Adoption Adventures

For the third time in as many years, we’re filling out our paperwork for an adoption agency. This time it’s different, though. After trying to adopt from foster care for almost two years, we’re switching gears and signing on with an agency that specializes in infant adoption. After talking with countless social workers, reading hundreds of profiles of children in foster care, and meeting with various people connected to foster care, we’ve come to the realization that we don’t have what it takes right now to successfully parent a child or children who have spent years living with uncertainty in the foster care system. We have gained a monumental amount of respect for foster parents and those who push through the system to successfully adopt, and the social workers who try as hard as they can to make new families a reality. But we want to adopt and, at this point, it seems that infant adoption is a more realistic option for us.

This is how adopted babies are delivered, right?

Many experiences led to our decision, but the two most important ones happened in the past few months. One of our major hesitations about infant adoption is that these days, the vast majority of them are open adoptions. Birth families choose their child’s adoptive parents, and most often the parties meet prior to the baby’s birth. As a pro-choice person, this concept has been difficult for me since I wouldn’t want to influence a birth mother’s choice in any way. If she should give birth and change her mind about adoption, that is totally valid and she shouldn’t have unhappy would-be adoptive parents to deal with. It just seemed like—regardless of the amount of contact between the birth and adoptive families after the adoption is finalized, which we’re completely supportive of—it would be cleaner somehow if a birth mother was able to make her final decisions without an adoptive family waiting in the wings. And we had been unsure of our abilities to get to know a potential birth family and “sell ourselves” as good parents, while not attempting to sway them in any way.

However, in October, we met with family members of two children who were about to be placed for foster care adoption. Although we had no idea if we would be matched with the children, their family seemed very comforted to meet us even just as an example of the kind of parents the kids could end up having. And although we were nervous going into the meeting and didn’t know what to expect, we actually got through it very well. Cory tapped into his skills from his estate planning days, and I instinctively went into my old “women’s services director” mode. We had never talked about it, but both of us have had a good amount of experience helping people in difficult and often sad situations that require them to make tough choices.  That made us realize that we actually do have the ability to be unbiased and helpful when meeting birth parents.

Then, between the end of December and mid-January, both of our mothers got serious medical news that required immediate surgeries. We’ve tried to be there for our parents as much as possible through it all and at some point in the middle of it, I realized that there would be no way we could be as available for them if we adopted a child or children with high levels of emotional needs and behavioral challenges like those we have considered in foster care. Not that adopting a baby would give us unlimited free time (feel free to laugh, parents of little ones), but the probability of a young child needing the amount of appointments and types of intensive family therapy that were suggested for the older children we considered seems relatively low. Additionally, a family member or friend could babysit an adopted newborn if we had to make a sudden trip to the hospital, while a child in foster care can only be looked after by a licensed foster parent. Simply put, this is not the right time for foster adoption for us.

So now we’re moving forward and getting excited about another opportunity for growing our family. It’s not how we first pictured it, and obviously there are no sure things in adoption or any part of life, but we’re feeling good about our next steps.

Oh wait–I was wrong. THIS is how they’re delivered. Who could forget the stork?

First, an update on the kid we previously mentioned. After spending another day out with him, we hosted him for the weekend at our place. Throughout the entire process, he was told that we were only babysitters providing respite care so his foster mom could run errands or go out of town. We tried to plan a combination of fun things to do, but also have enough real-world home time to see how we’d all get along on a typical weekend together. It became clear over those days that he needs a different kind of structure than we can give him in our home, and a different kind of family in general. The first two times we got together, he was really on his best behavior and probably showing us what he thought we wanted to see. But as we spent more time with him and his true nature and personality came out, we found that he needs to be reminded pretty constantly of how to act, except for when he’s entranced by a video game or other project that he’s into. He’s also very persistent about trying to get what he wants (which he’s had to be in order to get through 5+ years in foster care),

i don’t know what these things are

and needs extremely clear-cut, black and white rules with no deviations from the plan.* That alone we maybe could’ve handled, but he’s also dissimilar to us in lots of ways. He really only lights up when he talks about guns, for example, and we’re not a gun family. He also has expressed an interest in going hunting, which we would obviously never support. We felt like it would be cruel to not only have to constantly correct his behaviors, but also tell him that his interests aren’t acceptable in our home. I think he’d do very well in a military or law enforcement family, or one that has a ton of rules and is into hunting and eating steaks and whatnot–which is clearly not at our house. So, that’s how that whole story wrapped up.

One thing we’ve found along the journey should not be a shock to most folks: the foster care system in the US is underfunded, understaffed, and presents a whole lot of challenges for people on all sides of it. Let me first be clear in saying that I do not fault social workers and others trying to work in the best interest of children in this. Many of the tasks that some people see as hassles that come with the system are very necessary. We have been more than happy to do the background checks, the home visits, the medical tests, the interviews, and otherwise share personal information. It’s the duplicated procedures and the drop-off in services that happens after a prospective adoptive family completes all those tasks that are hard to deal with. Not being an expert on the history of all of the policies and procedures within the system, I can only surmise that policies were layered on top of one another over a span of many years, and not changed even when redundant policies were created, or funding cuts caused some of them to become nearly impossible to implement. For example, our county department of social services expended staff time and resources to train us to become adoptive or foster parents. However, there is no longer funding to pay for social workers who partner with prospective adoptive parents in the county, and without a social worker it’s very difficult to navigate the entire process. For example, without a social worker, a prospective adoptive parent or family cannot access nationwide databases of adoptable kids, since most social workers will only talk with or transmit information on children to other social workers. So, essentially, we’ve gone from being able to proactively inquire about any child in the US and having any adoption social worker in the country be able to contact us to having our home study sitting in a county office where only a handful of local social workers representing kids can see it. What that means for us is this: should a child become legally free for adoption in our county, and if our abilities and preferences match that child’s needs, and if their social worker sees our home study and thinks we might be a good match, we may get a call one day. That’s a lot of “ifs,” in case you didn’t notice, so we’re not holding our breaths.

As far as where that leaves us, we’re still sorting that out. A good portion of the reason we wanted to become parents through adoption was because we wanted to give a child or children in foster care a permanent family. That’s a different motivation than the type that it takes to go through the infant adoption process, where there are more potential adoptive parents than babies that need forever homes. We’re not necessarily ending our journey here and–as we’ve always said–we’ll be happy however this whole thing shakes out. But, we are looking at our future more realistically and realizing that we don’t need to factor a child or children in when making immediate or a-few-months-away life plans, as we had been doing.

*I realize this sounds like normal kid behavior. That’s primarily because I’m using much softer language for the purposes of this blog than the professionals who have worked with him do. Rest assured, we wouldn’t expect a child who is never demanding or who doesn’t ever try to game the system.

After years of talking about adopting and learning more about foster care adoption, many months of paperwork and background checks, and weeks of parent training, we got to spend a day with a real, live kiddo who’s looking for a family this weekend. We went to the local natural science center in the morning, called a meeting of Pizza Club for lunch, walked around the neighborhood, and played some football in the afternoon. It was awesome and it was weird.

Daaaaang

There really aren’t other times that a grownup or two hangs out with a single child with absolutely no relation to them. Not a relative or neighbor, not your child’s friend or one of several children in a class or scout troop. Just a random child who knows nothing about you, although you know many personal details about her or him. And it’s all under the guise of babysitting to give their foster parents a little time off, because telling a kid that s/he’s on some kind of interview would only make things weirder.

Despite the odd setup and some lulls in the conversation, we had fun and were totally exhausted by the day’s end. Some non-identifying highlights from the day include:

• The child repeatedly saying “daaaaaang” under his (ok–the kid’s a he) breath when we got nose-to-nose with giant tortoises at the science center
• The rocks & minerals section of the science center being referred to as his “favorite part”
• His spot-on guinea pig impersonation
• His desire to throw the football with Cory for an hour even though football is not at all Cory’s strong suit (which he’ll tell you himself)
• His gentleness with the cats, who sweetly put up with being meowed at by a small human for long stretches of time

We had fun, he had fun, and we’ll see where it goes from here. As with everything in the world of foster care, situations and circumstances can change rapidly so we’re trying not to get our hopes up (or freak out at the thought of having a kid all of the sudden, for that matter). As always, we’re taking it day by day. And Saturday was certainly a good day!

First off, thanks to so many folks for their support and encouragement of us during the whole, long adoption process! I know we’ve been slack with our blog updates, but things are moving along well and we’ve talked with several social workers about kids both near and far. (Well, not too far. All have been in the contiguous United States.) We’re happy with the progress and know that our family will grow if and when the time is right.

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption recently posted an interesting article about post-adoption stress in new moms. An earlier study found that both new mothers and fathers may experience depression or other not-so-elated feelings after the adoption of a child due to a few reasons including unrealistic expectations and lack of support. It’s a good reminder that no matter how folks become parents, they all face many of the same challenges and need similar types of support!

We’re currently in our second week of “model approach to partnership and parenting,” or MAPP, classes through our local department of social services. We were warned by folks who have gone through the classes that they’re very useful, but are partially designed to scare the daylights out of would-be foster and adoptive parents with worst case scenarios. That seems reasonably accurate so far. It appears we’re the only people in the class who are aiming to adopt rather than foster, and much of the class content (such as examples) makes the assumption that class participants are on track to foster. At any rate, it’s giving us a good understanding of what children in foster care have likely gone through and what kinds of emotions and behaviors they may express because of their experiences.

The classes have us doing a good deal of paperwork–some of it being homework and some being home study stuff. We already have a home study, but since DSS is planning on doing another one anyway, I guess we’ll get to be doubly approved.

We’ve been inquiring about kids for a few weeks now and have been hearing back from their social workers for almost as long. As avid/casual/one-time readers of our blog know, we’ve gotten the thumbs-up from several social workers so far and have been gently turned away by some others. Several folks have asked how it feels to be rejected by social workers, so here it is:

Sometimes being dumped by a social worker feels absolutely great! (Well, great with a tiny tinge of what-could-have-been sadness.) Those are the times when a social worker calls to tell us that the child we’ve inquired about is already in the process of being adopted. This was the case with the little girl in Alabama that Cory mentioned a few posts ago. Her new foster mom immediately fell in love with her, so it turns out she’s already living in her forever home! It’s hard to feel too disappointed when someone you hope the best for gets just that (and when it comes even sooner than it would have if they had come to live with us).

We’ve also been turned down outright by social workers for not being a “good match” with a child. Those situations haven’t been as happy as when a child has already been matched with their new family, obviously, but I still don’t get down about it. If a child’s social worker—who knows a whole lot more about them than we do—believes we wouldn’t fit together well, I’m going to trust their judgment. Some people might see that as a person saying that we aren’t capable of providing a child with a better life than they had in the home they were plucked out of, or that we’ve been classified as completely incompetent to parent any child. I see it as social workers recognizing that these kids have been through some really bad situations where grown-ups have repeatedly failed them, so they deserve the best possible family match in the future. We certainly don’t want a kid that would be better off with another family to be placed with us for the sake of our egos. Who would that be serving?

So we’re choosing to remain optimistic about things and not take rejections personally. It helps that we have also been sent several kids’ profiles by social workers who have specifically sought us out as a good potential match for their children. It all evens out in the end and, as always, Doris says (sings) it best: