Hard Questions

12 Jul 2010 3 Comments

by blackberrysmoothie in CAS, Update

When you’re going to foster or adopt children in Ottawa, you have to fill out a lot of forms.  The social worker warned us that we would have a hard time with some of them, and that it would be uncomfortable. He said that we might even feel sick after we complete them.  He jokingly suggested a bottle of wine might help.  Maybe it wasn’t a joke.

The first ones we worked on were about ourselves.  It was objectively interesting, but subjectively weird.  We had to choose words from a long list to describe our childhoods, our relationships with our parents (both currently and as a child) and our relationship with each other.  We weren’t supposed to share our answers with each other…. I really want to look at Peter’s answers, but I haven’t.  Those forms were uncomfortable to think through, but at least we knew most of the answers.

It took us about three weeks to fill out the form about what kids we want.  Some of the questions were easy…. we had talked extensively about wanting two kids, so that was the box we checked.  Children of any race or ethnicity would be welcome, so that section got all the boxes checked.  Then we turned the page, and the really hard questions began.

Are you willing to adopt a child with HIV?  Hepatitis? One who is blind?  One who uses a wheelchair? One who has been sexually abused?  How about if their parent had a mental illness?  What about if they have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?

What if we don’t know if their mother used drugs during pregnancy?  Are you OK not knowing that?  How little are you willing to know about the parents, or even the child’s early years?  What if the mother didn’t know who the father was?  What if you have no medical background at all?

This was the nausea-inducing form.  What a horrible person I must be, to be able to draw the line, and put these poor children into two heaps – acceptable and unacceptable.  To see my prejudices and preferences spelled out in black and white was unsettling.  These are things that a person kind of knows about themselves, but to have to literally check one box and not another, that’s a whole different experience.

However unsettling it was, though, we had to be honest.  We have no experience in caring for any kind of child, never mind a medically fragile one – 0r two.  We’re not teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, psychologists, or any sort of person who might have special insight to help with the sort of issues that children in foster care are at risk for.  So we thought about what our lives would be like with each kind of child.  We chose.  It sucked.

But it sucked less than taking on too much and having the adoption fail.  It would simply be too devastating for any of these children to end up in the wrong home.  It simply can’t happen.  So I’ll take a bit of nausea about some checkmarks to avoid that.  I can take it.  They can’t.

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