Sometimes now, after decades of this rough and tumble adoption journey, I fret that I’m becoming a little jaded, even though I’m just about the most annoyingly chipper mama out there.

A friend of mine, seeing photo listings of cute little kids, can now only picture them as the raging teens they are likely to become. Love simply isn’t enough.

I’ve rarely though, if ever, met an adoptive mother who severely regretted her choice to adopt, although I know it has cost many parents their marriages, financial problems, their own emotional struggles and even their physical well-being at times. Stress does a great deal of damage to one’s body and psyche.

I’d, of course, do it all over again in a heartbeat.

But today I was thinking about the checklist that pre-adoptive parents approach with a combination of naivety and trepidation, not truly understanding the definitions, nor the repercussions, of many of the words, issues, illnesses and options ominously printed on the paper.

I’d initially started out planning only to adopt a young daughter, just one, and I wanted her to be younger than my then 14 year old. I was immediately presented with a sib group of 2, a boy and a girl, in El Salvador in 1986 that I got very excited about parenting only to lose them then, as desaparecidos, the disappeared, during that country’s violent civil war.

Nearly a decade later, I meet the only El Salvadoran child I’d ever adopt, and the man she married then unbeknownst to me, had been a soldier fighting in that war, drafted (kidnapped) as a young teenager.

I’d ended up, in 1987, going to Honduras for a sibling group of two, which turned into three, but later became four, as we attempted to also get an older sister into America. Sadly, she died while still in Honduras waiting for the interminable paperwork process.

And one of the original two daughters tested positive for TB, something I’d encounter 15 years later with another son. I had not checked ‘yes’ to diseases. Squeamish at best, I am medically challenged, yet one of my Honduran daughter needed extensive and immediate dental work.

I never checked ‘yes’ to Reactive Attachment Disorder yet I ended up with one RAD child. Only one out of 39 is amazing in the adopting world. I attribute this to the fact that my children came as siblings groups, at least attached to each, and worn out from the attempts to meet the emotional needs of their brothers and sisters.

My one RAD child came from an inhalant abusing mother and the mis-wirings in her brain are obvious by her behaviors, yet she’s quite intelligent, just has a tough time mimicking normal human interactions.

Basically in my initial adoption proceedings I stated only that I preferred to adopt fairly normal school age children as I still had a full-time job back then. However I have dealt with so much more resulting in the single, feeble advice I think I can now give to adoptive and pre-adoptive parents.

There are no guarantees to anything and you’ll be amazed by what you find yourselves capable of handling, but please reach out to others for help, resources, therapy and support.