Adoption agency #2 - funny and flippant

There is something slightly scary about a room-full of infertile couples. The air is tinged with a quiet desperation. I look around and wonder why this or that couple can't conceive - what did they go through to get here?
The adoption talk happens at a branch of the Big Business Baby Factory out in the Burbs. It's so hard to find that one person arrives at 8.30pm as the whole thing is wrapping up. She couldn't find the place and when she did find it she was locked out and was left banging on the door in no man's land until someone happened to leave the building and she could get in.
It's really adoption 101. I meet my IRL IF buddy there (IF=infertile for the acronymally challenged). It's a rare chance to hang with someone I know in real life who is going through similar but different IF issues. S. can't come - and as I am busy info gathering I don't really expect it. It's nice to have someone familiar to sit by. The rest of the room is couples - all straight looking - (meaning comprising a male and a female) and one very heavily made up and slightly slutty looking female couple. When we are asked for topics we would like the speaker to cover I pipe up "same sex couples and singles" which covers me and my friends' issues. Everyone thinks we are a lesbian couple.
The speaker ( let's call her Ruby- not sure why but that name just popped out!) has been busy drawing a diagram of squares and circles in the shape of a family tree. With it she is illustrating that no matter whether the adoption is domestic, international, closed, open or whatever, the adopted child is irrevocably connected to two families at least - his adoptive and his birth family. She or he will always be connected to both - period. Adoption isn't a one shot or finite deal. It isn't over when the papers are signed. It evolves as the child grows and the complex relationships inherent in this truth cannot be ignored. Good point - I had not thought of it in that way before.
Ruby writes a list of topics that the audience members shout out on the white board - agency vs. attorney, domestic vs. international, open vs. closed and the two biggies - TIME FRAME and COST.
She saves those two till last. She is very engaging. She tells stories about the birth and adoptive families she works with. The most memorable points she makes ( and I actually did not learn anything new from her except the family tree analogy above) are about waiting time and cost. She talks in extremes - which is actually a touch misleading. It feels like we have been waiting an eternity to find out the answers to the biggest questions on our minds - how long will it take and how much will it cost? An hour into the talk she starts telling us about a couple who handed their "book" - photo and story book about the adoptive family to be shown to the birth mother so she can pick us - in on a Friday and were picked the following Thursday. That was the quickest turn around she had seen and she almost felt like telling the birth mom not to pick that couple as it wasn't fair to all the other people who had been waiting such a long time. The longest a couple has been waiting ( they are still wating) is 3.5 years. They have very strict criteria - only a caucasian baby and one where both birth parents are involved. As for same sex and single couples - how long do they wait? She did not say that they were less attractive to birth moms than straight couples - she just said that birth moms pick adoptive families for the most bizarre reasons - like they have a dog that looks like one the birth mom's grandpa had and it reminds her of him and so she picks that couple. Or they look down to earth. Or they have the same name as her best friend. Now I still know that same sex couples are going to be picked less but I feel better about it.
Onto the million dollar question: how much?
Well - miss cutie pie funny lady Ruby says, one couple that she knows spent $50,000 on an international adoption in Kazakstan (sp?). Another couple got a baby from a Balkan country which was also the birthplace of the adoptive mother. The baby came from an orphanage which was all too pleased to hand over the child to a national of that country and it cost no money at all! And we're all thinking - well where do we fall in this range? The room is thick with sweat and rapid mental calculations. We're all thinking - can I get a second mortgage? Will my mother lend me the money? Can I sell my soul to somebody for this baby?
And then it's over and we all pile out of the windowless room into the night. On the way to the parking lot I turn to a couple who were sitting on the other side of me and ask them which Baby Factory they go to. We talk, shivering in the cold, relieved to be spilling the beans to each other after an hour and a half of tension and anxiety. The wife says she has great eggs, but she had two IVF cycles and neither worked. Not sure if she miscarried or did not get pregnant but she feels her uterus is bad news. I on the other hand have an as yet unproven uterus - but one that I optimistically still believe can carry a baby - and eggs that have done a sorry disappearing act. She jokingly tells me that maybe we could make a deal - I carry her eggs and cook two babies - one for me and one for her. I almost take her up on it. She's blond, so is her husband, they are nice people. Sure, why not?
We go our separate ways and drive back to our respective lives, where our secrets and longings for a baby are tucked away a little more carefully. It feels like a let down. It feels like it's back to reality, back to the grindstone and back to dreaming of babies that miraculously appear regardless of miscarriages, losses, genetic anomalies, bad eggs, slow sperm, lethargic libidos. What a picture!
And by the way, I give the agency a B.