60. Adoption FAQs: Revisited
A little ways back I posted an “Adoption FAQs” that answered the most common questions I’ve gotten since beginning our process. I’m going to revisit some of those questions now that we have updated information about our process. In another post, I’m also going to address some general adoption FAQs that people have had about the process as a whole, not necessarily our specific process.
First, here are updates specific to our adoption journey:
Our timeline:
2007: When I was in high school and learned how exactly babies enter the world, I was horrified. I did not ever see myself wanting to do that, but I was super bummed wondering if I’d have a choice. I had never heard of anyone who only adopted or intentionally chose to adopt because they didn’t want biological kids. I thought something was weird about me for the longest time. I thought maybe when I met the right person, I would change my mind.
2013: I met Ryan, and my desire not to have biological kids did not change. He hadn’t really considered adoption before, but was on board very quickly. I did feel guilty for a while, wondering if he was only agreeing to please me and would later regret not having biological kids. But throughout our almost nine years together, neither of us has ever wavered on our decision even slightly. This has always been our right path. In fact, we've both often talked about how devastated we’d be if we accidentally got pregnant.
2015: We got married and knew for sure we didn’t want kids for at least 5 years. I was 23 when we got married. He was 26 and had graduated from a Christian university where people were notorious for getting married and starting families the minute they graduated. I hadn’t gone to that university, but I did feel like people stereotyped me based on what they knew of Ryan’s history. I would get so annoyed when people would ask if we planned to have kids soon. I hated being lumped into a category and having these expectations about what I would do with my body.
2019:
I was in grad school, our income was limited, and we were living in a small condo that wasn’t ideal for a family. We weren’t ready to adopt yet, but we were ready to at least start seeing what our options were.
We knew we did not want to pursue international adoption. We knew there were plenty of kids in the U.S. who needed safe and nurturing homes, and we also knew how crazy expensive international adoption is.
Since it seemed like everyone in our lives was currently having babies, we’d been coming down with baby fever too. We started researching infant adoption, but we quickly learned how insanely expensive it is. Infant adoption with our agency is around 3-4xs more expensive than adoption from foster care (the route we’ve ultimately chosen). In addition the expense, it’s also very risky. We learned that birth moms have to wait 72 hours before relinquishing their rights to the adoptive family, and during that time it’s not uncommon for them or their families to change their minds and raise the baby themselves. Also, unfortunately, many people who adopt want a baby rather than an older child, so there are often many more families wanting to adopt than there are babies available. If we went this route, we knew we might only be able to have one or two children, and they might be quite far apart in age. This just wasn’t the type of family we wanted.
Next, we looked into “foster-to-adopt.” Foster-to-adopt is when you raise kids as a foster parent with the intention of adopting them if/when they become eligible to be adopted. However, in further researching, we learned that the foster-to-adopt laws in Ohio don’t make it very easy for foster families to adopt. The laws in Ohio prioritize reunification above all else (reuniting kids with their biological family) or kinship care (placing kids for adoption with extended family members or friends of the biological family) instead of placing them for adoption with the foster parents. This unfortunately means that kids could live with the same foster family for years that loves them and wants to adopt them, but the system could still place them back with their original family if they become suitable caregivers. There’s definitely no black and white way of seeing this, and there are certainly benefits to prioritizing reuniting children with their biological family. But, we quickly knew that this wasn’t the route for us, either. Maybe someday we’d be open to fostering, but for now we really wanted to build a permanent family.
After learning about the foster-to-adopt laws in Ohio, Ryan and I were both quite discouraged. We wanted a family, and we did not want to create new people. But it seemed like the options for adopting were much less accessible than I’d been assuming. I really did not know whether we’d get to build the family we desired. There was a time when I really felt like my desired route seemed impossible.
Ryan did some more research and learned about something called “state waiting,” or “adoption from foster care.” This, we learned, is the placement of kids who are in foster care and whose biological parents’ rights have already been terminated. The foster family is not interested or able to adopt the kids, and there are no next-of-kin family members who are able to or interested in adopting. I had not heard of this before, but this wasn’t surprising given that there were only two agencies in Ohio that did this kind of adoption. But it sounded like exactly what we were looking for, so we reached out to the two agencies to learn more.
We met with a representative from the agency we would end up choosing: Open Arms Adoptions. The representative was extremely kind and helpful, and she was the first person I’d ever met who normalized my desired path to build a family. She said there were people who used their agency because they couldn’t have biological kids, and there were also people who, like us, simply chose not to. We discussed everything very theoretically, since we weren’t in a place to move forward with adoption yet. We learned that, if we were open to adopting any race and gender and especially if we were open to adopting more than one child at once (a sibling group), we would likely get a match fairly quickly once we moved through the process.
2020-2022: We were getting more and more emotionally ready to build our family, but now that we knew we’d most likely adopt multiple kids at once with unknown backgrounds and needs, we really wanted to be in the most stable place possible before doing so. This meant I had to finish grad school, we had to get our careers in somewhat of an order, we had to move to a home that would be suitable for bringing home several children of unknown ages and backgrounds, we had to live in a place we could see ourselves committing to for a reasonable period of time, we had to improve our sense of social support and community, and we had to do all we could to make sure our relationship was in the best place possible. By the grace of God, we managed to do all of this and more. The pandemic forced us to slow our lives down and evaluate what we wanted versus what we had. We managed to find an amazing house in a town we loved, a great church community, and I managed to make some new friends and restrengthen my relationships with old ones. We both started investing in friendships and hobbies outside of each other, which allowed us to enjoy our relationship more. We both found therapists we clicked with. We both started taking anxiety medications (a need that was a long time coming), which has helped us tremendously in our communication and ability to enjoy life and cope with stress. Our lives have come to a place of joy and contentment that I hadn’t dared to dream. I can confidently say that we’ll be bringing our kids home to the best and most supportive environment I could have imagined. There were months when I thought we’d never be stable enough to adequately care for kids who needed all the stability in the world, and I am so grateful for how things have come together.
September 2021: We kicked off the official process by going to our agency’s 36-hour state-required training. We traveled to Kent, Ohio and participated all weekend in classes about child development, trauma-informed parenting, communication, behavior management, and so much more. We met dozens of other families going through the process, some of whom have become very close friends. It was really an awesome weekend. It was like a massive pep rally of adoptive families combined with tons of fantastic education and resourcing.
October-December 2021: We completed the initial paperwork, including application, references, fire safety inspections, first aid and CPR training, financial info, medical info, and so much more. In mid-December, we were assigned a case worker who would take us through the home study process.
January-February 2022: We went through the home study process. Our case worker came over for 4 assessment visits. Each of these visits lasted about 3 hours and involved so many detailed questions about our relationship, our values and lifestyle, our expectations about parenting, our social supports, own self-care strategies, and more. This is all to help the case worker get a very good sense of what our family is like and what kind of children would thrive in our home. For example, we are pretty active people who love to be outdoors, love to socialize, and are very committed to our church community; therefore, we wouldn’t be the best family for a highly introverted child who preferred to spend as much time as possible indoors playing video games. We also had to be very honest about what we felt equipped to handle as parents. With our backgrounds, we felt equipped to lovingly nurture kids with behavior issues due to past trauma, for example, but we did not feel equipped to care for kids with physical disabilities, lifelong cognitive disabilities, or chronic medical conditions. As harsh as it may sound, this is the part of the adoption process where everyone has to be brutally honest about themselves and what kinds of family lifestyle they are looking for and able to handle. Sure, we could have made changes to our home and lifestyle to accommodate a child with physical disabilities, but chances are there are other families out there who are already equipped for this and would be a much better fit for that child. Our little girls that we were ultimately matched with love swimming, jumping on the trampoline, riding bikes and scooters, playing dolls, and coloring. This fits in excellently with the lifestyle Ryan and I already have.
The other part of the home study process, of course, is assessing to make sure we will be a good adoptive family. Part of this is the safety audit, where the case worker goes around the entire house and lets us know what we need to do to make our home suitable by state standards. This involves making sure all doors that lock have accessible keys, that tools and dangerous objects not accessible, that alcoholic beverages are out of reach, that prescription medicine is locked away. The other part of the assessment is simply the case worker making sure we know what we’re signing up for and have the tools to be successful. However, this isn’t something to be afraid of. Case workers want families to adopt. They want kids placed in safe, nurturing, stable homes. They’re not out to get you or criticize you for every little thing; they’re there to help you become resourced in whatever ways you need.
March 14, 2022: After completing our assessments and home studies, we were officially approved as state-licensed foster and adoptive parents. I think the reason for getting the foster license title, even though we won’t be fostering, is so that the kids can come home to live with us before the adoption is official. Or because it’s just what our agency told us to do. However you want to look at it. :) Once we got approved, our agency was to start submitting our family profile to kids who were available for adoption (well, to their case workers). We were told that we would not be notified when our profile was submitted, but we would be notified if we were chosen as a top potential match. Then, we would learn a little about the kids and decide if we were interested in moving forward. From there, the kids’ teams (case workers, foster parents, agency representatives) would review all the top choices and choose the best family for the children.
However…our process looked a bit different than we were told to expect. In early April, we got an email from our case worker letting us know about two sisters in Kentucky who looked like they would be a good match for us. However, Kentucky’s laws require families to go online and submit their own “inquiry” about the children instead of the case worker doing it on their behalf. So, we went online to the website we were given, made a profile, and submitted our inquiry about the girls. A few days later, we were contacted by the girls’ team asking to set up a meeting. We set up a meeting for the following week with the girls’ case worker, agency representative, county representative, and foster mom. In the meantime, we were provided with the girls’ entire background information about their biological family and reasons for entering foster care. We were surprised by this because we were told not to expect this information until we were chosen as the top match. So, naturally, we wondered if we had already been chosen as the top match before going into the meeting. Our meeting went really well; we had a chance to hear directly from the girls’ foster mom and felt really positive about our ability to be the family these girls deserved. We took the night to process it all and went back the next day to let the team know that we would be willing to adopt the girls if they chose us. From there, we didn’t get an answer for a full week! It was the longest week ever, for many reasons. But on Friday, April 29, 2022, we opened our email and saw within the thread of messages with the team (not even in a subject line) that our family had been chosen to move forward. It was the most anticlimactic and absolutely thrilling news we had ever heard. We had already been planning to go out of town that weekend visit my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, and so we spent hours in the car that day calling and texting everyone with the amazing news.
Next steps: Unfortunately, we don’t have an answer on when our girls will come home or even when we’ll get to meet them. We’ve been in contact with their foster mom and she’s sent us a handful of pictures of the girls, but we can’t set up a transition plan or officially meet the girls until some legal paperwork has been processed. We’re really hoping it won’t take too long, especially our district starts school August 10. So we’re just praying and taking it day by day. We’re not updated about the process as it moves along, since our agency works with so many families and they really don’t have time to provide regular updates to everyone. So, we could go weeks hearing nothing, and one day get a call that everything’s been processed and we’re ready to set up visits. It’s all out of our hands right now.
