If you’ve been a Chic reader for a while, then you know that Dave and I went through the adoption process for almost five years. If you don’t already know about our journey and you’re curious, you can start with this post about our Ethiopian Adoption and then this post for when our plans all changed.
We walked through foster care and then to adoption which later failed… all before finally getting our precious daughter Noah. If you’re curious about what we walked through before we decided to do independent adoption, you can read about the journey below.
July 23, 2015 – After many years of trying for an international adoption we have finally reconciled with the fact that we likely will never succeed. Sadly for us, and so many other families, the adoption system in Ethiopia has slowed to a near stop. We made the decision this year that rather than switch to another country we are going to adopt domestically. The process of domestic adoption is so much different than what we’ve experienced so far. For one thing, Los Angeles county requires that you become qualified as foster parents to enter the adoption system. Read the whole post here.
October 20, 2015 – For six weeks we met every Saturday at a community college across town from 9AM – 4PM. It was a heavy experience because for hours we watched videos or read case studies or listened to lessons on children in the foster care system. Imagine spending the bulk of your weekend listening to stories about children who’ve been moved over and over from one home to another. Imagine hours of focus on precious babies who’ve been physically or emotionally abused. Imagine trying to wrap your mind around the emotional scars that your adoptive child might have because of that. The purpose was to best prepare us to parent those children but it was so sad and so discouraging. We’d drive home almost every single Saturday thinking, What are we doing? Who are we to think we can take on something this big? Read the whole post here.
A photo posted by Rachel Hollis (@msrachelhollis) on
December 2015 – We got a note in early December that DCFS had lost half of our paperwork on file. Now, I will preface by saying that I can’t even imagine how overwhelmed the staff must be there and it takes a special kind of angel to do their work. That being said, you guys, I was devastated by this news. Anyone who’s ever gone through the adoption process knows how intense the paperwork is. So to have worked so hard to get physicals (for our kids and ourselves) and blood work and the boys school report cards and bank statements, etc, etc, etc all turned in, only to find that they’d misplaced it? It was so upsetting. The clincher too is that a lot of the paperwork has to be sent in directly by your doctor or a lab so you can’t tamper with it. Which means we couldn’t just send in copies, we had to have everything filled out again. I spent a few days feeling really discouraged by how ridiculous the situation was and then I got some clarity. One day it occurred to me, if this process is so hard for us (educated adults with connections and resources) what is this process like for a tiny baby without any voice or advocate? So as stressful as it was, we set out to turn it all in again.
Early January 2016 – Since we had gone through and completed our home inspection by the state in November (side note: when you do foster to adopt you have to get licensed by both the state and the county. The state inspects your home and the county inspects you.) the only inspections we had left were through LA County. Once all the paperwork was turned in again we were assigned a social worker who has been totally lovely to deal with. We had our first round of interviews in early January. They were individual interviews with both me and Dave that lasted about 2-3 hours each. In that interview they ask everything you can possibly imagine: from your relationship with your own parents, to your marriage, to why you’re in therapy, or whether you’re on any medication to how much sleep you get at night. I’m guessing this could be a pretty stressful for some people, but since y’all know I’m basically an open book I just laid it all out for her.
Late January 2016 – Having passed our individual interviews our social came back for our couple interview and an interview with our boys. The couple interview is where we talked through our answers in the individual sessions as well as went through what we will and won’t accept with a baby (I’ll get back to this in a second). She also interviewed each of our boys (with us in the room) and that was honestly pretty stressful. Stressful because I was super nervous that one of the boys would try and be funny (we’re a pretty sarcastic family) and when they asked something like “what scares you?” they’d answer “when mommy chases me with a knife!” to try and make a joke. Luckily for us all, they boys took it very seriously and were great.
What we will and wont accept in a child was the next thing we discussed, and wow that is an insane conversation to have! First of all, when you go through your required parenting classes they say approximately 900 times “Be honest about what you can handle!” and so Dave and I have had a lot of conversations about that. One of the things we accepted a while ago was that if we wanted a baby (we’re approved for a girl between the ages of 0-2) there might be a chance that the baby has had some exposure to drugs in utero. So we sat with our social worker and discussed what we would and wouldn’t accept. “Would you accept a baby that’s been exposed to marijuana?” Yes. “Cocaine?” Yes. “Meth?” No. “Alcohol?” No. At some point I started awkwardly giggling because I couldn’t believe we were discussing something so terrible the same way you’d pick out a car. “Do you want heated seats?” Yes. “Eighteen inch rims?” Nah, we’re good. The whole process was totally surreal and yes, I am making a joke at the awkwardness of the situation… because it’s either laugh at it or cry and there’s no way I’m going to make it through this process if I can’t find some levity. We also went over what race we would accept. Any, we told her. “Any? Let me just go over the list so you can be sure,” she said. Not necessary, we told her, we’ll have any race at all… we’ll have whoever God wants us to have. We also agreed that we’d be open to relationships with: birth parents, relatives, past foster families, and siblings. Apparently the relationship questions aren’t usually so easy to get trough but honestly, if we can have a relationship with our daughter’s family that’s healthy for her and us, then why wouldn’t we? And as for race, I’m not naive enough to believe that there won’t be things that pop up if she has a different skin color than we do, if that’s what’s meant to happen then we’ll navigate it alongside her.
All of these questions brought us to the end of our interview and a startling announcement. The social worker told us that our paperwork should be processed by February 1st and that, at least with the foster care portion, we will likely have placement fairly quickly.
Now, let me back up a bit for those of you who (bless your hearts) are still with me all these paragraphs later. LA County requires families to foster for six months to qualify for adoption. But here’s the tricky part, the baby you foster isn’t the baby you adopt. So we’re essentially on two different tracks: foster care baby girl and adoption baby girl. Now what happens if we get our adoption baby girl while we still have foster care baby girl staying with us? I guess we have a big slumber party y’all! And what happens if the baby girl we’re fostering comes up for adoption when we already have our adoptive baby girl in our home? Well then, I guess we have a big slumber party that lasts forever! Meaning, we could very well come out of this with two babies or just one and we have no idea what will happen.
So back to that startling announcement… beginning of February, as in, next week! What?! After waiting for years and years the knowledge that this is so close is mind blowing to me. We’re actually leaving on Monday for a family vacation and then I have four work trips in February alone (a total fluke for me) so we kindly asked our social worker to not officially enter us into the system until the first Monday in March. As in, five weeks from now!! You guys, the nursery isn’t ready and I don’t have anything… not diapers or clothes or anything because I don’t know the age of the baby we’re getting. So I’ll spend the next month (in between all those business trips) prepping the best that I can and praying for peace. Because really, what else can I do? I know that the next month, six months, year is going to be a wild ride but you can’t totally prepare for the unknown. So we’re just walking in faith and trying to support each other through one of the most surreal things our marriage has ever encountered. Thanks for coming along on our foster to adopt journey and thanks in advance for your prayers… we need them!
Early April 2016 – In April of 2016 we got a call for our first foster placement… an 11 month old baby girl. In foster care you’re not allowed to use the real name of the child on social media so we took to calling her Birdie. She was an absolute precious addition to our home and we all fell in love with her from day one!
Late April 2016 – A few days after getting placement with Birdie we got a call about her big sister. They asked us if we would please, please, please consider taking this two year old who had nowhere else to go. It was one of the craziest decision we’ve ever made to go from three kids to five kids in the span of a few short weeks but we said yes, again.
May 2016 – On Cinco de Mayo we got a call that big sister was on her way to our house! We had to fight so hard to reunite these two girls so the moment when they were finally back together was infinitely precious. I won’t forget it for as long as I life.
Late June 2016 – Our foster girls transitioned back out of our home. While we knew that it wasn’t a permanent placement, that day was traumatic for me. A baby should NEVER have to endure being passed around from one home to another. It’s unnatural for them to go from one adult to another, from one social work to another. Them leaving will forever be a scar on my heart. Not because they were upset to leave, like I had anticipated. But because to them (who have been passed around most of their short lives) getting into a car with a social worker who was a total stranger, didn’t phase them at all.
End of July 2016 – On July 25th we got a call from DCFS saying that there were newborn twin girls who had been abandoned at the hospital. We never in our wildest dreams thought we’d have twins and we only had 30 minutes to make THE biggest decision of our lives. We talked to the social worker and prayed together over the phone and ultimately came to a decision. We said the biggest YES of our whole lives! We would adopt newborn twins!
The time after the twins came home is one of the happiest in the history of my life. It wasn’t an easy time mind you. Newborn twins are incredibly hard to care for and these babies were both born with medical complications that made their first weeks of life tough. Even still… I had waited SO long to have a daughter and I felt like the luckiest woman in the world. I would spend hours upon hours just laying in bed with them cuddled on my chest.
August 2016 – 4 weeks into having the girls in our home, we found out that they would go back to their biological family. At the time, I was in total denial because they’d told us the girls were abandoned. It honestly never even occurred to me that family would want them back because we didn’t realize there was any family at all. From the second I held them in my arms they were my daughters and I believed that would always be the case.
September 2016 – The twins transitioned out of our home.
Even now, four months later, it’s still difficult for me to talk about. I feel like it will always be difficult for me to talk about. I always knew that DCFS would favor biological families– I just didn’t realize that was a possibility with the twins. I held nothing back. I loved them with everything in me as if they’d be mine forever. In retrospect, I truly believe this was the way God planned it. Newborns need a mama who feels that way and even if it meant their loss left a scar on my heart that will never be filled, I wouldn’t trade that time for anything.
After they left us we asked DCFS to remove our names from the system. Truthfully, we no longer trusted DCFS to be honest with us and therefore the idea of adopting through them didn’t feel safe. Adoption didn’t feel safe. Ethiopia failed. We dealt with the pain of foster care. We lost twins we thought would be ours forever. I honestly didn’t want any part of adoption after that. The idea of adopting again felt scary and incredibly painful.
October 2016
You can read what happened next in this post about the loss of the twins.
