Open Adoption Blog

I love IAC support group meetings. They’re a place of cookies, babies and people who know exactly what we’re going through. Recently, a group-goer I’ll call Melanie (because later I will say that she and her husband are funny and good-looking, so clearly I need to protect their identities) shared that she’d gotten a call from a woman claiming to be pregnant. But this woman was about to go camping where no one would be able to reach her for days. And there was some reason she couldn’t call the IAC. Oh, and she was having twins.

A few red flags there, right? But Melanie had confessed excitedly to her husband that she thought this was “the one.” Her adoption counselor gently explained what was going on. Melanie was disappointed, but she felt like the experience was a rite of passage.

Flash forward to the next support group meeting. Melanie and Tim had been contacted by two more scammers. This time they were more cautious, and the group joked about how, soon, they’d be picking up the phone and snapping “Whaddayuhwant?”

By this point, Cecilia’s and my profile had gone live, and I’d been checking the Gmail account we’d linked to it every day. All we had to show for our efforts was one piece of spam. Not an adoption scam—just regular old Viagra spam.

Everyone says that the longer you wait, the more you’ll start wondering, What’s wrong with us? Why are other people adopting before we do? What I didn’t expect was to envy people who’d been contacted by a fake birthmother. Continue reading »