This Wild, Precious Life

The pile of paper was sent away! (updated)

So I believe we'd mentioned to some of you some time ago that we'd finished getting our paperwork together. That was mostly true. We had gotten all the stuff from all the places -- friends, family, departments of motor vehicles, the FBI -- that we needed to put together the packet of stuff. What we hadn't yet done was gone through and made sure that all our t's were crossed and i's dotted... and we had to put together our financial paperwork to contribute it to the pile.

It was a scary part. I mean, we're in better financial shape than we have been for most of the time we've been together for sure. Maybe the best ever. But it's still scary, figuring out one's net worth, putting together tax forms, etc.

Then, after that, we realized that there was one last thing that needed to be signed in front of a witness, so we went over to Randal's, ordered in Thai, and signed that last form. Then, in a fit of silliness, we asked him to take pictures of us with our paperwork. Maybe Julie will post a photo or two - I think they're pretty cute, us with our goofy smiles on and our stack of stuff.

So then we made copies of everything -- of course, not the reference letters, since they're sealed and signed over the seal -- and packed up the package and sent it all off with the nice FedEx guy who was just getting ready to leave the store with his pile of goodies.

The next day, we got in touch with Anna, our social worker, just to let her know that we'd sent stuff in, and soon we hope to be scheduling our final interviews. I need to go to one more appointment and get a form sent in from my therapist, but that's easily enough accomplished. The point is, we're inching closer all the time!

As soon as we have the next interview scheduled, you'll hear about it!

Adoption 101: What All Those Words Mean

There's a lot of specialized language in adoption, and I'm going to try to define and elaborate on some of the most common bits here. This is focused on domestic infant adoption, because that's what we're doing, but if I miss a term you're curious about, just comment and I'll update this post. So let's get started!

Triad
There are three people / groups of people involved in any adoption: the parents who have made an adoption plan for the kid, the kid, and the parents who adopted the kid. All three are important and significant, not just in the beginning, but forever. Collectively, they're called the triad.

Birthparents / First parents / Natural parents
There's a lot of baggage associated with naming when it comes to members of the triad, especially around first parents, and different people have different associations with different terms. (I'm going to focus on "mother" in the next bit, not because the same issues don't happen for fathers or other family members, but because this is usually where the conversation starts.)

"Birthmother" can carry the implication that women who make an adoption plan are simply incubators rather than caring, thoughtful women who are making a difficult choice for their children. "Firstmother" can make some adoptive parents uncomfortable because it implies secondariness. "Natural mother" implies "unnatural" or "unreal." There are big political / ethical conversations behind each of these.

I, personally, prefer first mother, because it's an honest statement of what happens: the woman who gestates the child is the first mother that child has -- she just isn't the last.

As always, however, the most polite thing to do is to follow the lead of the triad member you're talking to. If you aren't sure what term they prefer, ask! They'll likely be happy to tell you.

Two other notes on naming: women who are considering making an adoption plan are not birthmothers -- they're women considering adoption. They aren't birthmothers until they sign the relinquishment papers, and that usually can't happen until after the child is born. And all family members, bio and adopted, are "real."

Openness
"Open" adoption is in contrast to "closed" adoption, which was the norm for decades until just recently, and which is what most people assume of adoption. In closed adoption, once the adoption is finalized, all connections to birth families are severed and the child is sometimes reared without knowing he or she is adopted. In many cases, birth parents and adoptive parents have never met or have met once, they don't know names or identifying information, and the child has no information about his or her past or medical history.

Open adoption, on the other hand, indicates that there is at least some minimal contact between the adoptive family and the first family (yearly letters and pictures delivered to the adoption agency, for example) and that adoption is part of the story the child is told about his or her origins.

Openness is a huge topic, so there will be a later post just about what open adoption looks like and why it's important.

Home Study
The home study is more than just a check of the house -- it's an extensive background check to make sure that prospective adoptive parents are, in fact, good candidates for adoption. There are two major portions of the home study: the paperwork, and the interviews by a licensed social worker.

Every state has different rules, but our paperwork involved an FBI background check, state records check for criminal history as well as involvement with child services, drivers records, financial statement, employment verification, birth certificates, a fire inspection, a home survey, a firearms check, a safety check, doctors' reports, references, a guardianship statement, and tax returns.

Once the paperwork is done and turned in, the interviews cover parenting philosophy, reasons for adopting, family history, general stability of individuals and couples, and anything else that might pertain to a family's fitness for adoption.

Once both the paperwork and the interviews are done, the social worker writes up a home study report that weaves together everything he or she has learned and states whether or not he or she thinks the applicants are good candidates.

The absolute minimum time a home study can take is three months, but it usually takes closer to six. Since we didn't rush through our paperwork, we'll definitely be on the six-month end.

Waiting Pool
In our agency (and this is pretty common for domestic infant adoption), when you're done with the home study, you put together a scrapbook about yourselves and then you enter the pool of waiting families.

Women considering placement decide what's important to them in choosing an adoptive family for their child, and the agency gathers the scrapbooks of families who meet those criteria, then she chooses three, and the agency checks with them to see if they're willing to consider this placement. If everyone agrees, the expectant mom interviews the three families and makes a choice.

Right now, the average wait time in the pool is two to three years.

Matching
When an expectent mom making an adoption plan chooses a family she would like to adopt her child, those families are considered matched. Some matches happen as early as 5 months into the pregnancy; some matches happen after a child is born. Matches are in no way legally binding, and it's very, very common to be matched several times (and to be on the short-list to be chosen many, many times) before actually bringing a child home.

Relinquishment
When a woman signs the papers that places her child for adoption, it's called relinquishment. Many states have rules about when relinquishment may officially occur, and they often prohibit relinquishment until several days after the child is born. Maryland has no rules about the timing of relinquishments.

Placement
When a prospective adoptive family takes home a prospective adoptee, it's called placement. Placement begins a period of legal limbo, in which the adoption agency is the legal guardian for the child. Placement is not legally binding, because ...

Revocation
Once relinquishment papers are signed, there's a period of time in which that relinquishment can be legally revoked by one or both of the first parents. This is an important rule that helps to ensure that people aren't being coerced into signing away the rights to their children, but it also understandably freaks prospective adoptive parents out. Many adoptive parents wait to have a welcoming party for the baby until after this period is over. In Maryland the revocation period is 30 days.

Finalization
Finalization is the end of the legal limbo begun in placement; at finalization, a judge orders an adoption decree into the record and the child is officially transferred to the legal guardianship of the adoptive family. There's commonly a waiting period between the end of the revocation period and finalization in which agency social workers do post-placement visits to make sure everything is going along as expected.

So there we are: adoption language in a nut-shell! As I said above, if I've missed something or if you have a question based on anything here, just comment and we'll clear it up.

Like Studying for Comps?

Last night, Julie and I were silly.

We lay in bed, basking in the joy of having all our paperwork completed and returned to us by the states who owed us drivers' records. So naturally we started thinking about and talking about the next phase in the process -- the last three interviews with Anna, our social worker. One for me, one for Julie, and one with both of us together.

We talked about what we imagine she might ask, or what we hope she might ask, or even what we fear she might ask. (Not so much of that last one, I have to admit.)

-- What are your views on discipline and/or punishment of children?
-- What are your hopes and fears around openness in adoption?
-- What is your ideal vision of openness in your particular adoption?
-- How will you deal with the issues that come up around transracial adoption, if you adopt a child of color? How are you preparing yourselves, your household, and your communities and families for froglet's coming? What needs to change in your lives in order for you to become a multicultural family?
-- What is the place of education in your lives? What is your philosophy of education? How will you support froglet's learning through her/his life?
-- How will you be taking time off when froglet is an infant? Will one of you be able to stay home with froglet? For how long?
-- What kind of support do you have in your lives for parenting?
-- If froglet has significant medical or other health or developmental needs, how will you deal with that?
-- What concerns do your families have? How are they supporting, or not supporting you? How do you plan to deal with their concerns? How are you dealing with them now?
-- How have you dealt/are you dealing with having not gotten pregnant? When did you start thinking about adoption, and is it a "last resort?" How did you come to decide to adopt?

--What do you think will be the biggest challenge for you about parenting?

-- Tell me about your marriage. What do you most admire about Julie/Catharine? Where do you most struggle, and how do you deal with those struggles?

Julie said it's like studying for comps. We thought of all these great questions, and who knows what Anna will ask? The questions might be easier than we're thinking, or we might have totally overlooked some categories of thought. We're just trying to be prepared, you know?

Paperwork!

Dear Froglet --

Some of what we've had to do to get ready for you is to complete lots and lots of paperwork. The state and the adoption agency want to do whatever they can to make sure that you're coming to a good and safe place - a family that will love and take care of you. Part of that process involves talking with a social worker -- her name is Anna -- and thinking about and answering some questions about how we hope to make our family life together. Part of that process is paperwork.

We had to get checked out by doctors and get paperwork from the doctor, saying that we were healthy enough to take care of you. We had to get drivers' records from every state where we've had a driver's license in the last five years. We've had to get references from friends who know us and who support our plan to build a family with you. We had to decide who will take care of you, in case something ever happened to Julie or Catharine, and we couldn't take care of you. We chose Peter and Jessica, and since they agreed to this very important role, they had to sign a paper and say that they are willing to take that responsibility.

Last night, when we arrived home after a very nice day, a large envelope arrived from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles. It was Catharine's driver's records, and the very last piece of paperwork we were waiting to receive.

So now we just have to gather a few things from the house (like birth certificates and name change documents), and make copies of everything, and get it all ready for the agency. Catharine needs to check with her therapist and doctor to make sure that they've sent in their pieces of paperwork, as well, and then everything will be ready.

It's one of many hurdles, but we're clearing it!

Adoption 101: Kinds of Adoption

I'm going to a do a series of posts that fill in the basics about adoption, because people who aren't part of the triad and aren't considering becoming part of the triad don't necessarily have reason to learn about these things. And so, to start, I'm going to outline the three primary kinds of (non-kinship) adoption in this country.

Domestic Infant Adoption
This is the "traditional" kind of adoption: A pregnant woman in the US chooses to make an adoption plan for her baby, and that baby is adopted by a person or a couple who wishes to expand their family. The baby often goes directly from the birthmom to the adoptive family with no intervening foster care.

Domestic infant adoption can be done through an adoption agency or through a lawyer in a private adoption. This is the kind of adoption Catharine and I are pursuing, and we're working through Adoptions Together, an agency here in Maryland.

International Adoption
International adoption changes depending on the country in question, but in most cases, children have been relinquished and are living either in an orphanage or in foster care. Americans wishing to adopt from those countries work through American agencies that have relationships with the in-country agencies and that know what the regulations and procedures are. Once everything is in place, adoptive parents usually fly to the child's birth country to finalize the adoption and bring the child home.

Foster Adopt
Children in the foster care system may or may not be free to be adopted; many have parents who are pursuing reunification and who still hold parental rights, and many will be successfully reunited with their biological families. However, sometimes parental rights have been terminated, and then children are free to be adopted. Because children are usually older when parental rights are terminated, and because foster care is rarely a nurturing environment for kids, fewer people are interested in adopting from the foster care system.

Next up in the 101 series: adoption language.

A Saturday Well-Spent

I’m sleepy and kind of emotionally wrung out, but I want to blog a bit about our weekend.

Yesterday, Julie and I had a day unlike any we’ve ever shared together. Even on the face of it, it was pretty amazing: we went to the house of a colleague and his wife for brunch at 10:30, and didn’t leave for six hours, after having shared a second meal. We’d never before spent time with them. My colleague, J, is lovely, and I’ve had some nice talks with him, but I didn’t know his wife and hadn’t seen his son, A, since A was in arms.  So even on the surface, it was a pretty cool time. We chatted and talked and enjoyed one another and just generally had a good time. They introduced us to some delicious Vietnamese food in the mid-afternoon – including bubble drinks, which I’d seen advertised but had never tasted – shared a yummy bagel-based brunch in the mid-morning, and introduced us to time with their bright and kind little boy.

J and K are active, engaged people (K had to leave to go canvass for Barack, or goddess only knows how long we would have chatted) who are concerned with the world in which they live. (J is a legal services attorney who works with kids.) Their house is beautifully full of art on the walls and pictures on tables and toys gathered in corners. K delighted us with the story of how she got a Thomas the Tank Engine play table for twenty bucks on Craig’s List. They have sweet, enthusiastic young dogs (and one lovely, much older dog, sweet Sophie).

We were just comfortable in their house. Their values, their politics, their aesthetic…it was great.

All of that was great, but it’s not what made Julie glow with excitement for hours afterward. And glow she did.

They are a thoughtful adoptive family. J and K adopted A when he was an infant, and have used many of the parenting principles that we hope to employ when Froglet comes to us. I mean, obviously, no two sets of parents are the same, but I (and I think Julie too) really found a lot of their decisions admirable and worth attending to. K has been able to stay home with A; she does adoptive breastfeeding, and has continued to do so long past when some people would have weaned; she speaks with him in English, Spanish, and baby sign; both J and K are wonderfully responsive to A, even while they were having some “grown-up time” with Julie and me. When A started saying “shut up!” in the manner he’d heard somewhere, J took some time and explained to A that it’s important not to talk to one another like that, made it clear that it wasn’t acceptable, and then moved on. When A seemed to want to keep saying it, just to get a reaction, J asked him questions and distracted him onto something more fun than envelope-pushing. A never felt like he was “in trouble” for testing the waters, but J made it perfectly clear that people in their family are expected to speak respectfully. It was just really cool to watch.

They showed us videos of the beginning of their journey with A – there was footage of the reams of paperwork they had to complete, A when he was teeny-weeny and with his foster mother in Guatemala, both of the sets of grandparents encountering and celebrating the new addition to the family…. Julie and I both cried. (So did K, so we didn’t feel alone.  )

They gave us books, and showed us other books. We gave them websites and email addresses. They told us about a conference we didn’t know about before. K sang the praises of the DC Breastfeeding Center and the women there who’ve helped her.  We talked about race and culture and loss and ethics and pain and love and love and love. It was wonderful. We shared our “getting together” stories – how we came to meet and fall in love with our spouses, when and where we got married, how we came to decide that adoption was the right thing for us. How we’ve worked and continue to work through the grief of infertility.

Because these are new friends, the whole event was shot through with the light of hope and novelty. Who knows what will happen in our friendship, overall, but it was just stunning to be with people who have similar values – aesthetic, parenting, political – to ours, and who are willing to discuss the hard parts of adoption, as well as the beautiful parts.

Difference and Adoption

(Note: I'm playing around with gender-neutral terms. Let me know how annoying it is.)

Something that we're trying to think a lot about - and about which Julie will write much more coherently than I can -- is/are the ethics of transracial adoption, and adoption in general. These areas are really chock-full of ethical pitfalls.

We watched a great video in our transracial adoption class (called, strangely, Conspicuous Parenting) of interviews of transracial adoptees. I think most of them were multi-racial, but I'm not totally clear on that. There was one young woman who was really angry with her parents, and with white adoptive parents of children of color more generally. (did that sentence make sense?) Anyway, she was really compelling to me. She asked, "Why do you want to adopt a child of color?" and demanded that prospective adoptive parents really think through this question carefully.

So Julie and I have been talking about this. At first, we agreed that it's primarily that we're not opposed to having a child of color, not that we're actively seeking out such a situation. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is some part of me that does actively want to have a child of color. Why? The answer is not fully articulated yet.

As my therapist pointed out, what's most important for adoptive children, as for all children, is that they have competent, loving parents who will be advocates for them. But in the case of transracial adoption, I think it's also really important that the parents be willing to have really hard conversations, to look at their own privilege and how it separates them from the experience of people of color, to examine carefully their own motives, and to be committed to fighting racism wherever they encounter it (particularly, but not exclusively, where it affects or pertains to their child). Julie and I are willing to do all those things, and have begun to do them more consciously than we have before.

Even if Froglet turns out to be white, we've realized that we have an obligation, especially living in this radically racially divided city, to work on issues of privilege, racism, and anti-racism. We've started attending a UU church with a more integrated congregation than the Friends Meeting we were previously attending. We're looking into anti-racist groups at that church. Julie is reading books on the construction of whiteness and how children learn about race. (I wish I could say that we are reading them, but I put down White Like Me and haven't gotten back to it of late. I am instead reading for my African-American Studies class.)

Wanting to adopt a child of color is not about trying to save Froglet from hir own community of origin. It is not about separating Froglet from hir own family of origin. We are committed to open adoption, and to having as much relationship with Froglet's birth family as seems good to all parties and is safe and fruitful. The current reality, much as it galls me, is that children of color, particularly black children, are considered "hard to place" by adoption agencies and by the state. Most adoptive parents are well-off white people, and often they want to have adoptive children who "look like" them, whatever that really means, which means that there are fewer parents willing to adopt children of color. That drives me crazy, even though I know for sure that people who aren't willing and able to do what it takes to adequately parent a child of color shouldn't have one.

There are other classes of children we're willing to adopt who are considered "hard to place." We're open to a lot of things. We're open to children with developmental delays or disabilities. We're open to children who have been exposed to HIV. We believe that our experiences, skills, research and willingness to learn could make us really great candidates for children in these situations. They are children whose lives look, on the face of it, very different from our own, but who need loving, attentive parents who will advocate for them, and learn how to do the things that we don't yet know.

This is true for all parents, I think. All parents need to be advocates for their children. All parents, whether biological or adoptive, need to know that things happen, that life is uncertain, that human beings are not simply copies of their parents, that openness to difference is key. I mean, I am biologically related to my parents, and that didn't stop me (or my brother) from having some really serious issues that my parents had never, ever planned for, and to which they had to respond as best they could. I turned out to be lesbian, to have bipolar disorder and not get diagnosed until I was thirty-one, to spend my twenties running around with whoever I could get my hands on. I'm sure that none of this was in my parents' plan for me when I was a wee babe. And being their biological child didn't save me from these issues. I had them anyway, and we all suffered together through my brother's and my difficult adolescences. (Julie has to constantly remind me that not all children have the horrific adolescences that I had.)

So I guess what I'm saying is that we're open to difference, and we're willing to do the work to reach across divides -- race, class, disability -- to build our family. Not only that, and maybe this is too much "hearts and rainbows" for some of us, but I honestly believe that the overflowing love that Julie and I have for one another and for the Froglet-yet-to-be will continue to compel us to learn more, to change our lives, to become the parents we know we can be, no matter the race or abilities of our child.

So those are my thoughts now. I'm interested in what you have to say...and in what Julie has to say! We may not always disagree - she's much more well-read on these subjects than I am - but you'll get a sense of our journey together, and the things with which we're struggling.

Love, Qira

Greetings and Salutations

With the dogs wrestling in the background and the cats determined to sit in front of the computer screen, we're sitting down to start documenting the experience of waiting for Froglet.

We have piles of paperwork (almost done!), books, magazines, and all kinds of ideas about what this is going to be like -- but we don't really know what this is going to be like. Not really at all. But so that we can remember -- and so that one day Froglet can read about how s/he joined our family -- well, here we are.

We're writing alternately to Froglet, to ourselves, and to our friends and families of blood and choice. But whoever you are, welcome to our journey.