No news...

Is not always good news. We have our first homestudy meeting next week, and I have been going back and forth between excited and stressed.

I'm stressed because:

• We're nowhere near done writing our autobiographies (about 50 pp each); mostly because the H's stupid job has been keeping him crazy hours this week.
• A million little what-ifs keep popping up in my head; this prospective adoptive parent support group I've joined is kind of a mixed blessing in this regard. This is going to be a long, hard, expensive process, with a lot of opportunity for the random fallible human being somewhere along the line to keep us from adopting based on their personal values rather than objective facts.
• I do not want to get into it here, but my medical evaluation was a less than positive experience. Not only did I get the impression that the doc was actively looking for a reason to fail me (seriously, who makes someone repeat bloodwork THREE times?! It came back all good the first two, WTF do you think subsequent tries are going to turn up?), but the doc made so many negative comments about international adoption and wives/moms working outside the home (daycare is NOT the same as an orphanage. I understand the beans will have separation anxiety till they understand we're coming back after work to get them, but come on) that I'm petrified to have the homestudy social worker speak to him. I need a new doc, and fast, as well as a good story as to why I changed at this juncture.
• Cost. OMG. Ethiopia is a very reasonably priced country, but this is all relative when adoption comes into play. We have to lay out about 7K over the next two months, which is a challenge when our home is underwater and nobody's giving loans. It's extra annoying, since AFTER the adoption is finalized, our employers will reimburse us pretty much everything. We just need to come up with the cash, now; had the credit market not collapsed this would not be an issue. I have some fundraising ideas, but especially in this economy, I am not sure how well they'll do, not to mention I feel badly hitting up friends/family/loved ones. Need to make a decision about Stella & Dot today if I want to get the cheap sign up special.
• Our beans being unhappy when they come home - missing their caretakers at the orphanage, hating our cold winters, facing racism here in the US, feeling like it's their fault that they were placed in the orphanage, etc... I could go on and on.
• The SW not liking us, and denying our homestudy.
• Who we're going to ask to be our references. I don't know how much work it is to be a reference, not to mention most of our "friends" that have kids are actually relatives who can't serve as references anyway.

I'm excited because:

• If the HS goes well... we will become parents!

PSA: What not to say to adoptive parents...

... unless you want to (best case) really hurt their feelings or (worst case) alienate them permanently. Both things I've heard said to others, and dumb sh*t that gets said to me.

• Can't you have kids naturally? Is this your business? Do I ask you about the internal workings of your crotch?


• Just relax and you'll get pregnant. Unless you are their gynecologist, you never know what goes into someone's fertility. They may have one of a million medical issues. They may be a trannsexual. They may just be a person who prefers adoption to pregnancy.


• You're just going to get pregnant right after you adopt. Yeah, unless we don't. See above. That only happens to 8% of adoptive parents anyway, so we're not holding our breath.


• Adopted kids turn out messed up. Granted. Moses, Dave Thomas, Steve Jobs - all such screwups. So unlike that sweet little Jeffrey Dahmer, who was raised by his birthparents.


• You're buying a child! Most adoption fees go to pay lawyers. Nobody calls the medical costs you paid to give birth "buying" your children. PS - offspring are not commodities.


• Adopted infants are stolen from their birthmothers. Unfortunately, this happens a SMALL percentage of the time. Adoptive parents and adoption agencies go to great lengths to avoid that happening.


• If you were meant to be parents, God would have given you a child. You now speak for God and the universe? F* you.

Special to international adoption:

• Why don't you adopt domestically? Why don't YOU adopt domestically? Whether, when, and from where is the best place to adopt, is a question every family answers differently. In our case, we found some aspects of domestic adoption to be not for us. Also, if we're going to adopt, we prefer to do so from a country where being adopted vs not may be the difference between living to adolescence and not.


• If you care so much about Ethiopia, why don't you do something to make the place better rather than just take their kids? Did we explicitly say we were doing nothing to help Ethiopia? It's not that we don't care, it's just that (a) on our planet, classy people don't brag about charitable donations; and (b) Is my name Warren Buffet? No? Then probably, any charitable donation we give that country, isn't newsworthy to anyone but one or two individuals.


• You are such a humanitarian to take that poor child in! Right. Thanks for your support. That said, adoption is not a charity project, it is a way to build a family. That means the parents are probably happier to be mom and dad to that child than the child is to be adopted. And do you have any idea how bad it must make kids feel to hear people refer to their mom and dad loving them as some great act of benevolence?


• Any comparisons to Brangelina. Do I make out with my brother and keep a vial of my husband's blood around my neck? Then I guess we're not so much like Brangelina at all. PS - adoption is tens of thousands of dollars spent, every aspect of your life examined with a microscope, and your nerves on end for a year plus. This is not something people do because it's "the in thing".

Now that you know, I trust you will not say any of the above unless you're trying to be a douchewaffle.

Before the first homestudy meeting

In sixteen short days, we meet with the social worker for our first homestudy meeting. I am both excited and nervous, and a tinge resentful.

To those of you who haven't adopted, where we are right now, means we are working through MOUNTAINS of paperwork, blood tests, 25 page theses on our thoughts on life and childrearing, and recruiting references.

Honestly? I understand that you can't just give a child to anyone, but seriously, is this amount of scrutiny necessary? For example, is a child seriously better off in an orphanage than with parents who don't attend church and bought purebred pets rather than go to an animal shelter? Because we've had several social workers refuse to consider us for a homestudy on these grounds. Do medical conditions like high cholesterol and renegade blood sugar render someone unable to be a parent? Give me a few weeks and I'll tell you what our current social worker thinks.

While I've heard so many positive things about the one we've hired, I've run into so much negativity, so many petty people who can't keep their own personal biases separate from their professional lives, that it's really freaking me out. It's like if we don't measure up to some other person's judgements, we fail and it's back to the fertility clinic. To some degree, it's like this guy gets to play God and tell us whether or not we have the right to be parents. And you know what, yeah, he doesn't know us from Adam, but if you ask anyone who actually knows us, my husband and I would be kick-ass parents. And it really gets under my skin to have someone suggest otherwise. I know we'd have a lot to learn, both about parenting and about the parenting of adopted kids. But can't that be said of everyone who becomes a parent for the first time? It's like the "adoptive parents are lesser parents", or the "if God wanted you to be parents, He'd give you a baby" bias, seep into even the adoption professionals.