March 30, 2012
Spoiler Alert
Part one, part two, part three
At some point during that emotionally charged time after the baby was born but before any steps had been made toward his eventual placement, I found myself standing with the social worker in a quiet hallway. Somehow we got onto the topic of those reality shows that follow expectant parents and prospective adoptive parents around from pre-birth matches to placement.
"It's hard to think of a worse time to have cameras around," I commented.
"Oh, I know. Our agency has gotten called more than once trying to get us to participate in those shows," she said, the disdain in her voice making her opinion clear.
I've said my piece about those shows before, but one of the many things about them that sets me to grinding my teeth in rage--and among the things the social worker and I talked about that day--is their framing of relinquishment/placement as the conclusion of a story. In the interest of shoehorning real-life events into a dramatic storyline, the show-makers nearly always present it as a conflict of, "Will the birthmother go through with it? Will the adoptive parents get that baby they so deserve?". (Biased, unethical language intended there.) The placement, then, serves as their tidy, happy ending.
There are so many damaging ripples from shows telling the story that way, over and over. (Imagine for a moment if instead the happy ending were the new mom finding a way to parent after all.) But the least of them is simply that it is not an open adoption. That is the tip of the iceberg, the starting point for a lifetime of exploring, working on, experiencing the richness and challenge, grief and joy of openness in adoption. Don't show me a made-for-tv storyline culled from a several weeks of a pre-birth match and placement and tell me that is an "adoption story". You haven't shown me the story of an adoption. You've only shown me the events leading up to the very start of an adoption, one in which relationships will grow and change, and in which the most important person--the adoptee--has yet to gain a voice and active role.
In order to keep this story from falling into that same trap, allow me to spoil the ending-that-is-not-really-an-ending for you before continuing on. Meet our newest son, born to Shamika and Derrick. He turned two weeks old yesterday. This isn't just a story about how our family became his. It's the first chapter of a lifetime-long tale that is only just beginning.
March 26, 2012
Turning Point
Part one, part two
My conversation with the agency social worker was on a Friday. She asked us to write a short letter introducing our family and our values around openness and send it to her by Monday, when she'd be meeting next with the couple.
Over the weekend I stole away to our bedroom for a few hours to write the letter and put together some photos of our family more recent than the ones the agency had on file. This is a strange exercise even under the usual circumstances, trying to capture honestly in one page what is unique and true about your family without "selling" or veering into cliche, all to an unknown reader. Writing it in one day instead of mulling over every word for weeks made it all more more weird.
I emailed the pictures and letter to the agency on Sunday evening and settled in for the expected few days' wait to hear the couple's decision. Monday went by. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. The longer the week went on the more swiftly I drifted from being interested but still fairly aloof to being emotionally invested in the outcome, hoping that by some small chance we were the right family for this particular couple. By Friday I was in that ridiculous emotional place of trying to will the phone to ring ring please just ring already before the weekend started. I just wanted to know, one way or the other.
I thought a lot about this couple I didn't know, in impossibly hard circumstances, trying to make what I imagined must be a strange and difficult choice. I didn't begrudge them taking all the time they needed. But, oh, was I ever distracted over the weekend.
The next Monday, in the middle of a conference call for work, I saw the agency's phone number pop up on my cell phone. I debated letting it go to voice mail for a ring or two, until my overwhelming need to know made me excuse myself from the meeting.
After perfunctory pleasantries, the social worker got to the point. Through their different contacts, the agency had pulled together five potential adoptive families for the expectant parents to consider. Out of those five, they had decided they wanted to meet Todd and me.
They had picked us.
Part four
My conversation with the agency social worker was on a Friday. She asked us to write a short letter introducing our family and our values around openness and send it to her by Monday, when she'd be meeting next with the couple.
Over the weekend I stole away to our bedroom for a few hours to write the letter and put together some photos of our family more recent than the ones the agency had on file. This is a strange exercise even under the usual circumstances, trying to capture honestly in one page what is unique and true about your family without "selling" or veering into cliche, all to an unknown reader. Writing it in one day instead of mulling over every word for weeks made it all more more weird.
I emailed the pictures and letter to the agency on Sunday evening and settled in for the expected few days' wait to hear the couple's decision. Monday went by. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. The longer the week went on the more swiftly I drifted from being interested but still fairly aloof to being emotionally invested in the outcome, hoping that by some small chance we were the right family for this particular couple. By Friday I was in that ridiculous emotional place of trying to will the phone to ring ring please just ring already before the weekend started. I just wanted to know, one way or the other.
I thought a lot about this couple I didn't know, in impossibly hard circumstances, trying to make what I imagined must be a strange and difficult choice. I didn't begrudge them taking all the time they needed. But, oh, was I ever distracted over the weekend.
The next Monday, in the middle of a conference call for work, I saw the agency's phone number pop up on my cell phone. I debated letting it go to voice mail for a ring or two, until my overwhelming need to know made me excuse myself from the meeting.
After perfunctory pleasantries, the social worker got to the point. Through their different contacts, the agency had pulled together five potential adoptive families for the expectant parents to consider. Out of those five, they had decided they wanted to meet Todd and me.
They had picked us.
Part four
March 21, 2012
Bigger Still
Part one
It started with an email.
The agency we used for Mari's adoption was working with two local expectant parents who were considering adoption. Because of some of the significant challenges in this couple's life, none of the families in the agency's pool were comfortable being shown to them. So the agency was taking the unusual (for them) step of reaching out to some of its old clients to see if they could gather some potential adoptive parents for them to consider.
I read the message right as I was heading out the door for a run, expecting to brush it off. Instead it stopped me in my tracks. Something about it felt...familiar, almost.
I chalked up the feeling to having not read the email closely enough. Surely there was some factor I'd missed that would make it absurd for us to even consider. But all through my run it wouldn't leave my mind. Once home, I thrust my iPod into Todd's hands, the email opened on the tiny screen. "Just read this," I said, with no preamble. "Then tell me what you think."
A few minutes later he looked up at me. "I think this is exactly why we do adoption," he said quietly.
That evening I wrote back to the social worker. "We're interested in talking to you more," I told her. Even with that noncommital wording I hesitated for a long time before clicking "send". We're just not the sort of people for whom things happen out of the blue. It must be foolish to think we might possibly meet this couple's needs, be part of this child's life.
The next day, hidden in a back bedroom of a friend's home while playgroup burbled through the rest of the house, I listened to the social worker tell me more about the expectant parents and the heartbreaking, frustrating circumstances into which their baby was being born. The challenges were big and any open adoption relationship would need a lot of support to be healthy. I understood, on some level, why it had felt like too much for those waiting parents already in the agency's pool. But, still, it felt familiar to me. Not scary. In many ways, it paralleled aspects of our family's existing adoptions. These were challenges we knew (or thought we knew).
Because of those parallels, the social worker thought we and the expectant parents would be a good fit for each other. If we agreed, we could quickly write up a new introduction letter that she'd give to the couple, along with our old profile materials they had on file from Mari's adoption. But we needed to move quickly and we needed to be sure--the couple had already selected one set of prospective adoptive parents only to have them become overwhelmed and decide they couldn't continue. She did not want to put them through that again.
This time I didn't hesitate.
Part three
It started with an email.
The agency we used for Mari's adoption was working with two local expectant parents who were considering adoption. Because of some of the significant challenges in this couple's life, none of the families in the agency's pool were comfortable being shown to them. So the agency was taking the unusual (for them) step of reaching out to some of its old clients to see if they could gather some potential adoptive parents for them to consider.
I read the message right as I was heading out the door for a run, expecting to brush it off. Instead it stopped me in my tracks. Something about it felt...familiar, almost.
I chalked up the feeling to having not read the email closely enough. Surely there was some factor I'd missed that would make it absurd for us to even consider. But all through my run it wouldn't leave my mind. Once home, I thrust my iPod into Todd's hands, the email opened on the tiny screen. "Just read this," I said, with no preamble. "Then tell me what you think."
A few minutes later he looked up at me. "I think this is exactly why we do adoption," he said quietly.
That evening I wrote back to the social worker. "We're interested in talking to you more," I told her. Even with that noncommital wording I hesitated for a long time before clicking "send". We're just not the sort of people for whom things happen out of the blue. It must be foolish to think we might possibly meet this couple's needs, be part of this child's life.
The next day, hidden in a back bedroom of a friend's home while playgroup burbled through the rest of the house, I listened to the social worker tell me more about the expectant parents and the heartbreaking, frustrating circumstances into which their baby was being born. The challenges were big and any open adoption relationship would need a lot of support to be healthy. I understood, on some level, why it had felt like too much for those waiting parents already in the agency's pool. But, still, it felt familiar to me. Not scary. In many ways, it paralleled aspects of our family's existing adoptions. These were challenges we knew (or thought we knew).
Because of those parallels, the social worker thought we and the expectant parents would be a good fit for each other. If we agreed, we could quickly write up a new introduction letter that she'd give to the couple, along with our old profile materials they had on file from Mari's adoption. But we needed to move quickly and we needed to be sure--the couple had already selected one set of prospective adoptive parents only to have them become overwhelmed and decide they couldn't continue. She did not want to put them through that again.
This time I didn't hesitate.
Part three
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