We started in December 2011-by attending a Pre-Adoption orientation through our county adoption agency. We sat in a roomful of equally nervous and uncomfortable strangers for two hours and listened to the honey-voiced social worker explain the atrocities that had been perpetrated against children and wondered if this could work for us-me, a "professional" working White/Native women in her mid-thirties, and my husband-an immigrant Mexican laborer going back to school in his mid-forties? Before we left we looked at one another and without a word we stepped forward and signed on the dotted line-we were ready to take a chance.
On a chilly day in January 2012, we filed into a colorless conference room in the basement of a public library and were promptly greeted and given a three-ring binder called "Growing our Family Through Adoption" and modules 1 and 2 of our adoption training guide. We had but a few minutes to take in our surroundings when our adoption trainer gave us our first task-find someone in the room you don't know and get to know them so that you can introduce them to everyone else. Soon enough we were telling a roomful of strangers our life stories and what who we imagined as our future children.
All day the adoption specialists filed in-social workers, guardians, and psychologists. We "traded places" with our future children in a role-playing activity in order to get a small picture of the many people and places that our children will have gone through before coming to be "ours". We listened intently as we were told that most of our children will have been neglected, that more half will have been physically or sexually abused, that most of their parents will have had a chemical dependency problem during and after pregnancy, which will have led to in-utero exposure to drugs or alcohol, leading to difficulties with learning, attention, behavior, and attachment to caregivers.
"Our kids are multi-racial, most are age 8 and above, about half are groups of siblings, and all who are waiting have birth parents whose legal parental rights have been terminated-legal connection stressed, because just because a paper says they are no longer their parents, does not mean they will ever stop yearning for them."
"Do you still want to adopt 'our kids'?...We don't want to scare you, but we want to make sure that we do the best thing for our kids, that they have forever families who understand their past and still want to stick with them."
"Adopting a waiting child is like, it's like a pregnancy without a due date-you never know when we will find the just-right child for your family, and even then there is no guarantee. So you wait, and wait, and wait some more, and then one day, you give birth!"
We still want to take a chance.
