almost to the day

Our first meeting with a social worker (in our home) should take place in a couple weeks. Almost two years to the date of our original application.

I am not really afraid of a home study. I am not ashamed of any part of my life. I am completely comfortable talking to anyone about anything.

It might be a good opportunity to donate at least two car loads full of clothes that don't even fit anymore. It might also be a good time to clean out some of the cupboards where band-aid boxes and hair gel bottles get stuffed into the darkness so I don't have to see them out on the bathroom counter.

Two years ago we felt excited and nervous. One year ago we felt frustrated.

Right now? Right now I feel a little tender. I feel like I need to re-read the attachment books. I feel like I need to get into this again because after two years of nothing at all, life goes on.

We will eventually complete a home study. Then we will start the waiting process all over again. Life will go on. In two years I will re-read the attachment books.

The thing is, no matter how long we wait, we will never, ever be prepared for what is to come. Some day we will bring new people home and I will feel the greatest joy, deepest sadness and like the most inadequate person in the world. On that day the wait will have been,  all at once too long and too short.

Offbeat Awesomeness

Another guest post on Offbeat Families and more lovely, supportive comments. There are many beautiful people in the world and I am honoured to be able to share this journey with some of them.
Nesting for Adoption - Offbeat Families

You gotta have faith... faith... faith

Actually, you don't have to have faith.
I do. It's the way I'm wired. I didn't grow up in church. I grew up with pretty liberal parents who created two pretty liberal kids. We didn't memorise bible verses or say grace at the dinner table. My mum was religious but we didn't really practice religion as a family.

The funny thing is, I can't remember a time that I didn't talk with God. I don't mean formal prayer. I just mean chatting and conversing. I think that it is because of this relationship with God that I eventually found more "formal" religion. Religious tradition didn't limit my engagement with the world, it became a way for me to express my relationship with God within a community.

I think a lot about the role that my faith has played in my decision to adopt. Sure, there are biblical teachings about caring for widows and orphans. I hold fast to the teaching that helping "the least" of God's children is a direct link to God. These are the reasons I continue to believe in universal health care, compassionate criminal justice programmes and rights and freedoms for all people regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation. But these aren't the reasons that I decided to adopt.

I decided to adopt because I had some really important feelings about how our family should be created and  I felt our home would be the right one for a child already here, on this planet. I decided to adopt because when I talked to my husband about it, he acted like it was what we'd always planned. It was like he had the same feelings, we just hadn't discussed them yet.

I decided to adopt because God and I have been talking about adoption for a long time, I just didn't always realise it. When I opened myself up to the idea, God continued to lead me in that direction and continues to lead the way.

Now, I hope the title of this post has given you all a George Michael ear worm for the rest of the day:

Look at all that sexy chest hair...

Where do I fit?

I tried to find the cheesiest stock image of "the internet"- this will have to do.
The title of the post is "Where do I fit?" Get it? Hilarious...

The internet is a funny place. There are so many people. There is so much information. You would think that the internet would mean that no one ever gets lonely or feels out of place. But that is exactly how I feel when it comes to reading about other people's adoptions. When it comes to foster-adoption/public adoption there seems to be two distinct camps who do a large portion of the blogging/posting/website-ing.

There are those who have adopted children with a severe RAD (reactive attachment disorder) diagnoses or FAS/FASD (and often a combination) who post a lot on a forum that I sometimes read. These parents post about excrement being smeared all over the walls by 9 year olds, children who throw up at the dinner table every night, kids who light the family pet on fire at least once a day. They seem to try to 'one up' each other on the forum. Now these parents are amazing for taking this on. They are strong, loving people with strong stomachs! I am not one of these parents. I'm just not. I still plan to adopt because I know that not every child in the system has RAD or even FASD and not every adoption situation is like this.

The problem is that this forum seems to have been commandeered by one particular group of parents. If you were searching for information on public adoption and came across this info first, you might not continue to lean more.

When I look at blogs about adoption, I often see a different group of parents. There seem to be a lot of conservative, Christian adoptive families with profiles that mention their five children through "the miracle of birth" and their five children through "the miracle of adoption". They usually live on spacious property in an all American suburb or on a sprawling farm. Again, these have got to be some strong and loving people to raise such huge families.But again, they're just not me.

We're city dwellers living in an awesome, rented apartment. I am an ordained Presbyterian elder and we attend church every Sunday but politically we are very liberal. We are planning on adopting a foster child who will have some special needs but we can't handle every kind of special need. We are ourselves and we are not reflected perfectly in everyone's situation.

Big surprise, eh?


Now that I've written all that, I'll let you know that I have found some awesome blogs, websites and resources through sheer determination and luck. I have also found "diamond in the rough" posts on blogs that otherwise don't help me much. There is also great value in reading about different kinds of families and situations even if you disagree about stuff. The information that you need to help you learn and prepare is out there. You just might have to be patient in order to find it. A lot of this adoption preparation seems to be about patience...

Diary

When I turned 5 I had the only co-ed birthday party I would have until I turned 16 (worth the wait because my 16th was a 70's themed fondue party in the basement). If I remember correctly, my fifth birthday was at a bowling alley. I don't remember much of it. What I do remember is that a kid named Dillon gave me a strange and awesome gift. He gave me my first diary.

I guess Dillon and his mom had some idea that all girls, regardless of age, needed a place to put their secrets. Or they had no idea what to get me and watched too much Full House (that Stephanie was always worried about her diary!). This diary was great. It had a puffy plastic cover (like one of those toilet seats that old people have) and it had a lock that could be opened with the two little keys that it came with. At five years old, I already shared a room with my baby sister, had very protective parents and had never seen anything quite as thrilling as a private book with a lock on it!

So what did I do? I locked it and unlocked it every day. I wouldn't dare write in it. A book that special would require some kind of special secrets. I couldn't think of any secrets special enough. One day I bit the bullet and wrote a sentence about picking wild strawberries. After that, the diary lost some of it's appeal. It was like I had tainted it with my crappy story about strawberries.

It was years later before I would have a diary again. This one was filled with boys. A lot of boys. It was basically my record of every time a boy that I liked talked to me, hugged me or said something funny. Kind of like those notebooks that they find in the apartments of stalkers and serial killers.

After those scary years, I stopped writing in a diary. I went to college to try to be a writer but quit when my scholarship money ran out. This is the closest thing to a diary that I've had as an adult and the hilarious thing is that over 1700 people have read it. Not amazing by blog standards but pretty weird none the less.

So I'm going to keep rambling because this helps me organize my thoughts and helps me communicate with lots of family and friends all at once. I also hope that if you're out there and thinking about starting a family in any non-traditional way, you might learn something or laugh at something or just feel a little less alone.

It's hard for me to to feel alone when hundreds of people have snooped through my diary! Thank you!

Hormones

I'm going along, enjoying being young and awesome. Stuff like going to the museum whenever I want, going out for wings and a pint whenever I want, playing Harvest Moon 2 on the Gameboy Colour emulator on my smart phone, making super healthy juice to offset mojitos and nachos for dinner. You get the picture. Awesomeness. Some of this is awesomeness that will probably have to change when I become a parent. Not that I won't still be awesome, I'll just be different awesome.

So I'm going along minding my own business when whammy, every month I get hit with a big truckload of hormones. Hormones that make me think I'm a biological anomaly for not being pregnant, hormones that make me read all the adoption blogs in the world, hormones that make me go back and read all the materials from the AEP, hormones that make me facebook stalk all my friends and acquaintances who have adorable families.

And these hormones are awesome because they help me get stuff done. They help me learn more about adoption and parenting, they help me remember to fill out that form about my mental health (ha!), they help me want to organise the apartment (or at least complain to AH that the apartment needs to be organised).

It's not that I don't want a family every day of the month but I'm glad for those hormones that give me a little kick in the pants.

PS- It's been a year since we took our AEP and well over a year since we applied to adopt. In the last provincial election, funding for the provincial adoption program wasn't in any party's agenda (not that I could see, anyway). The province has re-elected the same government so we're not expecting the situation to change. Our advice? Don't wait to get started if you want to adopt within the next 3-5 years!

Thank you offbeat families!

The awesome "offbeat" empire published an article that I wrote. The comments on the article have brought me to tears with their warmth and positivity! Check out the link if you want to read it.

Offbeat - choosing adoption

Thanks a lot, newspaper

Most of the time I'm pretty cool with the fact that this process takes a long time. Adam and I eat Thai take-out when we want and go to bed early when we want. We can choose to lay in bed eating chips (crisps, not french fries) and watching Arrested Development on netflix for hours. And we do do this more often then we'd like to admit. We enjoy being a family of two.

Then there are those moments when it just hits me like a truck. Today I clicked on a link to a restaurant review that lead me to the website of our city's largest newspaper. Right there on the homepage is the headline "Adoptions build families, make a house a home". Ok, grammar issues aside, this just kills me. The article is all about adopting older children from foster care. THAT IS WHAT I'M TRYING TO DO! Of course it's great that adoption is in the news. It's great if there are more families out who learn about adoption. But I was told in September that we'd get a home visit (that never happened) and in October I was told we should hear from someone by Christmas (that never happened). I'm not angry. I'm just sad. Some days I get a little sad. But the sadness makes me glad too. I'm glad that my heart and my mind are both edging me on towards the goal of bringing our kids home. I'm glad that this process that is so clinical makes me emotional sometimes. I'm glad that my sadness will make me call and ask where we are on the wait list for a homestudy.

Tonight we will enjoy the bittersweet companionship of netflix and chips and a glass of wine or two. Because we're grown-ups without kids and we can console ourselves with the fact that we can choose the most awesome of pastimes without interruption. Not that the interruption won't be welcome when the time comes.

like a new species

This morning over coffee, AH and I were talking about his future business plans. In a year's time he plans on working for himself, doing what he loves. This would give him more flexibility and a more stable paycheck. But it is so hard to plan a year into the future when we have no idea what will be happening next fall. We could still be going through our homestudy, we could be waiting for "the call", we could be in pre-placement visits and (strangest of all) there is even the (extremely slim) chance that we could have children.
AH commented that if we were pregnant we'd at least have a pretty clear idea of our family's time line. I said that this feels like being some new kind of species with no idea how long our gestation period is. So we're planning on not being able to plan. It's all good.

personal post- the loss of the fantasy child

So far, a lot of the posts have seemed a little clinical. There is a lot of "book learning" to do and it is all really important. There are also a lot of emotions that AH and I have dealt with/still deal with. The fact is, at the end of the day, we will have little strangers in our home who are with us, for better or for worse and it will be up to us to make a family out of that situation. This is a post about one of the very personal aspects of this process.

From the time we are children, we have an idea of what our own children will be like. We think about the physical characteristics we will pass on. We think about the things that we'll teach them. We think about the way we'll take care of them. We think about how beautiful they'll be. We think about how smart they'll be. We know that the children that come from us will be perfect. When we are with our spouse, we think about the amazing traits that they will pass on- the things that we love about them.

This is all a fantasy. Any parent will tell you that no child turns out how you expect them too. In giving birth to a child, you cannot protect them from all "defects" or diseases. You cannot pick whether they get your blue eyes or your crooked teeth. But there is still a chance that some aspect of your 'fantasy child' will be realised.

Adoption is different. AH used the game Yahtzee to describe it. He says that when you give birth, it's like you've already got some dice on the table. No matter what you roll with the remaining dice, you already know some of the variables. With adoption, it's like putting all the dice back in the cup on your last roll and not knowing if you'll get a "Yahtzee" or your "chance" (not that your "chance" is a bad thing, many close games have been won on a "chance" score!).

When we made the decision to adopt it felt overwhelmingly "right" in a way that trying to have birth children never did. We are at times blissful, anxious, excited, serene and terrified (sometimes all at once); just like any other 'parents to be'. But it is important to accept the loss of the fantasy birth-child so that we can fully welcome our own children into our lives with no prejudice or presumption.