Accessing Your Intuition In Making Adoption Decisions

Assessing your intuition when making adoption decisions is more complicated than I thought it would be.

I grew up in a household where using your intuition or gut instinct was very common. My mom talked about it all the time. “What’s your gut telling you to do” “Listen to your gut!” “You’ll just know.” That last one has been the hardest for me in making adoption decisions. Up until building my family through adoption, listening to my gut or intuition was a fail-safe way to navigate the parts of life that do not have conscience reasoning.

My heart has been filled with thoughts of our future second child more so than usual. I can see my son as a proud big brother. I can see the newborn photos. I can smell the sweet newborn smell. I can feel the unconditional love for a child I do not even know exists yet. I can feel it deep in my bones. There is no conscience reasoning for my feelings.

Anticipating a second child is logical since we are working to build our family again through adoption. It’s this feeling of hopefulness mixed with real desire and it’s been getting more intense lately. I believe it’s a mother’s intuition that has me committing to a child that’s growing such fierce love in my heart. I believe that a child growing in my heart will someday be in my arms. Assessing my intuition and navigating through the roller coaster of adoption has given me a love-hate relationship with my intuition.

Let’s take yesterday as an example. I was convinced that an adoption situation email was going to come. I had that “feeling” that today was going to be the day that a situation was going to be presented to us. I was feverishly deciding to check my email every hour and dreaming about our sweet baby. I was feeling that email coming and that there was going to be some type of action in the pool of hopeful families.

Anyone who has built their family through adoption can relate to the underlying anxiety that your days are filled with when you are in the pool. Is there going to be an email coming today, next week, next year? Will I have notice? Will the baby already be born? Should I really plan that vacation? There really is no such thing as “just adopting.”

Our agency pool has been quiet since we have been in it. Yesterday, I thought my intuition was telling me to prepare and to be ready for a possible situation. But guess what? No email. No correspondence at all. When no email arrives, how do I sum up that feeling? Where are the lines between hope, intuition, faith, and perseverance? Adoption takes all of these things.

When experiencing this level of uncertainty, my intuition unconsciously kicks in. Assessing my intuition is the tricky part. Where I am in the adoption process, most of the decisions are not mine to make. So as a way to cope with all of the uncertainty and to rationalize how huge adoption is, my mind tries to make sense of the love and desire for a child and the logical reasoning that emails aren’t sent by feelings.

How do you navigate your intuition when working to build your family? Do you ever feel confused about what your feelings are telling you?