The journey through infertility, whether you seek treatment or not, comes with grief and loss. You might have lost agency over your body through fertility treatments. You likely feel you’ve lost control of your family-building plans and dreams. There are also losses to your family’s genetic lines. Indeed, your finances have taken a hit, and you might even feel a sense of loss over those impacts. When you choose to pursue adoption after infertility, you might hear that it’s critical to acknowledge and process these losses before adopting a child.

3 Tips to Help You Come to Terms with Infertility Loss

It’s wise counsel to intentionally learn how to come to terms with the losses you’ve experienced during infertility before pursuing adoption. In a recent interview, Carole LieberWilkins, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and frequent guest on the CreatingaFamily.org podcast, shared these practical tips to help you move forward thoughtfully.

Tip #1: Make space for your feelings of loss.

Even if you are surrounded by the most supportive and encouraging “village” of friends and family, many won’t understand your feelings. That’s okay. However, don’t diminish or gloss over your feelings or pain. Even when others misunderstand, those feelings are valid and should be honored for what they are.

You (and your partner) may have dreamed about becoming biological parents for many years and pursued many paths to attain that dream. Recognizing when you have depleted your financial, emotional, physical, and relational resources is an excellent skill that will transfer well to parenting. Recognize when enough is enough and honor how that feels, too.

Acknowledge and release the losses.

Acknowledge the losses you are experiencing from infertility and create a way to release those losses. One suggestion is to write a letter to the child you always dreamed of having. Get it all out on paper: the values you dreamed of instilling, the hopes for the family you wanted to create, who you wished they might be. Write that you know it’s time to let all that go and then create a ritual, perhaps like a memorial service, to release the letter. Some people find visiting a special place like the beach, a family lake home, or a memorable hiking trail meaningful. You could burn the letter, bury it in a favorite location, or release it in the wind.

Make room for honor.

It’s a challenging exercise. However, when you tangibly make space to acknowledge your feelings of loss and say goodbye to the unborn child you may never meet, you give yourself the honor and respect your journey deserves. You can also offer the child you might eventually parent the respect and honor they deserve by creating this space and acknowledging it well. After all, no child deserves to feel like they’re second choice for their parents.

Letting go of your original plans to become a parent and honoring how you got to this point can be an essential mark of readiness for how you go on to become a parent. Coming to terms with unexpected changes in plans is a crucial skill for parenting and can help you feel prepared for those next steps.

Let’s Talk About Adoption, a free guide to the ages & stages of crucial conversations

Tip #2: Prepare Yourself for the Realities of Adoption.

There are many similarities between parenting an adopted child and a biological one. For example, both kids need daily loving nurture, healthy food, a safe place to land, and firm, consistent boundaries to thrive.

Educate yourself about trauma and prenatal exposure.

However, there are also some significant differences in the realities of adoptive parenting! It will help if you understand how to explain an adopted child’s story to them (in age and stage-appropriate ways) from the day you meet them. You will need to be educated about and prepared to help them process whatever feelings come up while they process their story. You will also need to understand how things like prenatal substance exposure and trauma impact a child’s development. Indeed, those issues will affect how they process their adoption story. But they also influence how they learn in school, respond to corrections, and manage daily experiences.

Educate yourself about attachment and building trust.

Kids grapple with their adoption history in a variety of ways, with questions like “why didn’t my mother want me,” or “why did (abuse, trauma, prenatal alcohol exposure) happen to me?” These questions can be heartbreaking and confusing for you and your child. But when you are prepared, they can also be excellent tools for building trust between you and developing skills to manage their feelings and process their story.

Learn about open adoption and contact with the birth family.

Another crucial area of preparedness is how to manage the potential for ongoing contact with a child’s birth parents. For example, you and your partner must discuss in-person visits, monthly phone calls, and holiday gift exchanges. Understanding open adoption is critical for domestic infant adoption.

However, discussing these questions is equally vital if you are starting your adoption path with fostering. The goal of fostering is the reunification of the original family. When reunification is not possible, and a child moves to an adoption plan, there is additional loss layered into that child’s story. This is one reason we often tell hopeful parents that fostering to build your family is unpredictable and messy. It’s not an easy path to parenthood. Are you prepared, along the way to becoming a parent yourself, to help someone else raise their child? These are tough questions that only you and your partner can answer if you are following the path to adoption through foster care.

Transitioning from Foster Care to Adoption

Tip #3: Find help and support.  

Proactively seeking help and support to move out of infertility and on to adoption is one way to take control over some of the losses of infertility. CreatingaFamily.org has many online adoption resources to help you learn about the many issues your family may face. We also offer an active online community where adoptees, adoptive and foster parents, kinship caregivers, and birth parents share experiences and concerns to grow and learn together.

Find a few friends and trusted confidantes who can handle the emotions and flood of information you will encounter in this process. Make sure they know what you need and how you feel most supported. Offer yourself the gift of self-care and consider when you might need a break from learning one more thing about adoptive parenting! Those of us who have been doing it a while will tell you – sometimes you just need to NOT think about adoption, trauma, attachment, or learning challenges. You can probably identify if you think about how you had to care for your mental and emotional health during fertility treatments.

We also recommend that you consider working with a mental health professional who specializes in infertility. Your infertility specialist should be able to recommend resources for coming to terms with infertility loss. Additionally, these three resources may be of help:

Be Patient and Gracious with Yourself

You already know that infertility is not a simple disease to live with or manage. Just as you had to learn how to take it easy and allow yourself time and grace to cope with the pain, treatments, and broken dreams, now give yourself the same patience and grace for coming to terms with it. Moving from infertility to adoption is a process, and no one can tell you how long it takes or should take. Find ways to move forward that honor and respect where you’ve come from and how you want to get where this next path takes you. And remember, you are not alone on this trek – CreatingaFamily.org is honored to be of help on the way to creating your family, whatever shape that may take.

Image Credits: Pixabay; Noelle Otto; R F._.studio