Part 26

When you embark on the journey of adoption, you know it’s going to be hard.  You know that there will be challenges, but you don’t really know what to expect.  As we began our journey with Adoption Connections, our chosen adoption agency, we had a secondary conversation with the Director, Rebecca to walk through how we get started.

Rebecca explained, “In order for you to officially become a waiting family you must complete the Home Study process.  It takes most couples several months to complete this process.  The biggest hurdle is all of the paperwork.  That tends to be the biggest obstacle – and takes the most time.  You must complete all of the paperwork before we will schedule the home visit with our social worker.  It, on average, takes 6-8 weeks for most couples to complete that step.  I’ll send you the checklist of everything we need you to submit and fill out including a checklist.  If you have any questions just ask us.  We’re here to help.”

The window of 6-8 weeks to complete the paperwork was like a challenge thrown down in front of me.  Challenge accepted.  The competitor came out and I became intensely focused on getting the paperwork completed and submitted in record time – and I haven’t even received all documents, yet.  Nonetheless, I was motivated to get moving and get the paperwork done… fast.  For the next couple weeks, it was all I could focus any and all of my free time on.  I couldn’t focus on anything but getting the paperwork done.

Little did I know, at the time, was how much paperwork there was to be done – and how emotionally draining the paperwork would be.  The process of completing our adoption paperwork was the most vulnerable experience I’ve ever had.  There are things you have to share and talk about and prove that you don’t talk about with anyone but your partner – stuff you don’t even tell your parents or closest friends.  You have to bare it all (with the exception of a cavity search).  You have to lay everything out,  for the agency, the social worker and court to see – to judge – to assess whether you’re “good enough” to be parents.  You have to pray and hope that all of it will be good enough.  It’s emotional.  It’s stressful.  It’s overwhelming.  It’s like nothing you’ve ever imagined and nothing you ever expected.

It’s the most vulnerable and personal experience I’ve ever been through in my life.  It’s like applying for a mortgage plus a full physical with a pap smear and mammogram while some interns watch, plus someone reading your diary, plus a therapy session that someone else is spying on, plus getting pulled over for speeding and you don’t know how fast you were going – ALL WRAPPED INTO ONE.  It’s no walk in the park…

Here is the checklist of the paperwork that is required be completed by us prior to scheduling a home

visit:

1. Adoptive Parent Application:  This came before the big packet of paperwork.  It’s your basic, minimally invasive form including things like height and weight, education, medical history, hobbies, and employment.  Nothing too major.
2. Home Study Agreement:  Agreeing to pay the money and cooperate with the agency to complete all the necessary documents.  Standard practice and expected.
3. Criminal Background Checks:  We expected this too.  You would hope that they’d have to run criminal history checks on people who want to adopt or being anywhere near a child.  They’re mostly looking for history of violent crimes, felonies, crimes against children, or abuse or neglect charges.  If only that was a prerequisite for anyone with children.  The form (that we each had to fill out) required us to write down every address we lived at since 1998.  1998!  I was in high school!  I moved every year of college.  Ben and I have lived in four states TOGETHER, not to mention before we met.  Needless to say, that took a lot of thinking power and Google magic to remember addresses of where we lived since 1998.  Ben had EIGHT different addresses.  I had 9.  Including our current address, Ben and I only had 3 addresses in common.  That’s why I am so good at packing!

1. Marriage License or Certificate:  That’s easy.  I still have it, on hand, on our safe.  They only need a scanned copy.  At ready number one on the list I was still feeling pretty cocky that I could complete all of the paperwork in under a week.
2. Birth Certificates of All Household Members (required for every person no matter the age as long as that person stays in the home at least 21 days out of the calendar year):  My friend and coworker KJ almost qualifies under that criteria (but seriously) but minimally missed the cut off of 21 days.  Good thing I still have copies of both Ben and I’s birth certificates.  Still feeling good.  Still believing I can lock this in, in under 7 days.
3. Medical Forms (each parent and any adult living in the home):  This form is basically a form that your Primary Care Physician signs after completing a physical that says, “The named person is a patient of our office, and we have found this person to be a) in good health, free of communicable diseases and able to care for a child without any restriction, b) in satisfactory health and able to care for a child with the following restrictions, or c) this person’s health is not such that we can recommend that this person be a caregiver to a child.”  This form seems like a reasonable request to screen a person and be able to confidently recommend them to adopt a child.  However, you will begin to notice the theme that these are things that people who have the ability or desire to procreate on their own wouldn’t have to do, but probably should.  Ben and I quickly scheduled visits to our doctor and had him sign off on the forms.  We passed – duh.
4. Fingerprint-Based Check:  This requires us to each schedule an appointment individually at a public office, pay $40, get fingerprinted, and run a check for any outstanding warrants, investigations, etc. involving our fingerprints.  Ben and I, again quickly make the appointments and pay online.  The location of the fingerprinting facility is in the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children – state/federal assistance with basic nutritional needs of low-income families like milk, cheese, juice, formula, etc) office in town.  The day of our appointment, Ben and I walked in for our appointment only to witness a mother refusing to take a drug test because as she was screaming, “I know what I’m going to test positive for!” whilst demanding her WIC vouchers.  Now, I am not trying to spur any debate about public assistance or support for low income families – I’m for it.  What I constantly found myself questioning through the paperwork process – and in this instance – is, why does she get to be a mom so easily – and I have to go through ALL…these…steps?  How is this fair?
5. Local Police Checks (for each adult in the home):  I can’t, for the life of me figure out how this form is different than the 5 other background checks we have to do.  Different except for I have to physically take the form in myself to the local police station with my photo ID to have my record checked…again…I guess for anything I’ve got on my record for local stuff.  I tried to send my form with Ben since he was already stopping there, but alas rules are rules.  I had to physically walk in myself, in person, with said form and a state ID.  I’m not sure what would show up here that wouldn’t show up on our state check, but nonetheless, it’s required.  I guess if I have some parking tickets outstanding, I might not get a baby…just kidding…I hope.
6. Child Protection Record Checks: A form had to be filled out for both Ben and I, for every state we have lived in, in the last 7 years.  SEVEN years.  Once we fill out a Child Protective Record Release Form, the agency then has to fill out each states individual background check form (yep, they’re all different), send them to us to sign, and then send them to each individual state…individually.  We then have to wait on each state’s own backwards, backed up, messed up bureaucratic system to process our CPS check and send the results to our agency.  Those CPS check results MUST be received back before the agency schedules a home visit with our social worker.  Ugh…this shouldn’t take long.
    
7. Personal References (5 preferred, 4 required):  These are non-relative references.   It asks fairly simple questions like, “How do you know the couple?” or “How long have you know the couple?”  But also asks questions like, “Do you believe the applicants are of good moral character? Please Explain.” or “Do you believe that they have any weaknesses that would prevent them from parenting a child?” It’s quite a process to go through to determine who should be a reference.  You want people who are good writers.  You want people who know you well.  You want people who would speak positively to your ability to parent (college drinking buddies may not be a good choice here).  There’s so much to consider.  We ended up picking people who were our friends, but that we’re an important part of our marriage or our adoption journey.  We picked a friend who had adopted and offered us a lot of advice.  We picked a friend who is the minister who married us, we picked a friend who is also a birth mother, too, we picked a close friend who seen us through all of the joys and trials of our marriage and lives, and we picked my best friend who knows me better than any human.  It wasn’t an easy decision and we inevitably feel like we left some people out – but the five friends who are our references wrote the most incredible, thoughtful, and beautiful words that have even been written about us and our ability to be parents.  I think hearing our friends talk about our ability to be parents made this whole process feel so much more real – like we were actually going to be parents one day.
8. Financial Profile Form:  This form.  Oh, this form.  How much money do you make?  How much is your house worth?  How much are your cars worth?  What other investments do you have?  How much are those worth.  How much debt do you have?  How much is your mortgage?  What are all the bills you pay every month?  Money is a stressful topic.  Filling out the form requires a lot of vulnerability around a topic that people just don’t talk about.  I get it.  The agency wants to be sure you can a) afford to actually pay for the adoption and b) financially support a child.  The idea of filling out the form was stressful.  Once Ben and I filled it out – it wasn’t as bad as it originally seemed.  It did leave me wondering, however, how do people afford to adopt?!?
9. Parent Info and Family Questionnaire:  This form was odd to me.  It asked questions like, “Have you ever been arrested?” as well as “How many toilets do you have in your house?”, “What medications do you take?” and “Where do you keep your alcohol?”  It asked about education.  It asked about employment.  It asked about marital history.  It was 16 pages of a random assortment of questions.  It felt like a catchall of any questions that they hadn’t yet asked. Nonetheless it took us awhile to fill the form out.
10. Social History Interview:  The final, most extensive and most personal of all the forms.  This form, was 20 pages of questions about our life.  Questions about our marriage.  Questions about our relationships with our family members.  Questions about how we want to parent.  How we would discipline, how we would educate, why we want to adopt, who we go to for advice, who is in our friendship network, etc.  We had to answer questions about our relationships with all of our parents and step parents growing up and now.  We had to answer questions about our relationships with our siblings growing up and now.  We had to answer questions about what we were involved in extracurricularly in our lives.  We had to answer questions about what our parents expectations were of us in school.  We had to answer questions about what attracted us to one another, describe our courtship, and discuss each others strengths and weaknesses.  We had to discuss our support network, our hobbies, our church, our neighborhood.  We had to lay our whole lives out on paper.   This form took Ben and I a long time.  It was meant to be a precursor to the Home Study visit – a way to prepare the social worker for our meeting and give him/her the ability to prepare questions.  We spent a significant amount of time filling it out.