the eelfang chronicles

After going to a meeting with the first agency, we had a pretty good sense of what type of questions we had to ask ourselves. Those questions were:

1. Agency or Private?
2. Infant or Child?
3. “Healthy” or “Special Needs”?
4. Domestic or International?
5. Traditional or Open?

Private or Agency?

The idea behind a Private adoption is that the adopting couple retains the services of a lawyer to handle all of the paperwork and to give legal council, but to not work with an actual agency. Instead, the couple will advertise in local papers, magazines, websites, and send out letters to friends and family, searching for a birthmother in need. A well-chosen lawyer will have some experience with the advertising process, but the couple is largely on their own.

Maybe when we’re on our twelfth adoption and the process is old hat, but for now? No thanks! We need all the support we can get.

Infant or Child?

Again, this was a pretty easy question for us. We are definitely interested in raising our child from as early of an age as possible – as mad as it might sound, we look forward to the dirty diapers, the sleepless nights and all the craziness of that process. It would have been difficult for us to give up those early months and go for a child already past that stage.

“Healthy” or “Special Needs”?

One of the fields that WACAP (the agency who hosted the first meeting we went to) works in is with Special Needs children. During the presentation, they showed us a book full of children currently looking for placement, with any number of physical or learning disabilities.

It’s extremely difficult to look at these children, in need of a home and a loving family, and to have to admit that you simply aren’t prepared for that responsibility, both in parenting skills that we have not yet built and in emotional strength and durability.

When I was in high school, our parents were friends with a family who was heavily involved with the foster care system. The father in the family was someone who was always willing to help where he could – whether that meant lending a tool, providing an extra set of hands for a weekend chore, or driving an hour in the rain down from Marysville to help his friend’s teenage son get his car up and running when he left the lights on in the IKEA parking lot. My parents have had a lot of friends like that (and are people like that themselves), and as I grow older, I’m trying to look more for opportunities where I can be a friend and a source of help to others. With this family in particular, I’ve always been especially impressed by their willingness to bring children into their homes and to provide them with love – even if the children stayed with them for only a few months, I know that the children’s lives were measurably improved by that stay.

Betsy and I have talked a lot about participating in the foster program, and trying to do our best to help children with “special needs”. And if the child that we end up adopting through the “healthy” program ends up having special needs, we will do everything in our power to help them grow up strong and happy, and I know our families will provide us with the support we need to get through those obstacles. But we’re simply not ready to volunteer for the more difficult path today.

Domestic or International?

The other packet WACAP gave us included pictures of several children from each of the countries they worked with. As I flipped through the packet, trying to “feel” which country was right for us, I kept on returning to the Kazakhstan page. I tried to figure out what it was about that country that was intriguing to me – I had little to no knowledge of the culture or the people, and I had never felt particularly drawn to them before. In contrast, I’ve had a lot of “touch points” with some of the other countries – a cousin born in Korea, a burgeoning interest in Ethiopian jazz, love for the food from Vietnam, Thailand, India… admittedly, not a huge interest or knowledge about these diverse cultures, but it was still far more than I knew about Kazakhstan.

Until I realized that I kept on returning to that page because the baby was white.

It was a stunning realization – I’ve never been concerned about race among my friends or coworkers, I have non-caucasian cousins who I never think of as anything but as part of my family, I have great respect and interest in other cultures… but I couldn’t deny the fact that when I looked at pictures of babies, my “father instinct” kicked in way harder with babies who looked like me. I returned to the pictures of the other children, and tried to force myself to imagine holding them, playing catch with them in the backyard, teaching them to ride a bike, but it just didn’t feel as natural as with the caucasian child.
I left the meeting more confused about my stance on International adoption than when I had gone to the meeting. Was race important to me, and I wasn’t aware of it previously? Was I overreacting? If I went ahead with a non-caucasian adoption, would I subconsciously regret it later on?

Over the next couple of weeks, I continued to think about it, and to “try on” the images of different races of children in our house. As I worked through this mentally, I realized that my reaction actually wasn’t about the race of the child in the picture at all. What I was reacting to was the first realization that the child we would be raising was not going to share our genes.

Up to that point, I don’t think I had really worked through that part of my own grief. For myself, I was never going to carry a child, and seeing Betsy pregnant would have been neat, but it wasn’t what I was looking forward to. What I wanted was a child of my own, and I had convinced myself that the method of bringing the child home wasn’t important to me. But when I was confronted with a picture of a child that obviously would not share my genes, that part of my loss became more real.

Once I finally gave myself time to “own” this loss, to deal with it and to start to move on, I realized that race was not a consideration for me. There are definitely some people from the outside who may have an issue with a mixed-race family, but I decided that that was something I was willing to work with. However, in the time that it took me to come to grips with this and to understand my initial reaction to race, Betsy and I had made other decisions that answered this question for us. Those decisions will be the topic of my next post.

Part 2 of our first meeting. The first part was posted a couple weeks ago.

Once we were inside the meeting room, the meeting facilitator welcomed us warmly, providing us with a big packet of information and explaining the plan for the evening. There was another couple sitting in a couch in the front of the room, with chairs gathered around in a semi-circle around the couch. The couple had their two children with them, and the facilitator explained that they were a couple who had successfully adopted through their agency and were there to share their story and to answer all of the questions we were sure to have.

The problem was, we didn’t have any questions. At least not any questions that could be easily answered. We had vague senses of the categories of questions, but I couldn’t think of anything more intelligent or insightful to ask than “so, adoption… it’s good, right?” After reading all of our books, we had a good sense of the specifics, but no sense of the general and no sense of what path we were going to take. It was like we had studied the driving manual and the rules of the road and now had an opportunity to talk to a professional race car driver, but we had never actually sat behind the wheel or even been in a car. We knew the language but not the conversation.

Worst of all, we had shown up early for the meeting, so we were expected to be making small talk while we waited for the rest of the attendees to show up. Todd and Betsy can do a wide variety of things, many of them extremely well, but we are not small talkers. And put us in a situation where we’re already nervous about attending the meeting, and we’re going to be very quiet. I could tell the couple sitting up on “stage” felt a little awkward as well, and they didn’t really have anything to say to start the conversation, so we all sat quietly and watched the couple’s daughter run around, say “hi” to people, fall over, and eat cheerios. It was standard toddler action, but from the way we were all glued to her every movement, you would have thought she was walking a tightrope over a pit of flaming crocodiles.

Finally, the meeting started, and the couple told their story. From what I had already read about the process, there were no surprises – lots of paperwork, long agonizing wait on The List, photos sent, a trip to the country to pick her up, love and happiness at the end. The facilitator seemed to think that their process was extremely short, and she kept interrupting with a panic-stricken tone to tell us that it NEVER went that fast and to not expect it to go SO QUICKLY, like the couple was telling us that they got the process done in 60 minutes while they waited for their dry-cleaning to be done.

After the couple shared their story, we toured around the building, and the facilitator showed us which parts of the office dealt with adoptions from which countries. There’s no such thing as a “generalist” in the world of International Adoption – each country is so labyrinthian in its laws and regulations and processes that a worker focuses very intently on a single country and knows nothing about the process for any other country.

After the tour, we watched a quick video about the agency, including a story from one of the families they’ve worked with. The story showed a family who brought home a boy from Russia as an infant. A year or so later, he was able to start talking, and he asked when his sister was going to join him. Sure enough, when the family looked into it, there was a sister at the same orphanage who hadn’t been listed in the records back when the first adoption was going through. The family ended up adopting her as well, and the little boy was so excited to see her again. Roughly at this time, someone must have dumped a large amount of dust into the room, because I found my eyes becoming VERY watery.

The rest of the meeting was a cold shock of reality, though, as we started going through the information about the specific countries that this agency worked with. The big impact was seeing the requirements – half of the countries disqualified us because either we weren’t over 30, we hadn’t been married for more than 4 years, we didn’t have a verifiable $80k net worth, or various other criteria like that. For the other half, the requirements we could meet were a lot higher than I anticipated – 8 weeks in the country to finish the adoption, or thousands more in fees than I expected, or two different trips of a couple weeks each.

After looking at the costs/travel requirements, I spent the rest of the meeting thinking “whoa.” As a result, the meeting itself is a little bit blurred in my memory – I know they went over each country in detail, allowed us to ask questions about specific programs, and they were probably helpful and nice. I, however, only remember thinking “whoa.” I kept going over the program, but between costs/requirements being higher than anticipated, and still unresolved questions about ethnicity (probably the topic of my next post), nothing felt right. It was good to go to the meeting, but if I learned nothing else from the books I had read and the meeting I attended, it was that the right program for you is the one that “feels right”, whatever that would mean.

As a final note, I asked at the end of the meeting if there were any books they recommended that we read to help get us up to speed (and to maybe help me get past the “sticker shock” I was feeling at the time). One of the fellow attendees helpfully suggested that we “try the library – they’ve got lots of books there.” I wasn’t so far gone into my world of “whoa” that I wasn’t able to immediately start thinking snarky comments such as “Really? They’re carrying books at the library now? Is… is that something new they’re trying?” (When I told Betsy my comments later, she pointed out that the woman was trying to help, and that we appreciate someone referring us to the library rather than Barnes and Noble, but Betsy is nice to stupid people that way.)

As we left the meeting, I felt that we had made a good first step on the process – we confronted the issue, and officially started rolling the ball. That particular agency didn’t feel right to us, but it was primarily because it was the first one we had visited and we were still figuring out what we wanted, not because of anything they lacked.

It was time to go back into research mode, and to start thinking about some of those Big Questions of adoption to help us narrow down the search.

I’ll try to write more later tonight, but to tide you over until then, some pictures of Betsy and I with our new niece Annika.

Betsy, Annika and my sister Kari.

Todd and Annika

More posts coming soon!  The second half of our first meeting!  The decisions we’ve made about some of those big Questions (international/domestic, open/closed, etc)!  Maybe even Betsy will post again someday!

See you soon.