About three weeks ago, I drove to a nearby town where O was working to have lunch with him and my parents. It was a beautiful morning with bright blue skies and the road was perfect for daydreaming a little bit – straight and flat and bordered by miles of farmland. Somewhere along the way, my mind drifted to our hopes of adopting through the foster system. Strangely enough, I hadn’t given it a lot of thought during the previous six weeks, which was the amount of time it had been since I’d last heard from our “new” social worker (J) in our “new” county.
If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, I’m sure that surprises you – that I wasn’t more and more fired up as each week passed without any contact from D*F*C*S. No one was more surprised than me.
I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on with me. “Apathetic” described it perfectly. I simply didn’t care if they ever got in touch with us again. I wasn’t angry at all. I wasn’t outraged or frustrated, even a little bit.
Perhaps I had simply depleted my reserves of emotion, of struggle, of fight.
Perhaps it was that I’d read one too many blog posts written by loving adoptive parents whose homes were continuously held hostage by children whose brains were so organically damaged that they had no sense of right and wrong – no conscience – no ability to love; whose children spewed hatred and anger and violence on whomever came near. Did I really want to take a chance on that becoming our lives?
Perhaps it was the certainty that we’d only dipped our toes into the idiocy that is the child welfare system, and that once we opened our home to a child, we were at their mercy for a good long while.
Perhaps it was the issue that I’ve come up against every now and then these past 18 months. O and I love our life together. Truly. I would venture to say that we are the happiest couple I know. We love just being together, and our current situation allows for a lot of that. We can jump in the car and go on spur-of-the-moment trips. We can turn off the phones and snuggle up on the couch and not be bothered for hours. We can spend Sunday morning in bed watching TV and talking. We can make love on the kitchen floor if the mood strikes us. That will all change if there’s another person in our home. It may be better. It may be worse. But it will definitely be different. Do I really want that?
Perhaps it was simply the busyness of the holidays and then the virus-from-hell that took us two weeks to recover from.
I couldn’t really land on an answer, which is unusual for me. I'm usually a pretty self-aware girl.
After chasing the thoughts around in my head for most of the drive, I finally gave up, looked up at the big white puffy clouds, and said, “God, just let me know if we’re supposed to be doing this.” (“this” being adopting from the foster system)
Two hours later, J (our new social worker) called to ask if we were interested in a 9-year-old boy they were looking to place.
So I guess I got my answer.
I was instantly back in the “game”.
I spoke to the boy’s social worker for about an hour the next day. He has a slight physical disability which didn’t phase us in the least, but there were a couple of things she mentioned that O & I just simply didn’t feel comfortable with. Ultimately we let her know that we didn’t think we were a good match for him. It’s sad, because I know we will provide a good home to any child placed with us and he definitely needs one, but I know we made the best decision.
Then the same week I got a wonderful e-mail from a foster/adoptive mom in another part of my state offering to tell the social workers in her county about me and O. So I spent a day putting together folders with a cover letter, a few of our scrapbook pages with photos of us and our home and surroundings, the form describing what kind of child/children we felt we’d be a good match for, and the letters of reference written by our friends and family. I sealed them up and mailed them off and she’s going to distribute them as kids in her area come up for adoption. Generous, huh?
I’ve subsequently e-mailed back and forth with J, and she’s checking with the worker at the state office to find out what she still needs to review our home study. I’m sure she’ll be happy to get the file off her desk, if nothing else.
I guess the point of this long rambling post is this: I have no idea where all this will lead. Will we end up adopting a child or will we realize one of these days that it’s simply not for us? I have no idea. I really don’t. But what I do know is that we are on the path we’re supposed to be on. And for today, that’s enough.
