deleting - not sure where you get the idea that we're not spending our own money. We have saved and scrimped and are paying for this ourselves. We put the costs out there for the information of others. We've passed on many other things to pursue this. I have no idea what you're going on about.

We took a look around the internet to see if this is just someone who spams adoption blogs, and found a few posts that are similar in nature - outward attacks on the Adoptive Parents, based on nothing.

So now that we've shown the world what fools are amongst them, let's make a couple things perfectly clear.

1. No one else is funding our adoption. We are funding it. It is hard, we have no money to waste, and we have sacrificed a lot to be able to do this. There are times when we're not sure we can pull another $30,000.00 out of the air but it's all us.

Yes, we sold vanilla for a few weeks while we were figuring things out. But the exchange of goods for payment is not spending other people's money, it's simply earning more.

We've been asked time and time again why we don't own a house, when we plan to buy a house, why we don't travel more, etc. We set our priorities and having a family is our priority.

We are paying the fees on our own.

And no, we have not received monetary gifts or donations to help us.

2. International adoption is not buying a child. It is not child trafficking.
Anyone who would suggest such a thing is an embarrassment to mankind.

The fees associated with our adoption are clearly laid out on our Money Matters page.


As for the shopping.

We have every right to buy things for our family. Whether it be toys, clothes or tickets to a show. It doesn't matter if it's for Pam, Adam or our future child. The right, and the decision, is ours and ours alone.

And we have more than earned the right to enjoy buying things for our child. We have been through a lot to get where we are and no one, NO ONE, is going to take these precious moments away from us.