Ron Reigns:
Welcome and thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption with Kelly Rourke-Scarry and me, Ron Reigns, where we delve into the issues of adoption from every angle of the adoption triad.

Speaker 2:
Do what’s best for your kid, and for yourself, because if you can’t take care of yourself, you’re definitely not going to be able to take care of that kid and that’s not fair.

Robin:
I know that my daughter will be well taken care of with them.

Speaker 4:
Don’t have an abortion. Give this child a chance.

Speaker 2:
All I could think about was needing to save my son.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
My name is Kelly Rourke-Scarry. I am the executive director, president and co-founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency, the Donna Kay Evans Foundation, and creator of the You Before Me Campaign. I have a bachelor’s degree in family studies and human development and a master’s degree in education with an emphasis in school counseling. I was adopted at the age of three days, born to a teen birth mother, raised in a closed adoption and reunited with my birth mother in 2007. I have worked in the adoption field for over 15 years.

Ron Reigns:
And I’m Ron Reigns. I’ve worked in radio since 1999. I was the cohost of two successful morning shows in Prescott, Arizona. Now I work for my wife who’s an adoption attorney and I’m able to combine these two great passions and share them on this podcast.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
When a birth mother is choosing an adoptive family, this is a big part of a birth mother’s adoption journey herself. This is a big moment. It does a couple things. It makes her adoption decision real for her, because as she’s moving forward, this is a milestone in her adoption journey. She’s looking at books that contain pictures of real adoptive families who are being presented to her to potentially parent her unborn baby. This can create-

Ron Reigns:
That choice-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Is permanent.

Ron Reigns:
… is when it becomes concrete, and when it’s like wow, this is-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
This is real.

Ron Reigns:
I’ve made a decision.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
This can create a myriad of emotions. Sometimes when I’m working with a birth mother and she’s choosing an adoptive family, she’s looking through profiles and she’s crying. New social workers will come to me and say, “Is that a concern or red flag?” It’s not at all in my opinion, in most cases. I won’t say across the board. But a lot of times when you’re looking at the face of the woman that is able to parent your child when you are not, it’s very hard to accept and to look into the face of possibly the mother of the baby that you’re carrying, would stir emotions I think, in just about anybody.

Ron Reigns:
You would start judging yourself and thinking, “I’m not good enough.”

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You’re questioning. It’s hard.

Ron Reigns:
It’s hard to look at yourself like that.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Of course it is. Sometimes we’ll have birth mothers that want to postpone or delay looking at profiles because it really makes everything real, while other birth mothers find peace after they pick a family because they know the outcome. They know what the end is going to look like of their adoption journey.

Ron Reigns:
This is the family that my baby is going to be a part of.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Once they have that peace, they can get to know the adoptive family and they know they’re making a beautiful choice, and they get this reassurance. It really helps them emotionally and mentally center themselves in their adoption plan. Also, I have seen it make a birth mother rethink what type of adoption she wanted. If you had a mom that was really hesitant about doing a semi-open or open adoption, and she was leaning towards a closed adoption, after she sees the adoptive families and they don’t appear threatening and they don’t appear judgmental and they seem really nice and they have a really nice home and family, extended family members, she may think, “Oh, I would do an open adoption with his family. This is way better than what I was thinking this would be.”

Ron Reigns:
These are people I’d like to talk to while I watch my child progress in life.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Correct.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I think that open adoption in the majority of cases is definitely a better choice all the way around. I love it when that happens. I have seen birth mother choose an adoptive a family for the type of adoption preference the adoptive family wants, where they live, if they have other children, if they have any pets, if they’re going to be a stay at home mom or if the child’s going to go into daycare, what type of religion they are, their lifestyle, whether they’re educated, if they travel a lot, if they have certain hobbies, their reason for adopting. A lot of birth mothers are very interested in learning the reason that adoptive families want to adopt. That is a question we get quite frequently.

Ron Reigns:
So is that good to share, for instance, in the book? Like, this is why-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
If it is due to infertility or-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It can just be a simple statement like that. It doesn’t have to be a detailed medical diagnosis. It can be that biologically we’re unable to-

Ron Reigns:
The female isn’t able to-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You don’t have to go that detailed.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You could say … But no. I mean-

Ron Reigns:
We’re just not able.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You could just say that biologically, we are unable to conceive and carry a child and adoption is a beautiful choice for us. When birth mothers first look at adoption profiles, they usually look at all of the covers first. We normally present three to five, is approximate. We don’t like to do more than that because it becomes overwhelming for the birth mother.

Ron Reigns:
That makes sense.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Some birth mothers will pick up the first book. A lot of times that’s the book they choose. Not always, but a lot of times. If we lay them out, they’ll look at them and then grab one. Some of them will literally study every word, while others just race through them.

Ron Reigns:
Right, and just skim it sort of.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yes. And again, some cry. When you have a birth mother and a birth father and they’re both looking at the books together, the birth mothers read and focus on the pictures and are very interested in every design on the page, whereas the birth fathers, oftentimes I see them just kind of glancing over and looking at the pictures and they’re not as interested in the books. They’re great in person and meeting with them, but in the books, they don’t seem as interested as the birth mothers, for the majority.

Ron Reigns:
Right. That’s interesting.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
All the birth mothers love to keep the book because what they do is, they study the book and they familiarize themself with the book and they almost memorize it. It’s their way of bonding with the adoptive family before they get to know them. So, when adoptive families are creating a profile book, I usually tell them books are always better than PDFs. Rather than sending us a PDF for us to print out, go ahead and have the book made. Usually-

Ron Reigns:
Make it a little more professional looking.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It does. It’s care that you’re putting into it.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah. Okay, that again makes sense.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. Send us at least three. Choose your very best pictures. If you don’t have children, don’t fill your book with lots of children, because it’s very confusing. If you have nieces and nephews, maybe have a dedicated page that says nieces and nephews, because as they’re going through the book, if you’re holding babies and kids in every picture, they think that you have other children and they may not stop and read that you don’t.

Ron Reigns:
You want to make it very clear, like at the heading of the page, okay, these are my nieces and nephews-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Correct, rather than just putting it in little parentheticals at the bottom. Keep your books simple, classy, and spend time on your book. When you have a chance to be presented to a birth mother who’s looking to choose a family for her unborn baby, you don’t want to have spent 10 minutes on Snapfish or Mixbooks and just thrown a picture on every page with a couple of words. You really want to take time and make it look pretty, because it shows.

Ron Reigns:
This is your first impression for the birth mothers.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
This is your first impression. Make sure you include a picture of your house. Obviously, make sure that your house number is not in the picture.

Ron Reigns:
Good advice, because I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You want to include a picture of your pets, if you’ve been on vacation, a picture of your extended family … you know, your parents, your grandparents, anybody who’s involved in your life and who will be a part of this baby’s life. It’s really good to have a page about each parent. Oftentimes on the front will be a picture of just the husband and wife, and then you may want to open the book with a short letter to the birth mother and then close with another short note. When I say short, I would say maybe a small paragraph or two.

Ron Reigns:
Three sentences or so.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You want to keep two to three sentences per page. You don’t want to have so much, because it becomes overwhelming. The biggest and most important aspect, honestly, are the pictures. This is something that I always tell adoptive families, when we go to other states and have seminars, is when you go through your pictures, I would often recommend getting opinions from family and friends. Are these good pictures? What is your opinion on these? Send them to your adoption agency. Let them tell you.

Ron Reigns:
Would you recommend having pictures taken professionally?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yes.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yes.

Ron Reigns:
Okay, so have a photographer come over to your house-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah, not for all of your pictures, but maybe for your cover photo and then a couple interwoven into your book. I know that we can do amazing things with our cell phone cameras and I’m not disputing that. Go ahead and get some professional pictures done.

Ron Reigns:
But again, you also want to see real life, so-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You do. You do.

Ron Reigns:
You want to see the dog running in the yard.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right. Get more than one opinion on your pictures. I can’t-

Ron Reigns:
And maybe not a family member necessarily, because-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Somebody that’ll be honest.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah. You want a little honesty.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You do. Again, you’re going to see your pictures through your own lenses, not through somebody else’s, and it’s really important to get a perspective. There are times where we will review books for our adoptive families coming in and give suggestions.

Ron Reigns:
Okay. Now, generally speaking, how many pages would one of these books be?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I would say about eight.

Ron Reigns:
Okay. So, you don’t want to novel.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
No.

Ron Reigns:
Again, two to three sentences per page. Have people check your-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Maybe a paragraph in the front and on the back.

Ron Reigns:
Right, yeah. I like it. Okay.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. You want it to be simple, yet you don’t want to have five pictures on a page either … maybe two or three with little captions underneath. If you had a pet page and you had maybe two dogs, maybe have a picture of each dog and then a picture of the dogs together and have their names. I mean, you want to keep it simple because it’s a lot to take in. When you’re looking at all of these different books, you want yours to stand out.

Ron Reigns:
This is Sparky. Sparky loves to chase a ball. And that’s about it, right?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
Per picture, and then … okay. I like it.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You want to keep it very simple, but yet very classy. And really talk about you, what matters to you. If you have a favorite sports team, wear the jersey. If you have a scrap booking passion, not only will it show in your book, but have a page of what you like to do, who you are. This is your time to, I don’t want to say sell yourself, but you really want to open-

Ron Reigns:
Present who you truly are.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah. Open your heart, open your front door, and show what your family is made of.

Ron Reigns:
And again, what the child’s life will be like if you choose this family.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I think the most important takeaway from these podcasts regarding adoptive families and when birth mothers are choosing and why people adopt … I think the most important thing is time, effort, energy and care, pouring it into yourself, pouring it into your book, pouring it into your passion of adoption and really creating and paving a way to walk through your adoption journey.

Maria:
Well, my name’s Maria. I am 34 and I placed my son up for adoption. The reason for my placement was because I wasn’t financially stable. I didn’t have a home of my own. I was actually homeless. I think that it was the best thing for my son, which turned out to be an amazing thing to do because I still see him till this day. He has an amazing family that I love so much, that loves me dearly, and I really appreciate them for all that they’ve done. Then I ended up getting pregnant again with my daughter.

Maria:
I chose a family that had biological kids of their own, which was my first placement, and then my second placement with my daughter, which I chose a family that couldn’t have any kids, and she is actually doing pretty good herself. I’m just happy with the decision that I made because I’m still financially not stable, but I know that my kids are fine and well taken care of and I do get pictures and letters, like every six months. I think that that’ll be the best thing for you guys to do if that’s what you’ve decided to do, and Building Arizona Families is a great company to work with because they’re awesome.

Robin:
My name is Robin, and I placed my daughter almost three years ago. Placing my daughter for adoption was one of the hardest but best decisions I’ve made in my life. I wanted to have her, but I knew it wasn’t in my best interest at the time. I’m native American. Placing our kids for adoption isn’t something we do. I chose to place my baby outside of the tribe because I wanted her to have a better life. As much as you want to think that we have our little reservations and we’re in our own little world, it’s a struggle of its own that I don’t wish on kids to have to grow up in. I see pictures of her and she has everything at our fingertips that I wish I could have given her. I did give it to her in a way, because I gave her to her new family.

Robin:
There’s open conversations there still, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I’m filled in with them. I see her milestones and I can get a grasp of how she is with people, the way they talk about her. They talk about her like she is this great being. You know she is, because that’s their gift, and it’s amazing to see that they accepted their gifts so proudly. I’m thankful for Building Arizona Families. I don’t know where I’d be without them. Three years later they’re still in my life.

Ron Reigns:
We have a pregnancy crisis hotline available 24/7 by phone or text at 623-695-4112, or you can call our toll-free number, 1-800-340-9665. We can make an immediate appointment with you to get you to a safe place, provide food and clothing and started on creating an Arizona adoption plan or give you more information. You can check out our blogs on our website at azpregnancyhelp.com. Thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, written and produced by Kelly Rourke-Scarry and edited by me, Ron Reigns. If you enjoy this podcast, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts, and as always, thanks to grapes for letting us use their song, Ida know as our theme song. Join us next time for Birth Mother Matters in Adoption. For Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m Ron Reigns and we’ll see you then.