Victor and Anna

Hi! We are Victor and Anna.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read our profile. We are both so excited to grow our family through open adoption.

Our home is in El Paso, TX, which is on the border with Juarez, Mexico. We met in 2018 rock climbing in the mountains outside of Juarez where we still climb to this day. Despite being from two different cultures, both learning the other person’s language, we connected profoundly that first day and quickly fell in love. We are best friends and feel so fortunate to have found each other.

Anna grew up in Santa Fe NM, with strong ties to the Netherlands, where her mother is from, and Victor grew up in Juarez. We come from different backgrounds, but we share a deep mutual appreciation and devotion to learning and embracing our differences and celebrating them within our partnership. Our first official date, we talked about how we both wanted children. Victor has a daughter Sue, who was six when we met, who Anna fell in love with just as quickly as she did Victor. As our unit of three happily formed together, we continued to dream about growing our family. Both of our grandparents had informal adoptions, which led both of our parents to talk about and consider adoption when they were younger. Our parents never did end up adopting, but a seed was planted, and we both felt connected to the idea.

We married in the mountains where we met, surrounded by our families, and moved from Juarez to El Paso TX, where we have lived for the last four years. We love living in El Paso, TX because we can be in both of our cultures at the same time. El Paso and Juarez truly feel like one large city. We have family and friends on both sides of the border. We spend half of our lives in El Paso and the other half in Juarez, very similar to many people in our community. There are many friends of ours that are in transracial or binational partnerships like us, which allows us to share our experiences with those around us and truly feel at home. We speak English and Spanish equally amongst our friends and family. We also often eat, enjoy events, and celebrate traditions on both sides of the border. We live in an area of town that is close to our university and the mountains where we often run or ride our bikes.

Anna works as a midwife with a small practice close by in Las Cruces. Victor writes for a small, independent newspaper in Colorado focusing on social and biological topics around the US/Mexico border. El Paso is right in between Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Anna grew up and where her parents live currently and Cuauhtémoc, where most of Victor’s extended family live.  This allows us to visit our families easily for Christmas, birthdays, and other special events. Victor has two older sisters that live in Juarez with their children. Anna has three older brothers. Two live with their wives and children in the Netherlands, and one brother who lives in Colorado.

Our favorite memories and moments are being outdoors, visiting museums, cooking, watching movies, listening to music, being creative, laughing, and just being silly together as a family. We feel most complete when Sue is with us, but sadly, we only get to see her on occasion as she lives primarily with her mother in Juarez. Despite our current distance, we have a deep loving connection with her that we trust will only continue to grow and blossom with time. One thing that the world needs to know about Sue, is that she has the most loving open heart of anyone we know. We spoke with her about adoption, she was so overwhelmingly excited about having a sibling, and even more so, through adoption. With Sue, Anna quickly found out that being a stepmother was an amazingly unique privilege. Sue gave both Anna and Victor the further realization that love does not have to be biological. We are a blended family, and despite it not always being easy, we and Sue find that that it is an incredibly beautiful thing as Sue is surrounded by two loving families.

Being that we both wanted a big family, we tried to have biological children right away, but have not been able to. It became obvious to us that two people from such different backgrounds and languages, wanting to adopt, was a special and unique situation and that maybe we were destined for this path to parenthood, over any other. Through our unique community and our experiences as a blended family, we feel like adoption would be the most genuine way for us to grow our family. We were excited to find OA&FS because we wanted an organization that really focused on building healthy open adoptions.  It is important to us that our adopted child can embrace and celebrate who they are, and where they come from. With love and support from the family we will create together, we hope that our adopted child will continually feel affirmed in who they are, as they grow in their most beautiful, unique life.