Today, Friday, is supposed to be my day to catch up on grading and errands. But my mind is wrapped up on the events of the week. Not only the victories and disappointments of the elections, a change in my attitude about political involvement, a call to prayer for my country and its leaders (local, state and national!), but also our progress in adoption. So, as I love to do, I thought I would process out some of that through writing. Its on my mind and preventing work anyway!
Careful questions and direct questions have been coming our way again about what is happening with our adoption progress, so that will be the subject of THIS post. We have completed and been approved for our family study. We weren’t sure what happened from there – do we start calling our social worker at the agency? Do we start inquiring about children we know in the state’s database? Or do we wait for them to initiate? We decided if we had not heard from our S.W. by yesterday, we would call her on Friday. Well, Wednesday when we got home from work we had a call from the agency and the message included that our social worker is doing a lot of training for a few weeks (she is new to the agency), so her supervisor was handling our file for now. Another social worker in the same agency, different office, had seen our file and was inquiring about our interest in one of her cases. Before you get excited, we are not pursuing this one, but I still wanted to share this with you because of how it affected us to read our first child assessment.
1. Excitement – wow things are starting to move!
2. Fear – Wow things are starting to move!
3. Sadness – we realized which children this inquiry was about and that we had read a brief profile on them, so we were aware of some possible severe issues. But we agreed to see their case report. Because of their privacy, I won’t share with you what we learned, but suffice to say we were heartbroken over what transpired in this particular case. I (Kelley) even retreated into a shell for a little while, overwhelmed with what I had read and wondering if this path to adopt from the foster system was/is really something Martin and I can handle.
4. Guilt – at least on my part. We signed up for this, but we want to say no? Will there be another family for these kids? Will they be okay? But it came down to a sense of peace finally when I framed the decision of what is best for THEM, and we are not it. Not for this particular case.
5. Resolve – we have talked many hours in the last few days, once again thinking about who we are and what we have to offer. This has led to us opening up more to considering a child a little older than we originally said. This decision was led by Martin, who has been gently asking me to think about this actually for a few weeks now.
6. Initiative – we looked through the database some more with new eyes and began to generate a list of children that we may be a better match for, and so when we called the agency today to say “no” to the first case (our worker was VERY understanding), we asked if we could take the initiative to inquire on some cases. She is very helpful at helping us interpret clues in the public profiles and what the terms mean, who generates the descriptions, etc.
We ask you for a few things. First, be patient! This could be a long process! There is a lot of back and forth of sharing of information before we even have an opportunity to meet a child(ren). Second, be understanding that we will not be sharing details about a child’s background and won’t be sharing every step. They deserve their privacy of course, so if you feel in the dark it is not because we are shutting anyone out. Third – and probably MOST important – please pray for us and our future kids, for courage, wisdom, discernment, and peace. And finally, also very important, consider the fields of the fatherless around YOU. How can you help hurting kids around you? Prayer? Mentoring? Supporting foster and adoptive families in some way? Volunteer work? Or, perhaps, even to consider fostering or adoption yourself…?
