Rebecca and Dom

Hello! We’re Rebecca and Dom and we appreciate you taking the time to read our letter.

We live in Oregon, where Rebecca was born and raised, while Dom comes from Michigan, moving here in 2008. In the past decade-plus we’ve been together, we’ve made a home for ourselves in the Northwest, with family and friends rooted throughout Oregon and Washington. We can’t wait to welcome our child and their birth family into the mix.

Coming from a family of public educators, Rebecca is a counselor at a K-8 public school. She’s proud to provide all children in a community, regardless of life circumstances, with counseling access. She loves the creativity she gets to express working with kids, plus the fact that they always want to talk about her two favorite topics: dogs and Halloween costumes.
Dom is a technical writer and editor, freelancing as a movie critic for a few publications. In other words, he watches a whole lot of films—anything from ’80s Hong Kong action to weird avant garde stuff—but he also gets to explore new ways to write about art he adores.

We met in 2014 on a dating app, though we realized we’d officially met several years earlier through mutual friends. Skip to Summer 2016: we got married in an intimate, informal ceremony in the backyard of our rental house. We wanted our wedding to feel like a low-key weekend with friends—the same kind of weekend we look forward to spending with our adopted child and their birth family, meeting up at a park or just enjoying a shared meal together at home.

We collect vinyl records, encouraged by parents in both families who had music playing constantly as we grew up. (This might explain Rebecca’s high school job working at a record store, or Dom’s high school job DJing at a roller-skating rink, at least when he wasn’t dressing up as the giant skating kangaroo mascot for kids’ b-day parties.) Together we’ve discovered an urge to travel as much as we can, camping or hiking or going on road trips.

We always look for new places to explore, new foods to try, and new experiences to soak in—we hope to bring our child into a home filled with laughter, music, imagination, and curiosity. We can’t think of much we’d rather do than go to the coast, wander through antique stores between ocean beach walks and cups of clam chowder. Whenever we can, we bring our two pups, Gilbert and Alfredo. Gilbert is our 11-year-old rascal and Alfie our 7-year-old sweetheart.

We live in one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in our city, short walks from schools, parks, and churches of various denominations. We want our child to live in the knowledge that this world is bigger than just their immediate experience. It is important to us they develop a strong sense of identity, found through a deep connection to place and the people in their life that inhabit them: their home, their communities, their family, and their history.

This means experiencing nature, encouraging adventure, exercising patience, and embracing honesty as a parenting philosophy. It’s why we’ve pursued open adoption, and why we’re so excited to bring our child’s birth parents into our family.

With love and gratitude,
Rebecca and Dom