the eelfang chronicles

*Long, deep exhalation*

Okay. We’ve finished all of our Christmas shopping, Betsy is busy putting the finishing touches on her final home-made project, parties have been attended, cookies eaten, trees decorated, advent calendars progressed, and we’re just about ready to lay back and close out the year with friends and family.

It’s been interesting this year to think about the idea that this could very well be our last Christmas with only two people in the family. Which of the traditions from our families will we teach young Eelfang? Which of the new traditions we’ve developed will we carry on when we’re dealing with the extra complexity of having a young child participate? What music will be part of their life? (I have to admit that I’m really excited about the idea that our child will grow up with Sufjan Stevens as a major part of their holiday memories.)

This year has been a little more crazy than most, though, as we’ve been working through the homestudy process in December in parallel with our Christmas preparations. We submitted the necessary paperwork in the first week of December, and by the end of that week, we had our appointments scheduled. Normally, they try to spread the meetings across 3-4 weeks, but due to the holiday schedule and my work schedule, we had them back-to-back-to-back-to-back – a meeting in our house with both of us on Fri, 12/14, a meeting in her office with Todd alone on Tues, 12/18, a meeting with Betsy on Wed, 12/19 and another in-house couple meeting on Thurs, 12/20.

When people hear “homestudy”, I think there is a tendency to assume that the interviewer is checking out the house to make sure it’s baby-proof, or critically examining the structure of the house to make sure that it has no termites or fire hazards or dust on any of the bookshelves, or ensuring that the wall on the art is classy enough for a baby with refined tastes and sensibilities. In fact, the homestudy itself isn’t really an “evaluation” session, and unless there are some major issues in your family that have not yet been discussed, there’s little chance of “failing”.

(Every agency is different, of course, and we do know of people who didn’t pass – while there were extenuating circumstances in that situation, and the social worker assigned was nowhere near as professional and kind as our counselor is, it still made us a bit nervous, despite what I just said in the previous paragraph.)

Instead, the homestudy is designed to give the counselor a more intimate sense of who you are and what your life is like, aiding her in being able to describe you to a potential birthmother who wants to know more about where her child will be placed. The counselor takes all of the notes from these meetings and writes a 12-15 page “homestudy report” that is given to interested birthmothers, and the report gets down to really specific details in an attempt to build a picture in the birthmothers’ mind that they can then mentally put their child in.

The first visit was really easy. We had spent the previous week cleaning the house, weeding the garden, sweeping the steps and doing everything else we could think of, so the house was looking very nice. Our counselor immediately started gushing about how cute the house was and how our style matched hers, so I felt pretty comfortable right off the bat. The meeting ended up feeling more like we were being interviewed for People magazine or something along those lines – what’s a typical day like for you? What do you like to eat for breakfast? Who wakes up first? How often do you see your friends? What are they like? What color would you call this couch, so that I can accurately describe it in my write-up? Can you show me your house, and tell me about all of the interesting things in it? In short, it was a 2 1/2 hour meeting in which we just talked all about ourselves and how cool we are. I can handle that.

Early next week, I had my one-on-one with the counselor at her office. The intensity ramped up a little bit on this one – how would you describe your personality? How do you build relationships with people? What was your childhood like? How did you meet Betsy, and what do you like most about her? I definitely had to think more about the questions here. I’d guess that some of the questions were asked just to make me think about it, rather than for the answer – with Betsy and I both admitting to a fairly high level of shyness and difficulty with small talk, I think she wanted us to sit down and think through our process of building relationships and opening lines of communication with people. This meeting also lasted about 2 1/2 hours, and while it made me think more, it still didn’t stress me out too much.

On Thursday, we met back at our house again (this time less immaculately cleaned) for another group meeting. The third was definitely the most intense of all – what are your religious beliefs, and how did you come to them? What is your parenting philosophy? How do you deal with conflict? What were your parents like – what did you like about their style, and what would you change? Betsy and I have spent a fair amount of time talking about different issues and ways we want to raise our child, and we talk about our values and priorities pretty frequently, so we were fairly prepared for some of the questions, but we had never sat down and thought of an actual “parenting philosophy”. I tend to be inherently distrustful anyway of something dogmatic enough to be called a “philosophy” when applied to something as dynamic and complicated as kids, and especially trying to set a philosophy in stone right now with my current (lack of) parenting experience. But we do definitely have our sets of beliefs and values, and we were able to stutter through enough of these to cobble together something resembling a unified theory.

With the week of meetings clustered so close together, and the intensity of the last meeting, I felt exhausted by the end of the last one. It was (and is) nice, though, to know that we’ve finished all of those meetings, and we don’t have to do any further ones in the immediate future.

So what’s next?

With the homestudy meetings done, our counselor has to write the homestudy report. At 10-15 pages, peer-reviewed inside the agency, and a full workload of other clients, it’ll probably take her until mid-February to complete that.

For us, we’re writing further revisions to our auto-biographies until it is something that both us and our counselor are happy with. We also need to put together a one-page “Dear Birthmother” letter to serve as our foot in the door to entice birthmothers to read our auto-bios and the homestudy, and we need to put together a photo collage to be included in that homestudy packet (if you see us walking around with our camera more frequently than normal, that’s why.)

All in all, we’re hoping to get everything written and put together somewhere between the end of February and mid-March. At which point, we’ll pay another fee and get into the pool, and officially be in the waiting period.

It’s been a while since you’ve posted any pictures in here, and you mentioned a Christmas tree up at the top of this post.

Well, if you insist…

Us and our very first Christmas tree as a couple.

Betsy bought a couple spools of ribbon and tied bows all over our tree. Very pretty…

…whereas the traditions coming from my family are a little more grotesque. Front and center in our tree is the infamous pinecone duck – an ugly ornament which my family grew to love over the years (well, at least I grew to love it… although every time I came home from college, it had accidentally been placed in the very back of the tree.)

Click on this link to Moviefone, and put in your zip code. There. Now you have no excuse to not go see this movie. Do it. Now!

But for those of you who might need a little more convincing…

Juno is the story of a high-school girl who finds herself in the family way. She finds a couple looking to adopt through the local want ads, and the movie is based around her relationship with that couple, with her family and friends, and with the birthfather. The tone of the movie is much like the main character – brash, funny, cocky, quirky, sweet and full of heart. Juno is instantly likable, and she carries the movie very well.

People outside the adoption process might be surprised by the idea of ads for parents being in the classifieds, but that is very much a thing that happens. Betsy and I decided pretty early that we weren’t cut out for that, and the movie does a good job of showing the awkwardness involved in a “private adoption” (one not facilitated by an agency, but instead handled by personal advertising and a lawyer for legal council). The initial meeting between Juno and the adoptive couple is suitably awkward and painful, and it made me all the more thankful that we’ll have some pre-screening and some assistance in place when it’s time for us to have that meeting.

Without giving away too much from the movie, the adoptive couple definitely has some issues of their own to work through in relation to the adoption. While the issue they face plays into a stereotype that’s a personal pet peeve of mine, I didn’t really mind – the movie is not trying to present archetypes of the adoption process or to educate viewers about how the process works, but just trying to concentrate on the personalities in the story and on their individual quirks and failings.

I should give the disclaimer that the movie is PG-13, and that rating comes from some pretty explicit talk. The movie is about a sexually active high schooler with a fiercely independent streak, and while the language is pretty true to my memories of high school cafeteria talk, it’s not something to take the kids or your priest to.

I should also warn you that there’s a really sad scene in the middle of the movie – at least, it was sad for me. In the middle of a conversation with the adoptive father, Juno says something mean about Sonic Youth, and, well, I’m not ashamed to admit that I teared up a little bit. I just closed my eyes and promised myself that I’d listen to Daydream Nation when I got home to help remind myself how totally awesome they are, no matter what the mean people say in the movie.

The theater got a bit dusty at other times (for non-music reasons) and I had to clear my eyes on a couple of occasions. However, I think that that was primarily because I could see myself or Betsy in the roles of the adoptive parents, and I was getting sneak previews of the tear bonanza that our adoption will inevitably be. It’s really not a tear-jerker of a movie, though, and I appreciated that it handled a very sad and difficult process without being emotionally manipulative.

In summary: Best movie I’ve seen so far this year, and probably the best way to give people outside the process a sense of what the birthmother is going through during an adoption.  Language gets rather salty at times, but by the time the second act rolls around, a lot of the sarcastic defense mechanisms have dropped and it’s a really heartfelt movie.

In order to move on to the next step of the adoption process, we were required to have 5 different people write a letter of reference for us. One of them had to be from a neighbor, but there weren’t any restrictions otherwise. However, it felt like it would be more “impressive” (whatever that means) if we had a range of different relationships represented by the letters. We decided to request a letter from:

1. A friend
2. A sibling
3. A parent
4. An “authority figure”
5. A neighbor

Friend letter: Probably the most difficult part of this one was just deciding who to ask. I know that lots of you would be more than happy to help out and would be excited to be asked, and it was nice to have so many options. In the end, we asked our friends Cory & Hillary – they’re great friends of ours, they’ve seen us interact with children, and we knew they’d do a good job.

Sibling letter: My sister is a great writer/blogger in her own right, and she’s the only one of Betsy’s and my siblings who has children of her own, so we asked her to help us out with a letter.

Parent letter: If the sibling letter was coming from my family, it made sense to have the parent letter from Betsy’s family. Her parents agreed to write a letter as well.

“Authority figure” letter: And this is where it starts to get a little more difficult. It was easy to decide on who we wanted – our priest – and we knew he’d be willing to do it. But Betsy and I had still not told him about our adoption journey.

It’s always weird to try to find a point in casual conversation to bring up the fact that we were in the middle of the adoption process. From the first times we were announcing it to our friends to starting to talk to employers about “contingency plans”, it’s always been tough to find a way to start that conversation. We had been meaning to tell our priest for the last few months, but never found the right time. It’s just awkward to be shuffling out at the end of church, saying our “hello”s and “have a nice day” and “that was a nice sermon” and “oh by the way, here’s a huge piece of news about something that is going change our lives forever”. It just never came up, even though we knew that we would have to tell him some day – it would have been a bit awkward to just wander into church someday with a child in our arms to the surprise of everyone.

When we decided to ask him for a letter of recommendation, we knew this would give us the motive to tell him, even if it didn’t make the opportunity any clearer. In this case, though, opportunity didn’t just knock, it walked up to the front door, opened it up and made itself at home on the couch. We were doing some work cleaning up after church when our priest approached me and asked if he could come over to our house some time in the near future. Our names had made their way up to the top of whatever “pastoral visit” list he maintains, and he wanted to come over and just spend some time talking and catching up.  He had no idea that we were planning on talking to him, but it worked out perfect.  We set a date, and were excited to have him come over.
Several months ago, during the summer, we had noticed a mouse in our house. The first time we saw it, I was able to track it into the bathroom, and had it captured underneath a tupperware container. However, in the act of trying to slide a piece of cardboard underneath to make a floor to my impromptu trap, a gap had opened and the mouse darted out. We bought some live-catch traps from the hardware store the next day, but spent the next few months catching nothing. After getting increasingly frustrated by the little mouse poos that we found around the house, we researched live traps further, and found one that was universally recommended. Within 2 days of putting out the new trap, we caught our mouse. Betsy drove the little guy out to the woods and released him, and we were both thrilled.

That evening, our priest was scheduled to come over for his visit. We spent an hour straightening up, vacuuming, and just generally making the house look as nice as possible. When our priest came over, we made him a cup of tea, and we had just sat down with a plate of cookies when he started and exclaimed, “oh! I think I just saw a mouse!” Our mouse issue wasn’t fixed after all, and our priest had seen one of the critters almost immediately.

Fortunately, he was good natured about it. He said he had rats in his house that he was dealing with, and knew how difficult it can be to completely mouse-proof a house. We spent the next hour catching up, talking about the young adult programs at our church, and then letting him know about our plans and having him agree to write a letter for us, despite our rodent infestation.

(Postscript: The new traps started getting emptied of bait without catching anything. After a week or two of that, I added a bunch of pennies to the trigger to make it even more sensitive. Within 10 minutes of going to bed that night, we caught another mouse, and drove it out to the woods the next day as well. Since then, we haven’t seen any mouse activity.)

Neighbor letter: This was by far the most stressful letter of all for us. However, as I sit here, trying to compose my thoughts about it, I’m realizing that it was also probably the most silly letter for us in terms of how much we over-thought it.

We moved into our current house about 8 months ago. As we were moving in, we met our next-door neighbors, an older couple with grandchildren. They’ve always been extremely friendly to us. When Tom saw me mowing the lawn with our manual push-mower, he brought over his gas-powered mower and told me I could borrow it any time I wanted. We’ve said hello over the fence several times, and they’ve been as nice of neighbors as you could ask for.

However, Betsy and I tend to be somewhat shy. We were more than happy to exchange pleasantries when we saw them in their yard, but it’s a pretty big jump from saying hello to asking for a personal favor of a somewhat intimate nature. While I understand why our agency asks us to have a neighbor submit a reference letter (a neighbor has a more objective viewpoint and can see how we treat our home and how we treat people who aren’t our close friends), it’s a little bit awkward to ask someone to write a letter vouching for your character when you’ve exchanged a few dozen words total in the amount of time you’ve known each other.

So that letter ended up being the one we sat on for a while. I think we kept hoping that we would see them in passing, and be able to bring it up, and not have to just show up on their doorstep unannounced. But even that strategy didn’t work – Tom actually came over to our house, handed us some mail that our postman had misdelivered to their house, and even then I lost the nerve to make the request.

After a week, though, we finally got together the courage to walk over and just knock on the door. As I was standing there, I realized I hadn’t made an unexpected knock (i.e., not preceded by a phone call or other conversations with a friend) on someone’s door in probably 10-15 years, around the time when I had last gone trick-or-treating. Doing it again was a bit awkward. We did knock, though, and… nothing happened. No one home. The next night, we picked up our courage again, knocked again, and still no one was home. We tried again a third night with the same results, and finally left a letter for them explaining the request. Karen gave us a call a few days later, and she was as gracious as ever about being willing to do it, and offering lots of advice on the best places for baby supplies around the area.

Next step! The rest of the paperwork included a 3-5 page auto-biography from each of us, which I’ll write about in a separate post, a doctor’s visit for each of us, a few more papers to sign, and the next in the series of checks of escalating size. After getting this paperwork in, we contacted our counselor to discuss times for the homestudy process – one interview with both of us in our house, one interview each separate in her office, and a second interview with both of us in our house. Normally, these interviews take about 3-4 weeks, and we expected to get a start on them near the end of the year.

Instead, we have our first in-house on Fri, Dec 14th, our individual interviews early the next week, and our final in-house on Fri, Dec 21st. I’ll keep you posted with the latest updates, but if you don’t hear one for a little while, it’s probably because we’re freaking out about the fast pace.

Wish us luck!

So, about a month ago, I said we were going to have an interview “tomorrow” with our new counselor, and I’ve been leaving you hanging ever since then.  My apologies to those who have been waiting with baited breath.  This post will probably be relatively short (by my standards, at least), and maybe it will help motivate me to write more frequently if it doesn’t take two hours to write.

Betsy had been acting nervous for the week leading up to the interview – visions of being dissuaded from being adoptive parents, or being rejected outright, or being chased from the office by a mob with pitchforks and torches.  This was the first step in the countless evaluations and interviews that we’ll be put through, and Betsy was afraid that we would trip and fall on our faces right out of the gate.

For me, I’m not nearly humble enough to worry about being rejected.  I imagined a scenario in which we’d walk in, introduce ourselves, and our counselor would say something to the effect of  “Oh, you’re Todd and Betsy?  We’ve all heard the legends about you, and we’ve been waiting for this day since the agency was founded.  Let’s dispense with the formalities – we have a stockroom full of babies in the back, and you can just take your pick and bring one home today.”

The day of the meeting, though, I was back down to earth, and quite nervous about the whole thing.  I still felt pretty confident that we would be great parents, and that we were well-spoken enough to convey our awesomeness, but still… it was an interview for the most important job I’ll ever have.  No matter how qualified an applicant we might think we are, there’s always going to be a lot of nervousness.

In the office, we were introduced to our counselor and brought into her office.  Betsy immediately asked what the stakes were – was there any chance of us being rejected at the end of the day?  Our counselor assured us that they almost never rejected someone outright.  They may recommend that the couple spend more time considering the issues and talking with the counselor before moving forward, but rejection was rare; and, if there was a chance of rejection, we would probably already know in the back of our minds that this wasn’t the right decision for the time.

From there, we spent about 2 1/2 hours talking.   We covered topics such as our reactions to the seminar, how we chose open adoption, the other adoption options we had considered, what openness meant to us, our thoughts on the grief inherent in the process, financial concerns, how we had decided to start a family,
how we had announced our plans to our friends and family… in short, we recited the text of this blog to our counselor.  We did cover some new topics, and I tried to rephrase or rethink things I had already written to avoid just parroting what I had already thought, but I have to admit, writing things out in here was the best prep for the interview I could have done and it made it way easier.

Our counselor was extremely nice, and I’m looking forward to working with her over the next few months.  She was quite perceptive, describing facets of my personality to me in ways I had never considered and showing a lot of insight for someone who had known us for only an hour or two.  We left the meeting with some homework to do, and we’ll be meeting back with her as soon as all of that is done.

Okay – I just wrote another 2 paragraphs, and realized I was starting to head down the path of another long story.  As promised to myself at the start of this post, I’ll keep this one short.  I’ll finish up the other story shortly, and try to get it up here in the next few days.