Hellobee

You know that I couldn’t wait to spill the beans to my beloved hive about our match… but I hadn’t finished telling you all of the steps we took to get to this point.  There were still some hoops to jump through and some decisions to make.  Today I’m going to tell you about one of the more challenging steps we had to take, lest you think that adoption involves just thinking of the idea and then instantly matching!  In today’s installment, the real work begins!

After selecting an agency, we were ready to start our homestudy.  Many people start their homestudy prior to agency selection, but we noticed that different agencies have slightly different homestudy requirements, including different background questions, varying numbers of in home visits and inspection requirements.  We decided to make the process a little easier on ourselves by using the homestudy social workers provided by the main agency we planned to work with.

We called and set up our first appointment and downloaded the homestudy packet.  The packet included questions about basic demographic data, and then a more extensive family, health, childhood, financial, and spirituality questionnaire which we each had to fill out separately.  I’ll admit that we were kind of intimidated by the seeming invasiveness of the questions.  Suddenly it hit home that just as giving your body over to a fetus and going to the OB was physically invasive in a pregnancy, this paper pregnancy was going to be emotionally invasive in a way we hadn’t experienced before.

Mr. Jacks and I are fairly private people.  We don’t post pictures of our daughter on Facebook, and until now I’ve refrained from blogging (though I’d do anything to continue my association with the Bee Family!).  Adoption, which often sends people into a more private realm, has counter-intuitively helped open us as a family to a more public role.  I think the adoption questionnaire played no small part in that switch.  Let me give you a few examples of the types of questions, so you can get a feel for what I’m talking about.

Warm up questions included things like:

• Describe your personality, strengths and weaknesses. (If this one is easy, what about the hard ones!?)
• Describe your early childhood environment.  Describe some special experiences and memories. Describe some difficult experiences and memories.
• Describe your parents’ method of discipline.
• Describe your spouse, include strengths and weaknesses.

Then we got to the more difficult questions such as:

• Share any traumatic experiences you have had.
• Discuss the intimacy in your marriage. (Yup, they went there!)
• Discuss how infertility has impacted you.  Include discussion of any counseling you have received and discuss how you have coped.
• Describe any financial difficulties you may have encountered.  How did you respond to these difficulties?
• Discuss your religious affiliation.  Describe your service contributions to this organization.

Imagine this line of questioning going on for 45 questions, and you can see that just by filling the questionnaire out you are performing deep self-exploration.  But that is only the beginning!  After your questionnaires are completed and received, the homestudy social worker will come to your house and do an even deeper exploration of some of the things you have touched upon, and follow up on anything that may be deemed as concerning.  I personally was already nervous about the topic of the age difference between Mr. Jacks and I (11 years for those who don’t know… and not in the normal direction!).

Before the scheduled visit with our social worker, we obsessively cleaned our house and did some baby-proofing that we hadn’t yet done for Little Jacks (bad pediatrician!).  We agonized over what to wear and what snacks to serve while the social worker was here.  Somehow we hoped that our choices would scream out, “We ARE worthy”, all the while we were worried that the social worker would find us so quirky or different that we couldn’t possibly qualify to adopt a child.

Her visit couldn’t have possibly been more benign.  She stayed for a couple of hours, spending approximately an hour with each of us, and then taking a quick tour around the house.  She focused on some “get to know you questions” and then some follow-up from our questionnaires.  I pre-empted some of the more difficult questions that we anticipated, so that she knew we were being completely transparent and forthcoming– though we didn’t spend much time on these issues.  We were excited to show her around our house since we had worked so hard to ready it.  I wanted to show off all of our fire extinguishers and baby proofing and she just waved us off saying, “everything looks in order.”  A friend of mine (who has adopted) joked that they are really just looking to make sure that there aren’t whips and chains hanging from the living room ceiling or garbage in the hallway.  This is definitely closer to the truth than the white glove inspection we anticipated.

It took about 2 weeks to hear back. The social worker asked a few more follow up questions to fill in some of the blanks we didn’t get to in our conversations.  After that, we had to wait for our fingerprints to clear (can take up to 10 weeks) and for agency approval, and we’d hopefully be worthy!

The homestudy and approval process was actually the longest leg of our journey so far, taking 3.5 months.  The wait was absolutely agonizing, because we knew there was nothing we could do to speed up the bureaucracy. You can see why after going through all of this that we’ve been able to open up in a whole new way!

Has the journey to parenthood opened you up or challenged you in ways you didn’t expect?