Personal Essay: Adoption Boot Camp
What our foster-care training program taught us about becoming parents.
by Dave Demerjian
July 10, 2009
By the time Halloween rolled around I was having serious doubts and dreading our final session, a panel discussion with five families who'd been through the process. Sure enough, they came bearing the horror stories I feared most: troubles at school, regression,
detachment, and my favorite — the ten-year-old twins with "toileting issues." But these parents also brought something to the DCF table that Karin and Rosemary's gloom and doom curriculum didn't: the joy of being parents. For every suspension from school or
unexplained freak out, we heard about a family vacation, a movie night or an afternoon making snow angels. These parents watched as ever so slowly, their kids begin to heal. One step forward, one step back — but then, eventually, another step forward.
It was enough to renew my faith in what we were doing, but it also made me wonder if people who adopt through the state do it because they have a bit of a savior complex. Why else proceed down such an uncertain path? Have Ethan and I confused becoming parents
with being superheroes? I don't think so, but I won't deny that loving a child who others have left behind somehow feels inherently right. And I also think a little part of me is determined to disprove the lessons of Karin and Rosemary's grueling pre-adoptive
boot camp. We will love our child so deeply that the trauma we've been told to expect will simply never present itself. We will laugh attachment disorder in the face and it will skulk away. It's a foolish notion, but it's there.
We're in the home stretch now. We've completed a forty-page questionnaire that covers everything from room sizes and role models to health issues and household income. Which family rules can never be broken? Will our families support us unconditionally?
What if the behavioral issues are just too tough to handle? Answering the questions with Ethan confirmed that we're not always on the same page (he thinks walking around the house naked is okay. Me? Not so much), and that made the exercise important.
Our social worker has turned the responses into the profile she'll use to find us a child. Now the waiting begins. "It will start to get frustrating if we're still looking in a year," she told us nonchalantly during our last visit. I nearly threw up in my
mouth. It feels like we've been pregnant for two years — I don't know if I can bear another.
It would be easy to dismiss this whole long, grueling process as government bureaucracy at its worst, and when I'm doing things like scheduling a pre-adoptive cholesterol test it sure feels that way. But in truth, the classes and stories and endless paperwork
have forced us to look at our impending parenthood from every angle: to examine our motivations and expectations, consider the risks and rewards, and think carefully about how our lives will change when baby finally arrives. Would we have done this so consciously
and methodically if it hadn't been mandatory?
It's been messy at times, but getting through it has convinced us — and the state — that this is where we're supposed to be. We're terrified, of course, but we're going in with eyes wide open. And that, we hope, can only make us better parents.
©2009 Dave Demerjian and Babble Media
About the Author
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Dave Demerjian's writing has appeared in Fast Company, Wired, Business Traveler, Nerve.com, and The Boston Globe, and Boston Magazine. He lives and works in Boston. |
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