Angelina Jolie and Madonna may be the most famous Americans to adopt children overseas, but they're certainly not the first.
Each year, parents in the USA adopt about 20,000 children from around the world. And though the super-rich appear to be able to swoop into a far-off land and scoop up adorable children with ease, for the majority of adoptive parents, the process is a costly, emotionally wrenching grind.
I know. My wife and I just returned from Russia with a 2-year-old girl. In just a few short weeks, we've come to learn what other adoptive parents have been telling us for years: that adoption is an amazing, transforming experience. It's no less a miracle than having children the old-fashioned way.
But the road we took to get there was no miracle. It was a 2½-year journey from the time my wife and I decided to adopt to the day we were given custody of our daughter. We spent months filling out an endless marathon of forms and getting them certified. Then we shipped the paperwork to Russia and waited helplessly until our number came up.
And then, when our number did come up, we flew over to meet the little girl who was randomly chosen to be ours and fell in love with her. We ultimately decided to adopt her, even after being told by several doctors that she probably had a severe form of epilepsy.
This adoption story began after my wife, Cathy, and I, after much research, decided to adopt a child from Russia. The first thing to do was sign up with an adoption agency. We chose Children's Hope International. After a social worker visited us and approved us as adoptive parents, we had to prepare a dossier of information and notarized legal forms — police background checks, for example — that would be shipped to Russia.
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