Seeking God Knows What

I have always felt myself to be open-minded and accepting of people’s decisions in life, unless of course, they are, in some way, life threatening, dangerous or criminal.  I didn’t think I felt a sense of superiority based on social class, education, race, etc but I think I have been somewhat enlightened on my actual thoughts since our last visit with L.  And truthfully, I think it affects how I feel and operate within the dynamics of our open adoption.

To be honest, we are definitely in a different social class than L and her family.  They are very nice people and I am never worried about our safety or their safety.  They don’t seem to make bad or dangerous choices in their lifestyle, though there isn’t a lot of stability in their lives, particularly with relationships, but when we visit, I tend to leave a visit thinking that Widget really does have better opportunities with us than she would have had with L.  And for all my feelings that if a mom can parent, wants to parent, she should parent, I thank God when we leave that Widget isn’t living through that.

Because I don’t understand their lack of motivation to make something of themselves.  They are not dumb, but  none of them have been to college, except for maybe L’s stepmother, and none of them seem to desire to go to college.  L talked once about at least getting an early childhood assistant training but never followed through.  I suppose it is saying something that they seem to be content with their lives as they are but still, I can’t imagine not wanting to better themselves.   But it is like this perpetual cycle where they do exactly as their parents did and their children will just follow along making similar choices.  I often want to say “But don’t you want MORE than this for your life?”  Though, in a way, I do think L thought this when she was pregnant for Widget, and hence, she bucked the family trend of raising her daughter and relinquished her instead.  But I can’t imagine she will relinquish subsequent children and I don’t see her changing her lifestyle when/if she does choose to have more children.

I say these things, not because I think I have more money- T and I are certainly not wealthy as evidenced by our financial disasters a couple of years ago.  We still live relatively paycheck-to-paycheck but, thanks to having filed for bankruptcy, we can at least save a small portion of our pay every month instead of barely floating.  Right now, our entire savings is devoted to our adoption fees, and since we had to pay property taxes last month, we are short in how much we need to pay for the adoption in full, so I’m trying to rebuild that first plus a small emergency fund.  We would never have been able to make our recent move, had it not been for my in-laws (and their incredibly good financial sense).  For what it is worth, we have learned and will never land ourselves in that position again.

I don’t know if this is making much sense.  I am certainly thankful that L and her family want to see Widget, want to be a part of her life, they clearly love her but I also have this fear that Widget will be ashamed as she gets older to visit them because their lifestyle is so different from ours.  And the last thing I want for her is to feel ashamed about who her family is because they are as much a part of who she is as we, her adoptive family, are.

We had a visit with L on Saturday.  We saw assorted members of her family, including the one sister we haven’t met before along with her husband and daughter plus one of L’s cousins.  We also met L’s boyfriend and, briefly, his mother.  Sometimes, I feel a little like who is going to be at visits is completely out of my control, especially when as of late, most of our visits have been at one of their homes.  So far, I have had no worries about safety or whether people are going to be appropriate for Widget to be around and I know that everyone wants to be there to support L and her relationship with Widget but it is hard to never be totally sure who is going to be there.

I am processing some thoughts I had during and after the visit about class differences and dealing with them in an open adoption.  I imagine once I feel like I can articulate them, I will have an additional post about this. 

But despite the things I have to process and deal with, I still believe that this will benefit Widget.

Our agency director came to our new house on Tuesday evening to do our update for our homestudy.  It was good to see her and get this step done.  I have to drop our medical forms off to be filled out and mail her our new financial data form, plus I’m thinking about putting together new profile pages with updated pictures and a slightly different layout.

As far as the agency itself, right now things are pretty quiet.  She has had a couple of high special needs possible placements that she did not show our profile to and we agreed that they were situations we would not be comfortable with but most everyone else she is working with is already matched with a family or came to her as a match done outside the agency.  The agency is still the primary referral when adoption comes up through a local pregnancy support group for young moms but she hasn’t had a mom who wanted to make a placement since, well, A.  Most of them come in and she learns that they actually want to parent but are unsure of it for various reasons.  She has done a lot of helping them get the support and plans they need to parent in place.

I know in my heart that this IS the agency we need to be with but I will say it is hard to hear this kind of information.  Not because I don’t want these moms to find the resources to parent, but because it just means we aren’t “needed” yet and I am ready to be “needed”.   We are allowed to independently search for a placement but I’m not totally sure how I feel about that because I do not like the idea of marketing ourselves to potential birthmothers.  Sigh.  It is a fine line.

We did open ourselves up to possible sibling placement if it is two siblings younger than Widget.   We want to keep her place as our oldest intact.  That could be interesting if it does happen!

Not our agency!

But one of my “favorite” agencies is being cited for violations-  this time soliciting extra fees from adoptive parents or they would close their case because they had a budget shortfall.

http://www.woodtv.com/dpp/news/local/ottawa_county/Adoption_agency_cited_for_violations

And they aren’t in this for money….

Right.

I had this idea in my head that reaching the one year anniversary of updating our homestudy would not be as significant with the second adoption as it was with the first.  Yeah, I was wrong about that.  I feel like I have been thinking about adoption, the wait, how infertility sucks, and so on a lot more lately than I had over the last few months.  Granted the fact that my cousin had a baby in May, a couple from our small group had a baby in June, a former co-worker of mine just had a baby last Monday and we found out T’s co-worker is pregnant at 38 after 9 years of marriage with no plans to have children, may have something to do with it as well.  It feels like babies, babies everywhere but not for us.

Widget feels it too.  She has commented with greater frequency that it takes a long time to adopt a baby and she will ask regularly “when is a baby coming to our house?”  It is hard to hear her ask and not be able to give any better answer than “I don’t know but you will be a big sister someday.”

Plus we haven’t really had any news or updates from our agency director since the end of April/early May when I found out A and Z had their son and did decide to place him with the other family.

I know it will happen when it is supposed to happen and it will all make sense why we had to go through the things we have been through on this journey to a new family member but right now, it is hard and I’m feeling sad.

As I said previously, Heather at Production, Not Reproduction has created a listing of open adoption related blogs and started a roundtable discussion on open adoption.  The first topic is what one thing I would tell my past self about open adoption if I could. 

I think probably the most important thing I would share is to realize that open adoption contact fluctuates and, while having an idea in my head of what our open adoption would look like was good, expecting it to be JUST LIKE that is not really going to happen.  When we moved towards having an open adoption with visits, I expected our relationship with the mom/her family to turn into this close-knit relationship, such as what I have with most of my family.  When Widget was placed with us, and we had lots and lots of contact from L in the beginning, I really thought this was the direction we were headed.

Then contact completely dried up.  We went from hearing from L just about every week or two, to not hearing back from her for nearly 6 months, even when I would call, e-mail or send a note to her.  I couldn’t figure out what happened.  I stressed out about it every time I called or e-mailed and got no response.  I went to all my adoption forums and asked “What should I do?  Am I doing something wrong?”  In fact, I was getting so worked up about it, that it was distracting me from focusing on Widget and being her momma.

Then one day, I realized that we don’t have to have what I thought was the perfect open adoption, as long as what we have seems to work for all of us.   L is the only person that can know when she is ready for a visit.  I always include a “hope to see you soon”  or “any time you want to visit, let me know and we will set something up” whenever I send a note or pictures.  If she calls, I also make sure I bring up visiting.  And I make sure she has our up-to-date contact information, especially since we have been moving so much these last few years   This way of thinking is a lot less stress for me and that makes me a better momma!