But it doesn’t matter when I’m ready.  We are a resource.  We are not clients who can complain when we don’t get what we signed up for.

CAS is not in the business of finding us a kid.  They are in the business of finding a kid a home.

But when they’re ready to avail themselves of the resource that we are, the kid will have curtains.  Because I’m ready now.

There were about 20 people in our class, which was split about half-and-half between foster parents and adoptive parents, as well as half-and-half between those who already knew the child they were going to take (some through kin, some were a family friend or a child’s friend or neighbour), and those, like us, who would be surprised.  There were people from all walks of life and levels of education.   There were parents and not-yet-parents.  There were mostly couples, (including a same-gender couple) but some single people, too.  Every person had a different journey to that classroom.

Before we started, I thought it was going to be really boring.  I had no idea what we would hear about for *thirty* hours!  But I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  It was not boring.  Kids in care are so different from kids who have grown up in a stable loving home.  I learned things I had no idea I was missing, and am so grateful to the trainers and the other people in the class for preparing me for this so well.

At some points it was really difficult.  On the weeks where we did two sessions on a Saturday, we had four sessions within eight days!  Added to the Wednesdays we were already doing…. hoo! It got overwhelming, and I procrastinated.  Peter had to tell me to do my reading and my homework. It was a lot of information, and a lot of sad, tough, discouraging-at-times information.

But we got through it with the help of our amazing instructors – Diane, who is a social worker with CAS, and Teri-Lynne, who is a foster and adoptive parent.  They were honest with us and made us understand that this is not about us, it is about the kids.  They showed us it was OK to make mistakes, and how to try to fix them.

Now we are really close to being “adoption-ready”.  We have one more meeting with our own social worker here at home on Tuesday, then we start looking at profiles of kids.  All our official papers are in order, and once our home study report is completed in the next few weeks, the adoption process could start at any moment.  It’s kind of like being on a roller coaster, with the added surprise of stopping at the top, then not knowing when you’ll be moving again.  My friend Joan, who is an adoptive mother, described it as hurry up and wait, then hurry up again.

I am writing about one woman who fostered my father in the 1960s.  I never met L. even though she only died a few years ago.  I was very close with some other of my father’s foster parents, even calling one “grandma”, but when I was growing up, Dad rarely talked about his time there – pretty much only when it was describing something in a time frame ie. “when I was staying with L.”

My dad moved out of her house and in with his friend Ray’s family for his last months of high school.  It was a fairly informal arrangement.  Ray’s mom never got any money from the province in exchange for caring for my dad.  I have no idea if he even told anybody that he had moved.  I’m certain he didn’t tell any government official.  I know this because, after he moved out, L. kept getting money from the province for his care.  Once my father turned 18, he had to sign the back of his support cheques since they were made out to him, as an adult.  He was still being supported by the province since he was still in school – two years in grade 12 and another in grade 13 made him age 20 at his high school graduation.

When he moved out of L.’s house, L. kept cashing the cheques.  She forged his name on them.  She continued this for over a year, including the time when he was at college, 80 miles away.  We know this because the government gave us copies of the endorsed cheques for that time period.  The signatures on the back are not his.  Compared to documents he signed in the same timeframe, they are not even close.  We looked into whether criminal charges might be laid (L. was still alive when we discovered this).  A handwriting expert felt he could not legally testify that the signatures were forgeries because they were “too good”.  There were no signs of hesitation in the writing, as there usually are in a forgery.  L. didn’t hesitate.  She just kept cashing the cheques.

When my dad turned 21, he was entitled to have the residue of the estate money that the province had held since his mother’s death.  According to the province’s records, this was about $4000.  This was in 1967.  In today’s money, that would be about $25,000.   This cheque was sent by the province to my father, although he never received it.  It was cashed, although he never saw it.  This is the one cheque that the provincial government did not have on file, not even a photocopy.   The last address on file with the province was L.’s and the last monthly cheque they sent was mailed to her.

We don’t know for sure what happened.  Because L. has since died, and because everyone who worked at the bank and the post office and the provincial offices has since at least retired and possibly died, we probably never will.   But people must have known.  Why else would there be absolutely no record of that last cheque in my dad’s file with the province?  How could someone like L. go into a small town bank and cash a cheque for that much money and raise no eyebrows with the bank workers?  It has made my previously open-hearted father into a (at times) cynical harsh man.  He is slow to trust now, and that makes me really sad.

If the first-round police check shows you have the same birthdate and gender as an offender (including pardoned offenders), you have to be fingerprinted to prove you’re not that person with a changed name.  This happened to Peter.  He has the same birthdate as a pardoned sex offender.  So we had to go downtown and get him fingerprinted.  The fingerprint lady said that about 50% of male applicants for volunteer and adoption police checks need to be fingerprinted.

We’ve seen in the news reports that some people are waiting up to four months for this second phase of the police check – since we are applying to adopt together, my forms are staying with his, so we’re in this wait together.  We’re hoping that they’ll see why Peter is doing the check and try to get it done quickly.  We know we’re also lucky to be in a large center (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) where the wait seems to be shorter than in smaller places.  But is our situation any more important that someone trying to be a hockey coach or a volunteer with developmentally delayed adults or a friendly visitor at a retirement home?

Just another hoop to jump through.  I’m a firm believer in all things (including timing of things) happening for a reason.  Our police check will be done when it is done, and in the correct time for us.  That’s what I tell the impatient side of my mind, anyway…

Our first advantage is that we are not coming to adoption after grudgingly accepting infertility.  Granted, we are not able to conceive children, but that’s not been any sort of heartache for us, and we are not looking at adoption as a last option.  It’s our first choice, and we are happily jumping in with both feet.

Another advantage is that we have never parented before.  This inexperience would, at first thought, seem like a disadvantage.  However, in the reading I have been doing, it seems as if the usual parenting strategies don’t work very well with kids who have attachment disorders, which many kids in foster care have.  In the formative years of their lives, they are often neglected and never attach to anyone.  They also can connect love with punishment and anger, so rewards and punishments don’t mean the same thing to them as to attached kids.  They can literally think that an adoptive parent doesn’t care about them if the parent doesn’t punish, spank or beat the child.  Some adoptive parents who have already had children will get frustrated when their usual strategies don’t work on their newly adopted child, and it’s hard for them to un-learn those habits.  We won’t have to unlearn them.  We never learned them.

Of course the flip side of this advantage is that it confines who we can take parenting advice from… I’m sure we’ll have to deal with lots of well-meaning people telling us what worked for their (attached) children, and it won’t work for us.

Our third advantage is that, although we are older than the average first parent, we are younger than the average adoptive parent.  Also, we are getting kids who are age 7 or older, so it’s like we “had” them when we were in our early thirties (or earlier), about equal with the Canadian average of age 29 for first time parents.

With all our personal challenges, and those inherent in adoption, I’m hoping our advantages will give us a fighting chance for success.

As it turns out, no.  There was no home inspection at all.  It was more of a brain inspection.

Our social worker sat with us and went through the forms we filled out about our childhoods, our relationships with our parents and their relationships with each other.  She was pleasantly surprised to find that both of us have parents who are still married (41 years for my parents, and 50 for Peter’s) – apparently that is quite rare to find these days. We also got good scores for having bad stuff happen to us, but getting appropriate help and coming out the other end.  Yes, we’re well practiced at that around here.

All in all, it was a positive meeting.  We demonstrated that we are able to deal with whatever comes our way, and that we can turn to each other as well as a support network in those difficult times.  Once again, her verdict was that there was nothing to prevent the adoption process from continuing.

It was tough to do, though.  It was like going back over all the therapy I’ve ever had in my life (a not inconsequential amount) in one hour and fifteen minutes.  But first I had to listen to Peter do the same thing.

I didn’t sleep well that night, or the night after; it brought up too many memories of things I hadn’t thought about in years, some of the most difficult things I’ve been through in my life.  I thought too much about the little boy and little girl who were painfully shy and lonely, the teenagers who dealt with death too early, the young adults who abused alcohol…. and we had pretty OK childhoods compared to many people.

It always amazes me that we, as humans, keep going in the face of all the crap that life hands us.  But we do, and we do, ad infinitum.  We keep going.  And we, Peter and I, have to deal with all our crap before we get these kids who will have had so much more unfair crap than we do.  Because they don’t need any more crap.  We will be a soft place to fall, a haven and a home where they are always loved.

When his mother died in 1961, all her property was sold (including a house), her bills paid and the residue put into trust for my father’s use.  This money was paid out in a monthly stipend to whoever was looking after my father at the time.  At the end of the six years, there was about $4000 left over.  More on that later.

But it could have been so much more.  Unbeknownst to my father at the time, a group of men in his small town – the doctor, a lawyer, a businessman and others – proposed that they administer the estate.  They asked to keep the house in trust, rent it out and give the proceeds to the estate, so my dad would still have it when he became an adult.  They also offered to make sure my father was well cared for, mentored and supported as he grew up without a family.  They were turned down.  My father found this out 40 years later, in a document within a huge pile of paper that comprised his wardship file that he requested from the province.

He lived with four different families over the six years.  One family had to give him up when their business burned and they simply couldn’t afford it anymore.  He clearly remembers being sat down and told this.  My father is still in contact with these foster parents, and they have given him so much over the years – a job when he was young, a place to visit when he went “home”, even immediate forgiveness of my father’s suspicion of them in a strange disappearance, only discovered many years later.  He stops in to see them every time he is in their area.  They are such wonderful loving people and I am so thankful for them.

He left another family when they told him he couldn’t store his canoe in their alleyway.  Yes, my dad went through a lot, but he wasn’t always the easiest kid to deal with, either.  He was stubborn and proud to a fault.  There were many places he could have stored his canoe within walking distance of this house, but it was the principle of the thing for him.

The fourth family was that of one of his best friends.  He shared a room with his friend Ray and Ray’s brother, and that was the home he left to go to college. I visited this small home for the first time five years ago, and can’t imagine how they fit three rowdy teenage boys in there.

The third family was the one that changed the course of his life in a way he didn’t even know about for many years.  L. was the foster parent that my dad does not talk about much.  Even before he figured out how she was taking advantage of him, he didn’t share about that family the way he did with the others with whom he lived for significant months.  But that’s a whole nother story…

Now I’m trying to figure out how to do well at this home visit.  I don’t want to have a perfectly tidy house, because that’s not us.  We have shoes at the door, books by the bed and grown-ups-only tools like razors and pill-splitters around.  If I put all that stuff away, wouldn’t that look suspicious?

On the other hand, is there anything to be gained by leaving a candle, scissors, a can of Dust-Off and four wood screws on my desk?  Because those are the potentially dangerous things that are within reach as I type this.  Just outside the door are dozens of PG13 to R-rated movies.  Mere steps away lives a bottle of bleach.

When you start investigating adoption, you hear horror stories of people who were disqualified because they had a small pond in their yard where a kid could drown, or they had one too many racy books on the shelf, placing their sexual proclivities in the spotlight.

Perhaps I’m over-thinking it.  My office is a regular office, and don’t lots of people own bleach, wood screws and racy books?  I think they will get us as we are.

One, the meeting was at 8:30 AM.  I am not a morning person.  At all.  I feel like my brain is wrapped in cotton and me no talk good at all before 10 or so.  Left to my own devices and scheduling, I am still in bed at 8:30 AM, and I need a good hour or more to really get going.  Granted, it’s probably good practice for parenthood to get up earlier, but I can pour cereal, make coffee and drive quite well during “warm-up”.  I just can’t think critically or express myself eloquently.  So I was nervous about sounding like a doofus.

Two, I was ready for a fight.  My husband has (is?) bipolar, and I was afraid that this would disqualify us from being adoptive parents.   That would be really really unfair, and I was prepared to get fierce about it if it came up.  I was mentally organizing notes from doctors and considering lawsuits.  There was a bit of a chip on my shoulder going in there.

But it went well.  We spoke to our social worker about our fears, our issues, our expectations and went through the forms that we filled out in our application.  In discussing these forms, we actually changed our answers on some of the questions.  I don’t think I sounded like a doofus, although I did have to sit and think about some answers for a bit.  It would appear we are less starry-eyed and more realistic about this than the average applicants.  We’ve had our struggles, but we gained useful experience by getting through them.  We were honest and real.

And at the end, she said the magic words that allowed me to exhale…. “I see no reason why this shouldn’t be able to go ahead.”

Next step, the home visit…

Now I’m beginning to have a bit of a dip in my optimism about it.  I worry that our medical issues will be questioned and that they won’t let us adopt.  I know that all our doctors have told us they will support our adoption, but I feel now like I won’t believe it until I see it.

We know that people with our medical conditions have children all the time.  But we also know that there is a large gap between circumstances where they will remove a child from a home and circumstances where they will allow an adoption.   I am not allowed to point and say, “Well, that family deals with the same medical issues we do, and you don’t take their kids away!”  It doesn’t work like that.  We have to be better.  I hope we are.