Esther Brady Crawford - faintstarlite

Being raised by my mom, Nana and Aunt Ruby for the first 8 years of my life meant everything was filtered through their eyes. I’m grateful my mom always spoke highly of my dad, even though it frustrated her that he chose not to be in my life for so long, because it’s allowed me to come to my own conclusions about his inner conflict of owning up to having me out of wedlock.

More than ever, I’m curious to understand and grasp the motivations of my parents – particularly the choices made during those first few years.

I enjoy sharing personal stories – it helps me process. This is a snippet of what I know about myself, starting from the beginning:

(to read YouTube video comments you have to double-click on the video and go to the site directly)

Ever since I was a pre-teen I’ve wanted to adopt. I can’t say I had thought through where to adopt from, but I knew my family tree would be made up of grafting new branches on rather than sprouting them all. Then when I was 16 it became clear that my body wasn’t functioning ‘normally’, and a couple of years later I was officially diagnosed with PCOS and told it’d likely be very difficult (albeit not impossible) to conceive naturally.

I probably quizzed Nick on adoption waaaay too early in our relationship (I don’t have a specific memory of it, but it would not surprise me if he does). All I know is long before we were ever engaged we were sharing our visions of a future family with each other, and really from the get-go it always included adoption.

Update: Now that we’ve found out we’re pregnant(!) we’re putting the process on hold, but nothing will change our long-term plans… they’ll just be modified in terms of timing. Our thoughts are that when we start the adoption process again we’ll likely look at sibling groups instead of going with an infant.

(to read YouTube video comments you have to double-click on the video and go to the site directly)