Overview
Some books about adoption will frighten you. Others sell you a fairy tale. This one does neither.
Nobody tells you about the jealousy. The waiting that hollows you out. The quiet fear that you might not bond, or that the child might not love you back. The feelings you're not supposed to have, but you have them anyway.
I know them, because I've stood on both sides of adoption. I was the child who was adopted. Years later, I became the parent who chose to adopt. I now guide others through the beginning of this road as the founder of Adoption Pathfinder. That double view - adoptee and adopter, the one who was chosen and the one who chose - is the whole reason this book exists. It lets me show you, openly, what almost no one can tell you from the inside.
Before You Decide is a complete, honest guide to adoption for anyone standing at the very beginning of the road - before the forms, before the panel, before you've even said the word out loud.
Inside, this adoption guide walks you through:
- The question that comes first - whether this is truly your path, or a longing wearing its clothes.
- The grief you may still be carrying - miscarriage, infertility, the family you pictured, the loss no one let you mourn.
- Every route explained - adopting from foster care, infant adoption, intercountry adoption, and kinship or step-parent adoption.
- Who is allowed to adopt - and the myths that stop good people before they start.
- The adoption assessment and home study - what really happens, and how to prepare for the parts that reach into your wounds.
- The children who wait - and the health and history you cannot always know.
- Waiting, matching, and placement - the process, step by step, in plain language.
- The lifelong work of belonging - bonding, attachment, and becoming a family after your child comes home.
This is adoption seen from both sides - by an adoptee and an adoptive parent who has walked every part of it, and who now helps others walk it too. It offers no rescue narrative and no easy reassurance. Instead, it offers the truth so you can decide whether it is right for you.
Whatever you decide, you will close this book clearer than when you opened it - with the tools, and the courage, to choose your own way.
Love does not run along the lines of DNA. It is built, day by day, by the ones who stay.
ACCESSIBLE FORMATThis item is Non-Returnable
Customers Also Bought
Details
- ISBN-13: 9781066921201
- ISBN-10: 1066921202
- Publisher: Adoption Pathfinder
- Publish Date: October 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.59 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.78 pounds
- Page Count: 260
Related Categories
