Signed, Sealed, and Delivered!

Today was the day!  I hand delivered all of the paperwork that we have been working on over the past month and a half to our agency.  I have been looking forward to this moment since we started working on the mile-high stack of papers.  Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a mile, but it had to be close! 

Before dropping everything off, I went to Kinkos to make copies of everything we had done.  I watched as our life in paper went through the copy machine.  There were birth certificates, our marriage certificate, driver’s licenses, social security cards, tax records, shot records for our dogs, the answers to every question about our past asked by the agency, and bunches of papers that we had to sign agreeing with this and granting permission for that.  I then went through the packet of paperwork to make sure everything was there…again.  I think I may have done that ten times before actually handing our hard work over.  I am not sure why.  If something is missing, I can always add it later.  Yet, it was important to me to have it all there and to hand everything over in one big chunk. 

I walked the paperwork in and handed it to the woman at the desk.  I met this woman once before when I came into the agency.  Due to this previous encounter, I knew that she was new.  Do I dare hand over everything about our lives that we have spent so much time compiling to a new employee??  Do I have a choice?  It looked like she was the only one there at the time and I certainly wasn’t going to demand to wait for someone else.  I gave the large manila envelope to her with some hesitation.  But…now… IT IS DONE!!!!!

As excited as I am about this step, it still can’t manage to escape the anxiety that I seem to experience in every step and stage of this process.  We are really doing this…we are really doing this!  I have excitement and anxiety about that.  My anxiety comes from the money, the uncertainty of the unknown, the worry of how our future child will feel about this whole adoption thing.  But, we ARE going to be parents again and we are now closer to that!  I couldn’t be more excited about that!

Our Family Story Through Photos

As a follow up to my last post, our formal application has been approved!!!  Yay!!!  We now move on to the next phase of approval in which they meet with us as a couple and individually to discuss our life and find out more about our family.  They also do a homestudy to make sure that our home is safe for children.  Considering that we already have a child, I would certainly hope we will pass that!  So, it looks like one hurdle has been passed and we can begin worrying about the next one.  Now on to the topic of the post.

If you had to tell the story of your family with pictures, what photos would you use?  Would you have enough pictures to tell the whole story?  For our adoption, we need to do just this.  We need to tell the story of our family in a photo book.  This book will then be shared with birth parents who are making an adoption plan for their child.  Birth parents will be shown the photo books of all families who match their preferences.  The birth parents also have to match the preferences selected by the prospective adoptive families.  After reading the Dear Birth Parent letters and looking over the photo books, the birth parents make a decision about which family would be best for their child.  Obviously, this photo book is a pretty important project to a prospective parent like me.  The fact that I need to start gathering pictures together for this book enters my mind regularly.  Have I started doing it yet?  No.  Every time I think about starting to look for pictures I stop because I have this fear that I am not going to find “the right” pictures.  I think about fun times that we have had together that I would love to include in our book.  Then I remember, we were having too much fun to take pictures!  I would think about the camera later and say to myself, “Aw, we didn’t take any pictures…oh, well.”  I never realized how helpful those non-existent pictures might have been in the future!  I also know that as I start looking through the pictures I will run into a problem with any pictures taken after our daughter was born.  Pictures of my husband and I together, just as a couple, suddenly disappear.  Our pictures are either of our daughter or of one of us with our daughter.  So, I am sending a plea out to friends and family, if you have any pictures of Nick and I together please e-mail them to me!  I will also gladly take any good pictures of all three of us or even individual pictures.  The more pictures I have to choose from, the better the book will be. 

Even though I am a little worried about starting this project, I am excited about it as well.  Not only will this photo book help us adopt a child, but it will also be a really nice book for us to keep.  I might even think about making a photo book about the story of our family if we weren’t adopting, just to have.        

In addition to the photo book we will also submit a Dear Birth Parent letter.  In this letter, three pictures are included.  The letter will be uploaded online so that Birth Parents can look at it just by going to the agency’s website before even coming in.  It was suggested that one of our pictures be a video montage of pictures set to music.  The woman from the agency said to make sure that the song we pick is current and that it would appeal to people in their teens and twenties.  I wanted a song that was upbeat so I am thinking of using “Brighter Than the Sun” by Colbie Caillet or “The Way I Am” by Ingrid Michaelson.  The Colbie Caillet song has started to be played on the radio so often that I am not sure I should use it, but I am not sure how well known the other song is.  I am hoping that at 34 I am not that far out of touch with “current” music that would be enjoyed by people in their teens and twenties, but if I am, please tell me!  Any input on my choices would be appreciated and feel free to offer different song options!

Is "Good Enough" Good Enough?

I have always felt pretty good about my life.  I rarely questioned whether we were like “everyone else”.  Instead, I pretty much assumed that we were.   I figured that the home lives of our friends were a lot like ours.  Sure, my husband and I have arguments every now and then.  Yes, I lose my patience with my daughter sometimes and need to walk away or give myself a mommy time out.  I am pretty sure this happens to most spouses and most parents from time to time.  Even with these imperfections, I was confident that my life was “normal”.  Entering the paperwork and home study phase of the adoption process, I would have to say that even the most confident person would feel anxiety having someone else judge you and your worthiness of having a child.  Suddenly, my assumption of being like everyone else doesn’t feel so secure anymore.

In mid-September my husband and I went to the information meeting for our adoption agency.  We received a thick envelope of paperwork that we needed to fill out.  Along with the paperwork, we had to get our fingerprints done for an FBI background check, get physicals for ourselves and our daughter, and submit our employment records for our current jobs.  Being a person who likes to get things done quickly, I happily tore into the paperwork the next day.  However, my progress was stalled when I stumbled upon what I would call the “difficult questions” section.  I knew that they would have to ask personal questions, but I didn’t realize it would start in the initial paperwork.  People who have already been through the process will probably tell me that the difficult, personal questions have just begun.  The first question that caused me to pause was, “How often do you and your spouse argue?”  I really have never had any reason to keep track of how often we argue.  And furthermore, what would be a “normal” amount of arguments to have in any given period of time?  The next question was, “What are the major areas of conflict in your relationship?”  Here we ran into a disagreement.  I wanted to just put a couple of things that we argue about more regularly.  That was my interpretation of “major areas of conflict”.  My husband had a different interpretation.  During this process I was thinking that they should include a question saying, did you get into an argument while answering this questionnaire?  Luckily, we did get through it fairly well without too much disagreement, but I wouldn’t call it easy!

I am still working through a lot of this paperwork and I find myself asking am I good enough?  Is my husband good enough?  Is my marriage good enough?  Is our house safe enough?  Are our finances good enough?  Is “good enough” good enough?  Now, instead of assuming that we are like everyone else, I am picturing these perfect-beyond-belief people who are applying to this agency.  I am imagining that next to them our flaws look ridiculously huge and there is no way that they will approve us.  Then, I think about my life from my old vantage point.  I realize that we have a happy, healthy, well-adjusted daughter as proof that, even with our flaws, we are able to provide a good home for another child.  I think that we will probably be approved and then I will move on to be neurotically worried about the next aspect of this process.

In my last post, I said that adoption gives me hope and allows me to take control of the situation back.  I still feel this, but it doesn’t mean that the process will be easy.  I didn’t write this post for sympathy or to have people reassure me that we are great parents or that we are “normal”.  I do still think that we have done pretty well as parents so far and I still feel pretty normal.  I wrote it to share the adoption experience.  I am sure there will be unbelievably hard aspects of this process and unbelievably amazing aspects.  I will try to give an accurate description of what it is like to adopt (for us).