About that oncoming train...

The closer I get to an event, the more anxious I get for it to arrive. And who doesn't experience this? Does a bride lose interest in the wedding as it approaches? Does a new job lose its lustre the week before orientation? Are children ever as wound up with anticipation about Christmas in September as they are on Christmas Eve? (when Christmas transforms from a season of wonders and delight into an endurance event, a triathalon of cooking, shopping and decorating, Christmas Eve becomes the first moment in a month in which a person can sit and breathe, knowing that if it isn't done already, it's not going to happen, but that is not the point here, and I ask, dear reader, for you to remember back to a simpler, happier time, when you were nine years old, wearing footie pajamas, and Christmas was a magical, wondrous time, all thanks to somebody else doing all the freakin' work).

As our homestudy nears its completion, it is natural for our feelings of anticipation to heighten, but when you are adopting, when you are going through the home study process, the important thing to remember is: nothing about you is normal, natural, or right.

Expectant biological parents may refer to their incipient offspring unit by any terminology they please, and everyone coos and sighs over how cute their pet name is (my favorite name, given by friends to their incoming infant: Particle). We have been thinking and talking to each other and friends for months about our approaching adoption, wouldn't it be weird if we didn't have a name we've given to the Kiddo? And there it is, he is The Kiddo. It's an expression of affection, endearment, not specific to any age, gender, or personality trait. And apparently, it's wrong.

Says the therapist: "this is not 'the kid' you're talking about, this is your child." "My child" is, by the way, the only acceptable nomenclature - "my son" is right out. If I say "I don't know him yet, I don't know who he is, what his history is, what he's like, what I'll love best about him, what he'll like about me, or even if he'll ever feel anything toward me but hostility, but he's my son and it is painful to me to think of him going through this holiday season not knowing that there's a real couple out there who wants him and wants him to come home, even if he doesn't fully believe that somebody wanting him is possible" - and that's close to a quote - the reaction is "why do you say 'son?' Would you be unable to accept a daughter?"

So why do we say son? I am a working mother, B is a stay-at-home father, and over 80% of children in foster care have experienced sexual abuse - often while in foster care, at the hands of other children. I trust B implicitly, but would a girl, of any age, who has been abused by men, be well served by being alone with a man for several hours a day? Neither does it seem fair to B, to either put him at risk of a false accusation or to subject him to being the primary caregiver for a child whose anxiety is exacerbated by his presence. Instead, we focus on the positives, that we have a great male role model who could be of great benefit to a boy who has been without one. Says the therapist: "when you explain it that way it's clear that there's logical thought behind it, but when you just refer to your child as your son, it can make people concerned." John Cullum can holler It's a Boy and then turn on a dime when his granddaughter is born and it's endearing; adoptive parents, don't think you can be like normal parents and that will be ok, because you can't and it won't.

The acceptable adoptive parent fully realizes the future relationship that he or she may be denied by a third party before it ever happens, fully engaging with the unknown child, not as a person but as a role. That is, the adoptive parent must envision having a child but not knowing a person; the adoptive parent is fully disengaged from any anticipation of the qualities their child might have, only what behaviors he or she will engage in. Adoptive parents are expected to be like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, knowing nothing about the children they will be caring for except that there are seven of them. Also, instead of meeting the children the day after she's told about them, in this musical, Julie Andrews goes through a six month screening and training montage (even Rocky had a montage!) in which she is expected to remain incurious about and detached from the children she was told about in scene 1.

Do biological parents get tut-tutted if they let slip that they vacillate from day to day between excitement and unsurety about the big event looming in their lives? If they express a hope that infant arrives before this holiday or that anniversary, does this excite criticism? My youngest brother was born one day after what would have been our great-grandfather's 100th birthday. If the standards applied to adoptive parents were applied to biological ones, My father's thought before the birth that it would be nice if Danny arrived on the actual day would raise concern among professionals, as possibly foretokening an inability to bond with his son, should he not measure up to his parent's ideals.

Maybe it's just this particular therapist. When we talked about our feelings about fertility and our lack thereof, I was emphatic that not only do I not endow fertility with feelings of self-worth, I conciously refuse to do so, dating back to long before we had any idea that infertility would be an issue. I explained that, to me, life is full of paths and producing offspring is just one of those paths, one that not everybody chooses, that my choice to adopt is not one that I see as a second choice to biological parenthood, but as an exciting life's work in its own right, that, even if creating a new child is as important, valuable or meaningful as opening a new life to an underappreciated child, that biological parenthood cannot help but be more ordinary, more commonplace, less interesting, less exciting than the path that we are on. I told her that, as I see it now, had we become biological parents, it would have been a hindrance to pursuing something that I now see as my life's mission. Says the therapist (with urgency): "but you can see how other people wouldn't feel that way?" Thinks me: "so the f--- what?"

My G-d, does she want us to conform. She's not in any insurance network and doesn't file claims herself. When I called to set up the initial appointment she was very concerned about whether our insurance would cover our sessions. I told her since she's out of network, the coverage would be minimal and since it's for an assessment, not for therapy, unlikely that they'll cover it at all, but even if that's the case, it doesn't really matter, since she's the person the agency told us to see to get assessed and cleared for adoption and we consider this to be simply one of the costs of the process. This bothered her. She was reluctant to book the appointment without me checking with the insurance company first. And then, at our first session, she wanted to go over it again. Yesterday she seemed to finally give up on the insurance and move on to parking - she had sent an email that said that parking was available in the lot across the street, but come into the building and check with the doorman about which spaces in the lot are ok and which ones aren't... so we just did on the street parking a block away and enjoyed the walk. This was apparently not acceptable. Unsolicited: "Where did you park?" I just found a space up the street. "Because you know, they ticket here if you aren't careful." Yes, I know, I went to the university two blocks east of here and I lived for seven years in an apartment about a mile west. "You don't care if you get a ticket?" I parked a block west of here, where you don't need a permit. "But there's a lot across the street." Yes, I saw that, I decided to park a block away and walk. I'd been driving for an hour and I knew that I'd be sitting in here for an hour and I felt like stretching my legs. "On your way out, check with the doorman about which spaces in the lot you can use next time."

B expresses that as a result of his childhood, he is hypervigilant about physical threats, and that's not his most attractive or engaging quality now, but it's quirky and interesting and when the zombie apocalypse finally gets off its butt and shows up, we'll all be grateful that B has an office stocked with gas masks and geiger counters (both kinds!) Whatever, he's very aware of physicality and works out a lot because he wants to feel strong. Says the therapist: "is a thirteen year old boy right for you? He might get aggressive." Says B: "I'm 220 pounds and an ex-Army Ranger." Says me: "so, in her world, risk awareness increases the risk? It's like, if somebody told her that he's a very cautious driver and always comes to a complete stop at intersections, she'd ask, if he thinks that driving isn't completely safe, why he ever takes the highway?"

I engage life with a sense of humor and an appreciation for the absurd. When people behave offensively or intrusively, I tend give my inner Dorothy Parker a little more rein, redirecting instead of confronting the offensive party. Says the therapist: "your sense of humor can be off-putting. Try to stop, reflect, and control yourself before you make those remarks." I remark on the general efficacy of unsolicited advice. Says the therapist: "that's the sort of thing you should stop saying."

I HATE this process, where everything is torn apart, second guessed, judged, where we live for months in anticipation, not being sure if, in the end, we will be found acceptable by this agency as prospective adoptive parents. We are living a year in limbo. Says the therapist: "you seem anxious and very keyed into what you think are delays, but six months really isn't very long to be waiting. I'm concerned that this child will introduce stress that will cause you to experience anxiety." The snappy comeback I didn't deliver would have made her happy that it was not delivered, if she knew it existed in the first place, which she couldn't because she'd told me to keep it to myself. I think I'm making progress.

Adoption Meeting

The blog is going slowly, I know. I'm trying to stick to adoption issues and, occasionally, work stuff for filler. Otherwise, I'd be putting up lots of posts about politics, links to things like this video of a robot which solves Rubik's Cubes in which the newscaster asserts that a cube has five sides and that the robot's best solve time (26 seconds) is "almost double" the fastest human time (10 seconds). I weep for humanity.

Or, I would be linking other videos like this one, which I've watched a dozen times today and it makes me cry and smile and I love it. I'm still weeping for humanity, but in a completely different way.

We had a meeting at the adoption agency yesterday. We went back over our opening checklist. The difficult part is that the goal is to be "open" with the agents, but it felt like everything we said just opened us up to misunderstanding. It went like this:

Agent: You've signed the agreement not to use corporal punishment, and you've been to the classes that have talked about discipline methods. Could you talk about how you were disciplined growing up and what your philosophy is with regards to discipline?

Me: I remember when my father announced that he'd decided that spanking was just teaching children that it's acceptable to hit when you're angry, and he wasn't going to do it anymore, and my first thought then was: "why did he wait until now, when I'm eight and too old to spank anyway, to figure that out?" I can see the rationale for a corrective light swat on a pre-reasoning bottom, but I think that, even if there weren't all the other reasons for not using corporal punishment on a fost/adopt, spanking a child over the age of reason is correction through humiliation, and that's a bad idea under any circumstances.

When we talk about discipline, the thing that I keep in mind is that it isn't possible to really "control" a child. A teenager, especially, is going to hit a moment when it occurs to him that there's not really a lot their parents can do to them, and what they can do might be a small price to pay for whatever it is the teen wants to do (I remember clearly when I had that delicious revelation). Children are autonomous beings, and it's up to parents to guide them by building a relationship in which parents' guidance and opinions are valued (or at least complied with because it's such a hassle otherwise...) And that works and it lasts - I still can't stand the idea of disappointing my dad. The important thing is to avoid overreaching the bounds of parental authority, because the inevitable result of that is that the parent either becomes a tyrant or a figure of ridicule or both.

And we have theories, not children, and we'll probably laugh our asses off a year from now at these theories, but for right now, that's where we're coming from. Use a light touch, build the relationship, horse whisperer stuff.

Agent: OK, but you understand that these kids might be 15 years old but emotionally aged 4, so they can't really make good decisions for themselves?

And everything was like that. Except for the part when we told them that what we really wanted was a kid with ropy muscles, good for "working the farm." They asked about what experience we had with kids and one of the things we told them about was the open houses we did in 2003-2006. I was going back to school at VCU and we made dinner for whoever showed up one night a week. Told a few kids at school about it the first time, and they came, and then they told two people, and they told two people, and it went on like that. There was somebody every week who we'd never met before, and we still keep in touch with some of the regulars. Met their parents when the 'rents were in town. Good kids, for the most part. We enjoyed having them around.

Still no firm news on the house situation. The house we'd like to buy has been re-listed at the same excessive price. We're getting close to the point where we're ready to make an offer, but we're not quite there yet.

Context

This is a fost/adopt blog. Really. In spite of the fact that the fost/adopt process is still in its nascence, and also in spite of the fact that I rarely blog. I thought I'd take a moment to give you an update on the whole shebang.

We have turned in a great big pile of paperwork, but still have another great big pile, including our autobiographies, to go. We have a meeting with the agents on April 15, by which time we hope we can have the rest done. We're also hoping by then to have some more definite information about the house we want to buy. We aren't worried about anybody else grabbing it before we can get there - it's way out in the sticks, almost an hour from the edge of Richmond, the asking price is ludicrous (10% over assessment, no we're not going to pay anything remotely like that) and nobody but us has even come out to look at it since last May. It's new construction on 9.5 acres, still owned by the developers, and none of the other four much larger lots in the tract are so much as cleared.

We're very excited about the house and we expect that sometime within the next six weeks we'll be ready to make an offer on it. We'd love to move sooner, but... see the problem is that we aren't people who like to live on credit - I haven't had a credit card since the first $500 limit teaser card I got my first week at college, and I cut that up before I graduated. In the nearly fifteen years B and I have been together, we have had... wait for it... zero credit cards and exactly one car loan and one student loan. That's it. Until the little Versa I'm driving now, we've bought used cars for cash. Except for the student loan and me putting my foot down when the '81 Toyota MR2 gave up the ghost on I-195 (in all fairness, we paid $2000 for that car and put 100,000 miles on it at over 30 mpg highway - it was a deal), if we don't have the money on hand, we don't spend it. Which means that our credit sucks because there's not much positive to report on it.

So... six months ago when we decided that this is the year to buy a house, we not only went to work on that whole down payment thing, we also went to work on putting some positives in our credit history so that we could get a better rate on a mortgage. Since our lease isn't up until the end of July, it made sense to take our time. Sometime in April, early May at the latest, we should hit our goal number (we're 10 points away right now) and then we get the pre-approval, make an offer, seal the deal (refinance the car while we're at it) and get our move on. That's the plan. And I'm happy to report, it's on track.

I'll let you know as soon as there's anything else to tell.

Sophomoricon

We have completed the eight hours of instruction required to become adoptive parents, which is eight hours more instruction than is required to become biological parents and approximately seven hundred ninety-two hours (give or take) less than is required to begin to have a clue about what we're getting ourselves into. I've tried to fill the gaps by reading everything I can find, both in print and in self-publication, i.e. blogs. And for the record, here's what I've learned:

• Child raising is like CPR, in that new information is always forthcoming and periodically the new information is revolutionary. There's a cycle of throwing out theories as new theories emerge. That doesn't mean that all theories are bunk and you can just ignore them, but do be ready to accept new ideas. Just because last year they taught you mouth to mouth and this year they say no mouth to mouth and hum the BeeGees while you do compressions doesn't mean that this year, if you see someone in cardiac arrest that you shouldn't do anything because next year they'll find another song that's even better.
  
• The behavior is what will present itself, but knocking out a behavior without getting at the underlying cause will only cause a new behavior to spring up in its place. If the underlying cause is unknown, fear is a safe first guess. In other words, Fear is the Kudzu of parenting traumatized children.
  
• Getting involved with fost/adopt is checking into the biggest morass of second guessing I've ever come into contact with. There is no end to criticism of the system and everyone who is a part of it, which in every case should either have let kids be with parents who were good or removed them much earlier from the bad ones, but in no cases ever acted exactly as soon as anybody ought to have noticed that something was wrong and not a day before. Somebody always ought to have known what Anybody else thought would have been best for Everybody, if only they all hadn't been so selfish/lazy/stupid/only in it for the money. The motives of all voluntary parents of suffering children are automatically either laudable, suspect, or both and they should all be considered guilty of not doing enough for their children until they prove themselves innocent by collapsing from nervous exhaustion.
  
• Sometimes kids wet the bed as a response to a specific, temporary anxiety. And sometimes they do it because their abusers didn't want to rape a kid who smelled bad. The fact that they continue to wet themselves when they're safe with you doesn't mean that they don't feel safe with you, necessarily. It's because that's the way the world works for them. Even if you're safe, that doesn't mean the world is. This cross applies to basically everything.
• There is a different right answer for every child, and the only people who don't know what that right answer is are the people providing day to day care for him. It is strange that this should be so, but as the world in general tends to be in agreement on this point in each individual case (although the pattern is generally denied) anyone taking the part of a parent in any particular accusation is taking what is popularly considered to be an indefensible position.
  
• When a child is neglected, a caustic chemical is released in her brain that has a calming effect on that child. If the neglect happens too frequently and the chemical is released too often, the brain resets its "rage thermostat" so that the chemical will now only be released under more extreme circumstances, leaving the kids with the most to cope with a harder time coping with everything. If one assumes the existence of an Omnipotent Diety, this single fact must be proof of Its satirical nature.

The agency has informed us that a case worker will contact us on Wednesday to begin our home study process. We still have a house to buy before the study can be completed.

My heartfelt good wishes for Torina. More than anything else, these poor waiting children need people like Torina's (and Yondalla's and the Grateful House and RADical Adventures) prominent presence in our society, because she provides visibility for their situation and encouragement and inspiration for people who are considering taking on the challenge of reforming their family to include a parentless special needs child. It is a shame that any dyspeptic troll can drive one of these bloggers underground by threatening to make false and baseless accusations of abuse against them. Taking her blog private was the only prudent thing Torina could do, but future adoptive parents will be poorer for not having her example to learn from, both in her successes and in her setbacks.

Snow Day

The 'net was flaky today, as was the power. Last night at 10, as we were taking the doggus for her walk, there was a kind of a zzzttt and a kind of a bright blue light, and a kind of a POW and then there was a kind of a dark all the way down the street. Across the street they had power. This happened after the hurricane too - the other side of the street had their power reconnected the next day, but our side of the street was up for an hour, then zzzt-blue-POW! and it was down for a week. That wasn't quite as bad because it was spring, so the lack of a working heater wasn't such a dire prospect. Last night, we missed the heat.

Went to see The Reader on Friday. Lot of skin. I enjoyed it, enough to pick up the book right after we got out of the movie. Read it Friday night. The book is much more clearly about the generational struggle in post-nazi Germany, and the tension created when the post-war generation's obligation to condemn the actions of their parents comes into conflict with a realization of the older generation's pitiable limitations. The movie was more a character study - interesting, but only as a character study. I found the book meatier. Speaking of meatier, the movie is much steamier than the book, so if you're looking for something with Kate Winslet and David Kross nude, lots, and from many angles, but on paper, Felicia Day reviews some Highland Hunk Fantasies that might interest you.

Watching all that skin, had to wonder how much longer we'll be able to go see intelligent movies that have a non-neurotic, not-cartoonish sexual aspect and have to stick to the flicks that eschew sensuality and concentrate more on shooting, car chases, and the "Gimme some sugar, baby" theory on relationships. I could do without the sex scenes entirely, as long as the movies are smart, but those are even harder to find. Waitress was smart without being pr0n, but that's just one movie and Adrienne Shelley isn't around to make more of them. Woody Allen writes about relationships without focusing on the sex, but B hates Woody Allen who really peaked with Hannah and Her Sisters anyway, so what's the point?

The next fost/adopt class is on March 11, at which time we're going to have to ask for fresh copies of the application paperwork - many thanks to the cat who saw a half-full glass of orange juice sitting on the desk beside the paperwork and said This Will Not Stand. Mostly I'm not worried, but there is a tiny bit of me that frets over having to admit... that I can't train a cat. A cat who is remarkably stupid, by the way. A cat who makes it so we can't have a resevoir waterer for the pets because she will sit at it, by the hour, scooping water out of the bowl with her paw, marveling at the way the water goes out and more water comes in! She'll sit in a quart-sized puddle of water, still amazed at the way the water keeps coming and sometimes there are bubbles in the tank! And I can't train her! So who would let me have a kid if I can't even teach a stupid cat not to do whatever she wants? Also, I can't bend space and time. Disgraceful.

Looking for Info

I'm trying to find information on the education needs, up to and including home schooling, that my future Annie/Oliver might have. Unfortunately, googling "homeschool" and its variants so far has turned up all manner of "home school your children to keep the scary fact-based world out and bind the kids to you 4EVAR!!!" advice that does put the fear of God into me, but not in the way the authors intended.

Can any of the sane, rational people who read this make any recommendations? I'm looking specifically for info that would give me an insight into children ages 12&up, and children with cognitive delay.

Also, question for the day, why is it that people who do international adoptions aren't required to learn any of the language their children speak? I'm not wondering why folks aren't becoming fluent in Mandarin Chinese (although there is a "Teach Yourself" series B and I saw at the bookstore that included "Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese in 14 Days." We'd been about to purchase that company's German kit until we saw the Chinese one and decided that the company might have a tendency to overpromise.)

Challenges

We have to write autobiographies as part of the home study. This is a standard requirement and the length is typically somewhere between 5 and 25 pages. For those of you who know me, you can probably guess that generating 12 pages of whinging about my mother followed by 3 pages of explaining that I've learned to deal with it (my favorite way of expressing this is to say that I've excused myself from the focus group for her particular brand of crazy) is no big deal. I have some concerns about exactly how much I want to reveal about my mother's (and her family's) particular brand of crazy: should I explain exactly what my brother means when he refers to what they call "family game time" as "guns or knives Pictionary"? should I include the most fantastic liberating moment of my life, the one when my mother told me that once, when I was three, I took my dad's hand and refused to hold her's and she has felt rejected by me ever since (I am not making this up, and it was more than twenty years later she hauled this story out and expected me to feel guilty about my selfish toddler ways) and it finally occurred to me that if an infant's capriciousness was enough to wound her for decades that her emotional baggage was neither my fault nor my problem nor my responsibility and I was free, glory hallelulia, Moses take me to the promised land!

Should I explain that one of the most formative moments of my life was when my mother's twin sister tried to force my youngest brother to eat vomit? And that I wish to this day that I'd had the guts to stand up to her and make her stop? Or even just to be openly sympathetic towards him while he sat at the kitchen table for hours in front of a plate of his own puke? Should I explain that the reason I don't have control issues as an adult was from learning then from my aunt's revolting example that the more you attempt to control others, the more you risk losing control of your own moral center?

These are the issues we're dealing with here, people, and this is heavy stuff. But there is a much harder question that I have to find a way to answer: how do I get a man who once responded to an assignment to write an essay on "What I Did on my Summer Vacation" by writing (and this is the entirety of his essay):

It is none of your business what I did on my summer vacation.

How does that man write a five page autobiography?

But for you, Annie/Oliver, we'd never know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.

*Update: Nobody's commented about the vomit thing and I understand that because it's just revolting and I was honestly afraid to put it up on a public blog, but after I'd done it, it felt great. We're only as weak as our secrets are strong - it's saccharine but true.

Anyway, I thought it could use some context because as it is it sounds bizarre and because it's kind of cleansing to tell. She didn't start out by trying to make him eat vomit, she started out by trying to make him eat overcooked yellow squash. The stuff was revolting (and I generally love squash), all slimy and gross, and Danny doesn't do vegetables anyway. But it got - fast, head-spinningly fast - into this place where he. was going. to eat. the squash. because she told him to and he wasn't doing it. He took a bite and said he felt sick and she told him he didn't and he said he needed to get to the bathroom and she said he couldn't and he threw up right there at the table (which did nothing to make the squash more appetizing for the rest of us, let me tell you) and she just couldn't let him beat her like that. So she told him to eat it and he wouldn't and then she told him that he wasn't going to get up from the table until he had eaten it and he just sat there for about three hours and the rest of us were told to stay away from him and we did. I'm ashamed to say it, but we did. And we lived in a place where things like that though generally not as graphic happened for about five months and then when Mother moved in too it got a little better and my aunt didn't try the really outrageous stuff anymore but things were still tense for about another five months and then we moved into Mother's house and we got a whole different flavor of crazy, although Mother was always better by comparison with her sister and brother-in-law. Like, for instance, the time that the five of us kids were alone at Mother's and Uncle Bob showed up for a few minutes and, when I told him that I was starting to feel really sick, he collected the other four kids, left me alone in the house and didn't call anybody to let them know that I was ill or check up on me again (he lived about two miles away, in case you're wondering). By the time Mother got home and found me, I was severely dehydrated, fever of 104 and I had collapsed halfway to the bathroom in a pool of my own... why do these stories always involve vomit? But, for extra fun, I'd also lost control of other... it was gross, let's just stipulate the total and absolute grossness of the general situation. Anyway, it was not a super fun time to be me. So for any of you out there who knew me then and for several years afterward and always thought there was something a little too tense about me, now you know (knowing is half the battle, yada yada, etc).

Frankly, I'm surprised I turned out as well as I did.

Core Issues in Adoption

Class #2 was more of the same stuff we pretty much already knew, but it's good to have it drilled in. So much of the focus seems to be on convincing people who are adopting infants and/or toddlers that their kids can grieve for the loss of their bio parents. I have to confess, I think it's weird that a newborn can identify mom - and even weirder dad - by smell. Wasn't aware that nasal passages work very well in utero. Once they get the first meal, I can see identifying the mom smell, but minus that, how would baby differentiate mom from nurse from adopted mom? Heart rhythm?

The instructor had a list for us:

• Loss
• Rejection
• Guilt/Shame
• Grief
• Identity
• Intimacy
• Control

And let us know that whatever one of those we felt vulnerable about, the kid would find it and push that button. I'm not scared, and that makes me worried. The thing is, I'm not uncomfortable with any of these, I am fully aware of how self-defeating it is to get into power struggles, I'm not afraid of getting close to this kid and I'm not afraid of her pushing back (mostly because I'm not fooling myself into thinking that she won't or that she'll really have any option other than to push away frequently). I want her to have a strong sense of identity that is all about her, and I'd be honored if she wanted it to be partly about me too, but my feelings of self-worth aren't tuned in to her wanting to be like me or wanting to be with me all the time or any of that - my feelings of self-worth as a parent center around knowing I did the best I reasonably could to give her the best chance of having a happy life she can have. My me is really about me, not about her. I really just don't see how a kid could get at any of the vulnerable spots I know about. At least, not until/unless the kiddo's career in either computer programming or Eng Lit really starts to take off.

In other news, when we got home, B volunteered that he had some issues he wanted to work out before we get the kid. This thing just keeps getting better and better. I've looked up AlAnon meetings for him. Thank you child, you do good things for B by needing him, even though you don't know yet that it's him you need.

Tonight, sitting on the couch with the doggus, watching Waitress.

Class #1 Attachment Parenting

Our first class last night, on Attachment Parenting (see title, above) was very interesting. We learned about as much about brain chemistry as a two hour class geared toward people who took biology twenty years ago, in high school, could be expected to teach. Apparently, when you get really upset and stressed, your brain dumps a chemical called Cortisol (sp?) into itself to calm you down. However, cortisol in large and frequent quantities is corrosive, so if you trip the brain's too-much-cortisol meter the distress thermostat gets reset and from then on that person has to reach higher, longer lasting amounts of stress to trigger the calm-down-happy-brain-juice. So people who have been under a great deal of stress at a very young age often get really stressed out much more easily than is normal and stay that way much longer than is normal. Fun times for all.

One thing I really liked was that the instructor said that one of the things that is just missing from these kids lives (even babies) and which makes a person feel much more secure is the sense that somebody else is simply delighting in their presence. It made me think of my dad, who will often say my name, and when I respond and ask what he wants, he says "nothing, I just like saying your name" with this big goofy grin on his face. I'm sure that there was a time when I was a teenager that I thought that Daddy was just being so stupid and annoying by doing that, but I don't remember it.

I'm looking more forward than ever to Annie/Oliver coming home.

Now Reading: Oliver Twist. Actually, this is going to be the first time I've read the whole thing. It goes really fast up until Oliver is kidnapped away from Mr. Brownlow, but then it starts to drag.

Back from the Agency

Saw the agent today, and we're signed up for classes, all of which will be done by the end of March. That's a month ahead of our target (end of April), so we'll have a big incentive to close on a house in May instead of dawdling and waiting until June or July, because the purchase is going to be the only thing holding us up.

The agent asked about the apartment, basically wondering if we could speed things up by getting approved here. We had to explain that, yes, we have two bedrooms, but one of them is packed full of things you would normally find in a garage - things like table saws and drill presses. It's just not an option. And even if the bedroom wasn't full of industrial shelving and an air compressor, there simply isn't enough private space here to add another person. B is a man who cannot live without a lot of "alone time" and I'd say the same about myself if I didn't have B around to teach me how needing alone time is done. So enough space that we're not in each other's way all the time is a must.

We got a glance at a one-page mini-file on Annie. There's a history of schizophrenia in her family, and she suffers from seizures and is taking a psychiatric medication, although we don't know what med that is. Oliver has a history of abuse or neglect, which we had expected, but that wasn't mentioned on Annie's sheet.

Oliver is "on hold" already - somebody's begun the process of adopting him already. What was that thing about these kids being hard to place again?

Patience is a virtue...

Just not one of mine. Heading down to the agency this afternoon to talk over the questionnaire and get oriented. It's 10:54 now...

10:55...

Update - not going to see her today, going on Jan 16th. And the info on Annie and Oliver - are they already in process with somebody else - they aren't going to have time to look into until the 5th.

Which is pretty reasonable, all things considered, because it's not like we could really start to do anything about it yet anyway, but we are curious.

Also, we have this piano that was given to us by my mother when she was purging her house, and which has been sitting in the living room unplayed for quite some time, and as part of our general purging in preparation of a move, B wants it gone. So we thought maybe we'd donate it to the "residential setting" Annie is living in. Need to mention that to the agent on the 16th - we're starting the classes, we can take it down there maybe, I don't know, meet some of the kids... I don't know - fly casual.

Good Vibrations

We met with an agent today - actually she's the co-founder of the small agency we found that we kind of liked, and we like it progressively more now that we've met her. Nice woman, she is herself the adoptive mother of 10, bio-mom of 1, and at least some of those 10 were waiting children. B (the husband) liked her, and that's a good sign. We got a checklist of behaviors, openness, etc. that we consider Preferred/Acceptable/Will Consider/Unacceptable and we filled that out together.

Some of these questions, we thought there was a real element of absurdity to them, at least in our circumstance (we want an early teen). For instance, one criteria is "Masturbates frequently and/or openly." Now, I understand that this is a symptom of sexual abuse and that whipping it out and working it at dinner parties is rude (not to mention trafe). But a fourteen year old boy, the bottle of lotion and box of kleenex he keeps in his room aren't because his nose is runny and his hands are dry. I don't mean to be crude here, but there are some things that are just... natural.

Going completely the other way, another criteria was "Tends to abuse animals." Now yes, there are kids who do this, and I like it that this agency has the philosophy that all children, even the ever so slightly sociopathic ones, are adoptable. What struck me as odd on this question is that there's that "Preferred" box just sitting there. Now, I can understand how someone could "prefer" to deal with kids who have been physically or sexually abused, or who would prefer a blind or deaf kid, or most of the other things on this list. We all have our special knacks and special missions. But who prefers to have a kid of whom all the neighborhood pets are scared?

Or maybe I'm just overly sensitive about the treatment of the small furry ones because every morning I wake up spooning my dog.

There's also the question of all the things that are missing. There wasn't, for instance, anything that touched on all the things we've found when looking through profiles that really attract our interest. Things like "likes to take things apart" and "enjoys reading" and "builds his own computer" and "has seen every episode of Firefly." It might make for a ridiculously long questionnaire, but the fact of the matter is, if we're going to a picnic to meet kids, we're probably going to want to hang out with the one wearing the "Han shot first" t-shirt, and that probably matters more, in the long run, than whether the kiddo has a history of bedwetting.

We don't want to start with a kiddo with severe RAD. We're buying a house to wrap around our Annie/Oliver and we'd prefer if A/O didn't include burning it down in his special brand of baggage. And, although I don't expect to enjoy it particularly, I'm prepared to absorb a certain outrageous amount of lashing out and vindictiveness from A/O, but that is because I am big and strong and bear a passing resemblance to the people who have let A/O down in the past; my dog is a sweet and trusting and playful lovebug who never hurt anyone since she lost her razor-sharp set of puppy teeth except for that one time when she tried to see if a cat would let her use its head as a chew toy (turns out, not so much), and I am not ok with A/O torturing my sweet little doggie girl.

That's my minimum: don't hurt my dog, don't burn down the house.

And we'll work on the Firefly thing.

Finding an Agency

How to pick an agency?

When I called Virginia's Department of Social Services to "start the process" they gave me the number of an agency, but so far, I'm not feeling great about the agency they sent us to. There are apparently two people at that agency who handle waiting children adoptions; one of them is on maternity leave for the next three months. The other one's new and doesn't return phone calls worth a damn.

So far the only online recommendation I can find anywhere is a listing for GLBTQ Friendly Adoption Agencies, which lists only one gay-friendly adoption agency in all of Virginia. I'm not gay, but I like people who are friendly to the sisters, the agency is actually within walking distance of my apartment (weather permitting) and that agency's website is my favorite so far (the design is horrible, but the content is good). Plus, when I called them at 4:55 in the afternoon, four days before Christmas, I got a real person on the phone. Not the person I needed to talk to, but still, it was nice.

Still, it feels like I'm picking an adoption agency with about the same shot-in-the-dark deliberation I use to choose a real estate agent. I want someone who will return phone calls and who knows the ropes, but isn't jaded by the system, someone who knows these kids and is going to match us with somebody we'd be good for. I want somebody who I'm going to go back to for kid #2. I want somebody I'll add to my Christmas card list, and not the generic list, the special cool people list I keep for the anne taintor cards.

Where are you, adoption professional of my dreams?

It Begins

This really all started over 11 years ago, when B and I were taking pre-wedding classes. We had this exercise where we had to go to our own separate corners with a notepad and pen and write our answers to some fairly difficult questions, then team back up and compare notes. I forget the rest of the questions - we both had the exact same answer to all of them, and they were all kind of no-brainer questions for us. But one stood out, and that was: "how would you deal with infertility?"

B's answer ran along these lines:

Get treatments. There are lots of medical treatments and we start by exploring them. All of them. Leave no procedure untried. And if they don't work, we adopt. Whatever it takes, but we will have children.

My answer was more like this:

I do not want to be one of those people whose lives are defined by their lack of fertility. Once you go down the road of trying to figure out what's wrong with you because you can't make a baby... it just doesn't stop until it consumes you. If we can't make a baby, that isn't the end of the world. And I don't want to go through infant adoption - there's so much competition for healthy babies... it's not for me. There are a lot of other things we can do with our lives, a lot of other ways we can go about leaving our mark, besides becoming biological parents. I want to be a parent, but I don't want my life to be about becoming one.

We met back up, compared notes, and laughed like 25 and 26 year old idiots at the thought that we would ever have any trouble popping out youngsters to befuddle to our hearts' content.

Fast forward eleven years, and the joke's on us, I suppose. We've had one round of IUI, and I've experienced the joy that is Clomid injections, and we've experienced the year of paying off the bills from that one go-round. Two months ago, I had just accepted a new job after three months of looking, and we were debating whether our now-recovering savings should go to another round of treatment or the down payment on our first house.

The new job was working on an aspect of a state's social services network (don't want to get more specific than that...) and I was browsing around that state's social services website when I noticed a link to that state's "waiting children." Clicky-clicky.

I have never wanted to adopt a baby. But these weren't babies, these were kids, and they need a home.

And it turns out, B had been thinking along the same lines. He was on board immediately, and B is never on board immediately. B takes most of a year to get used to big ideas, so this had been kicking around in his head, unspoken, for a long damn time.

We're buying a house this summer (when the lease on our apartment is up) and we'll be moving forward with beginning our orientation with our local adoption agency in January, so that we'll be as close to ready to get kids home as possible when we close on the house.

This blog is intended to record the process from the start. I'm pretty sure I have no idea what I'm getting myself into.