The (First?) Meeting...

I'm so all over the place with posting. Once a month, twice a day, whatever! It's all a mix of time and inspiration and stuff happening and me actually remembering that I, too, have a blog. Yes, yes, despite the fact that I've been keeping a blog for, oh, 9 and a half years (my LiveJournal came first) I do actually forget that I have one. I'm just that ditzy.

Anyway, as I recorded our (first?) experience with the fertility clinic here, I felt I should also detail our (first?) meeting pertaining to foster care.

First of all, I should say that the "(first?)" has a double meaning. There's the obvious, that we could very well pursue this further and and instead of last night simply being "the foster care meeting" it might actually be "the first foster care meeting". Secondly, we've already been to one of these meetings over five years ago, with different people, different building, and when the group split into foster/adoption and adoption only, we were some of the people who left to go get the spiel on adoption in the other room.

As a quick summary, we were married 5 years and 11.5 months ago and found out about our fertility issues about 6 months in (or rather, had them confirmed by tests). We were quick to pursue adoption starting with foster care, signing up for an information meeting and attending the first session we could. I was so certain that they were just dying for a couple like us! Married, stable, own a home, financially secure, health insurance, family support, stay at home mom, many years experience with young children, open to any race and gender, multiple ages and siblings groups. Oh, yeah, they were gonna love me!

But I was 23 and he was 21 and no, no they did not like that. Foster care might have been okay with it had we stayed for that meeting, but the adoption group did not like it. The woman who complained that she should be given the baby of an unwed teen because "well, that's just not good role modeling!", yeah, she probably got a child through them. And the couple who complained when they mentioned sibling groups, pouting that "so if we get our baby and he has a brother we have to take THAT ONE too?!?!?" Yeah, they probably got a kid before us as well. But we were young and young is so often thought of as naive and unprepared. I can tell you from experience that you can be just an unprepared and naive at 43 as at 23 but that's another blog post, that I'll probably never get to...

Anyway, we were so burned by the experience that we swore we'd never go back. No way in heck would we foster, only straight adopt, and no way would we want to deal with the people who didn't see the awesome resource in front of them.

Years later, and some humility slapped into us...

So we returned. We returned as a couple married almost 6 years, not 6 months. We returned as parents of a toddler and Kindergartner, parents who have dealt with loss and grief and anxious attachment in a small child, parents who have worked therapy into their schedules and set up long periods of their life around routines that appear so silly and useless that we're openly ridiculed by fellow parents who truly do not understand why we would do what we do. We returned as people with more compassion, more hands on knowledge, and more faith in our ability to parent and seek out the resources needed to help our children.

We also returned with all of the "knowledge" about foster care in our heads...

Mostly white people adopting, so few people hoping to foster, people trying to make a living off it, no one wanting to do straight foster, no one open to siblings, no one open to other races...

When we showed up we HAD TO WAIT IN LINE to get in. I say that because it's amazing. People were LINING UP to become foster parents.

The room? Was PACKED. Majority of the people were African American as far as I could tell, with many Caucasians and Latinos mixed in.

When they split the group from fost/adopt and adoption only, most of the Caucasian people left.

We hadn't noticed that the first time around....

They accentuated the need for homes, especially for siblings and older children. They told us that "teen" starts at age 10. They also told us that you could only have five children MAXIMUM in your home, meaning the most we could take would be 3 (whew! That's still a lot!). This also means larger sibling groups are always split up. Even smaller ones are usually split up. They told us that most foster homes are only open to one child. A handful will take 2. There are no foster parents currently licensed in our county willing/able to take 3 or more children.

That? That stuck with me...

Also, the process? This whole notion of "foster care is easy, if you're interested they'll just give you a child!" Um.... it's apparently a 6-9 month process to be licensed. Also you need the MAPP class, like duh, and that doesn't start until January. Which means we might be looking at a YEAR from now before we could even be licensed, and at that point we'd start the wait to be placed.

That also shocked me. They talked about why it takes so long, and it makes sense. It seems to run so against their desperate need for homes, which I do believe now is genuine, and yet I understand it. We only barely touched on rough issues with P, compared to what we might see in foster care.... thinking about someone jumping right in and getting a child a month later? And finalizing an adoption before the honeymoon is over? That scares me even more than the thought of a child in a long term therapeutic group home...

So yeah, we wavered a bit. And read and listened. And we laughed at the jokes and I misted up a few times just thinking about it all, about the children in peril, the young adults with their lives stunted, the case workers who love so much, and the people in the room... the people in the room who couldn't even wait for the meeting to be over before pulling out their Foster Parent Application Form and filling it out, right then and there, to hand in. The people asking for the fax number to send in their applications later, and kindly asking for a repeat so they'd send it to the right place. The people who weren't scared away and truly, truly want to do this...

And then there's us.

I almost bailed on the meeting the day before. Almost said, "eh, why do we need the trouble?"

I told Nik that because we have so long to get our application in I'd like us to sit on it a month and just think about it. And you know what Mr. Doesn't Like Risks told me? He's ready to fill it out. Ready to do this.

I could have cried.

I'm pretty sure it will be sent off sometime next week...

That's not to say we'll be accepted, and even if we are that's not to say we will be licensed. A lot could happen during the next year, right?

We could decide it just doesn't feel right for our family, or maybe one of the kids might end up needing more care than they do right now. We might find another adoption route that feels like dingdingding, this is the right path. Heck, I could even become pregnant. Stranger things have happened, right?

But for now...

I have to admit, I was half hoping that the class would scare me off... but it didn't. It didn't at all. And now I'm actually MORE excited about this. And I'm happy that it would probably take so long to become licensed. If we choose this path and continue on it and nothing changes, then we'll be licensed when our kids at home are 7 and 3, when they're in the same room and we have a bedroom and crib free, and when they're a bit older and more independent. They just get easier every year...

So, yeah.

Obviously we have NO IDEA what the future holds, none at all. And this could all be a horrible, horrible mistake. Or it could be the start of the most wonderful journey of our life, perhaps even leading into having a permanent attachment to helping those children in our community most in need. Who knows?

Oh, and I do have to share this little bit...

Toward the beginning of the meeting when they asked that everyone interested in adoption only please go to the next room over for their presentation, a large group of people left (perhaps a fifth of the room, like 20+ people). As they were about to shut the door, the woman leading the meeting called out "feel free to come on back when your meeting is over!" Then she turned to us and said, with sass, "They AAAALWAYS come back!"

Everyone laughed, and Nik leaned in and whispered, "she's right. It just took us five years..."