Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Well finally found resolution on one front. Hit my breaking point with the adoption agency. Below you will see our final exchange. After which I blocked all email addresses from the company and am working through the steps of my first break up of a long term "relationship" in about two decades

Hi Beth,

I’m not sure how to answer what Land of Cricket’s success rate is. You may think it is an easy answer, but it is not. For instance, this week, we had a birth mother go into labor and choose a family on the same day. The family had not updated their home study, and sadly could not move forward with the situation. Similarly last month, we had a mom due in about four weeks choose a family who had a trip abroad scheduled during that time and opted to pass. How do we factor those into any type of success rate??

Similarly, we have families like yours, who we anticipated being able to present you to the many requests we get for couples without children. You were blessed with a beautiful baby, and this affects the opportunities we anticipated we would have for you. Or a family who narrows to Caucasian only, or no on visits, or any other preference narrowing. How do we factor this into the success rate?

And then there are families who simply don’t get chosen by a birth mother. Would you suggest we force a woman to select a family she doesn’t want to pick? We do call families who are not getting picked when a birth mother declines to choose, but even if she declines to choose, she often has requests, such as race, religion, location, or size of family that we need to honor.

And, what does “success” mean when we have families who don’t take our advice on the profiles, who don’t update photos, who don’t keep a home study current?

I realize you haven’t adopted, and therefore don’t see a success for you. I understand that. And we are doing everything within our power to present you to birth mothers who have requested families like yours. But there isn’t an easy answer to the success rate. In the last year, we have been extremely busy, in fact in our recent audit in Florida the auditor noted that we are the only agency she has seen with an increase in adoptions. But whatever that looks like, it hasn’t resulted in a baby for you – I understand that.

Warmly,

Here was our response:

"How do we factor these into a success rate? Let us offer our thoughts...

The first two you count as success because you offered them a match.

You don't consider us a success because as you and P both fail to acknowledge it's not a though interest in our family suddenly dried up because we had a baby. There was never interest in our family, so you can count us with families for whom no birth parent shows interest. This group makes up your unsuccessful group.

We find it highly unlikely that families that narrow their preferences make up much of a statistically significant group, so feel free not to include those individuals in your rate. Also feel free to discount families who have major illness and decide they no longer wish to adopt, divorce and no longer wish to adopt and/or have chosen they no longer wish to adopt for some other personal.

So you take the total number of families, minus the third group, divide the number of families offered a match by that number and you have a success rate.

However, we all know that such a number makes it less likely for families to pay Land of Crickets tens of thousands of dollars for your "service" so this formula nor any other will be utilized to determine whether or not Lifetime is a successful or not. Though messages like the one delivered in the FAQ that started this entire line of questioning sends a message that your success rate is higher than others are in fact false since you and P both claim to not know how to develop such a thing.

Yes, in Florida families have been very successful. Living in the Southeast region we followed the website diligently and celebrated each family's success. North Carolina was mostly stagnant for 2015-2016 though 2017 saw an uptick for which we were again pleased for these families.

While we are happy for these families, it goes without saying, we have not been pleased with our experience with Land of Crickets. As a result we are making the difficult choice to no longer live our lives in limbo. Our contract ends June 12. We are not requesting an extension. We are done.

We understand you will send a letter for us to sign. Save the postage. We will not sign it. We have done all the work we will ever do for Land of Crickets."

Anger and sadness are the current status post breakup...hoping that peace begins to enter the scene very soon...