How
Families

Are Made

T

he parade of pregnant bellies ,
marched past the front counter all
day long — the air, filled with hope
1 , and anticipation, buzzed with the
____, excited chatter of moms-to-be.
Emily Rosenberg, the owner of Bella
Belli Maternity in Birmingham, watched
and listened like an outsider looking in.
Her customers, many of them random
strangers, each had the one thing she
wanted more than anything else in the
world: a viable pregnancy.
Motherhood had become a prospect
that seemed more and more uncertain for
Emily. It was as if life was playing a cruel
joke: The maternity storeowner, con-
stantly surrounded by pregnant women,
was unable to sustain a pregnancy.
Behind the scenes, Emily had suffered
multiple miscarriages. Sometimes the
pain, loss and heartbreak consumed
her. Sometimes, she couldn't bear to be
inside her own business.
"There were times when I didn't come
into work because I couldn't and times
I would come in and they'd make me go
home," Rosenberg recalls. "I just kept
thinking, 'What in the world did I do that
was so bad that God would do this to me?
What did I do wrong?'"
She says it felt like some sort of cosmic
punishment; yet, things started off so
well. After working as a campaign as-
sociate with the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit, Emily opened her
trendy maternity store in 2004. Business
was booming and life was carefree for the
then 29-year-old small business owner.
A year later, she married her husband
Darren, the fourth-generation owner of
West Friendship Materials, a Detroit-
based stone and masonry supply com-
pany. Like most young, married couples,
they planned to start a family someday.
But, they had no idea what an emotion-
ally devastating-yet-thrilling rollercoaster
ride it would take to get there.
'e got married in July 2005 and
starting trying in January 2006," Emily
recalls. "We just decided we were getting
older and we really wanted kids relatively
soon. I got pregnant right away, the first
month."
But the excitement soon faded. Emily
had a miscarriage six-seven weeks into
her first pregnancy. Disappointed, but
determined — and not overly concerned
— she tried and got pregnant again about
six months later, only to have another
miscarriage again at six-seven weeks.
"I think at that point we went to see a
few different fertility specialists," she says.
"We never found out what was causing it.
We were never 100 percent sure:'
The rollercoaster had two more peaks
and valleys; twice more she got the
exhilarating and hopeful news she was
pregnant, twice more it all came crashing

20 May 2011 I

RLD THREAD

down with heartbreaking loss.
After her fourth miscarriage, one doc-
tor cavalierly told her, "I don't think you'll
ever hold a pregnancy." At that point,
Emily and Darren started looking into
adoption but, as she puts it, "I was really
not for it at the time."
"I think you personally have to be 100
percent ready before you can adopt. At
first, I was still freaked out about the
whole thing," she says. "Darren was a little
bit more on board. But, the minute you
decide to adopt, you're having a baby, and
it doesn't matter where the baby's coming
from. Once you make that decision, you
feel like there is a baby waiting for you."
There was ... and not just one.

ONLY IN REAL LIFE
A short time after meeting with Cathy
Eisenberg, executive director and co-
founder of the nonprofit agency Child
& Parent Services in Bingham Farms, a
sequence of events quickly unfolded for
Emily and Darren.
"The agency called in January and said
we should get them our information be-
cause a situation had come up that might
be of interest. We made a life book, like a
big scrapbook, filled with pictures of us,
how we met, our families, our interests,
etc.," she says.
"We turned it in on Friday and on Mon-
day they said, 'The birth parents picked
you. I hadn't fully accepted this was how
we were going to have a child. But, I took
the next few days to really think about it
and realized these people picked us. There
was a child who was about to be born who
needed a family. All we'd wanted for the
last two years was to have a baby. How
could we turn this down?"
The birth mother was already five-
months pregnant. Once they'd agreed on
the adoption, Emily went with her to all of
her doctor's appointments from that point
on. They also met the father.
She and Darren were there at the hospi-
tal when their son, Ryan (now 3 years old),
was born. They brought him home on
Mother's Day 2008. "It was the best day of
my life to be able to do that," Emily recalls.
But there's more to the story: When
Ryan was just 3 weeks old, Emily real-
ized she was late getting her period and
couldn't understand why until she took a
pregnancy test; it was positive.
"I just assumed I'd have another miscar-
riage," Rosenberg says. "But, I didn't:'
Their daughter, Samantha, was born nine
months later.
And, despite the dire predictions of doc-
tors, Emily, now 35, is pregnant again. The
couple's third child is due in September.
"It was fate; we were supposed to be
Ryan's parents," Emily says definitively. "I
truly feel that Ryan brought us Samantha.
I really think Ryan helped bring both of

them. I feel so blessed that we
were able to experience both
experiences."

THE WAITING GAME
While things happened
seamlessly and in
short order for
Emily and
Darren, their
adoption
story is far from
typical. Eisen-
berg, a licensed
social worker and
co-founder of Child
& Parent Services,
knows that firsthand.
She adopted two
children herself back in
the 1980s and has spent
the last 25 years helping
couples (many of them Jew-
ish) navigate the sometimes
frustrating, complicated and
expensive legal — and emo-
tional — process.
"I know as a Jewish person
there are a lot of challenges," she
says. "Over 25 years I've seen hun-
dreds of birth moms, and we always
ask them what they're looking for in
choosing a family. Religion is always
right up there."
Eisenberg's agency handles domestic,
international, interstate attorney-assisted
adoptions and various other arrange-
ments. Fees vary, but she says the average
cost of a domestic adoption is $15,000
plus birth-parent expenses like medical
bills, rent and utilities. Interstate adop-
tions are $20,000-$30,000.
International adoptions (where the
adoptive parents choose the child, rather
than waiting to be chosen by birth par-
ents) can range from $25,000-$40,000.
Depending on the flexibility of the couple
and what they're looking for, an adoption
can take months or even years. In some
instances, the birth mother may change
her mind.
In Michigan, an adoption is not final
until both parents consent, voluntarily
release or terminate their parental rights.
This can take a month or more after the
baby is born.
"We tell every adoptive family there are
no guarantees and there's no way we can
predict," she says. "You never know if a
birth mom is being dishonest; you really
don't know."
Eisenberg calls Michigan a "slower
state," where fewer infant adoptions seem
to occur. In her experience, the most
adoption-friendly state is Texas. She
believes Russia currently has the best
international program for families.
"Adoption is not easy," she says.

Women often
navigate a maze
to motherhood
filled with tales of
infertility, protracted
delays and
disappointment, or,
as is often the case,
heer dumb luck.

By Robin Schwartz

"But it if it wasn't for adoption, I would
not have two children. To this day, my
daughter is the most incredible advocate
and proponent of adoption."

HAVE KID, WILL TRAVEL
Lisa Bronstein, 42, of Huntington
Woods began struggling with infertility
a decade earlier, at age 32. She and hus-
band Eric sought to expand their family
employing adoption as one of several
methods.
The Bronsteins turned to in-vitro fer-
tilization (IVF), a process by which em-
bryos are made in a lab, to have their first
child, Jacob. After two failed attempts,
Lisa had a successful pregnancy and the
baby was born in May 2004.
"Keeping the difficulty we experienced
in mind, we restarted IVF in hopes of a
second child just 7 months after the birth
of our first," she says. "But it took years
longer and countless procedures and
miscarriages before we recognized that
having another child was immeasurably
more important than how we got that
child. I went through a lot of heartbreak
and tears to reach that point. Looking
back, I wish I could have reached that
decision years earlier."
The couple spoke with many agencies

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