by Julie and Kevin Caran
November 9, 2009
Opening Reading:
From There is No Me Without You by Melissa Faye Greene
Our chalice-lighting reading today is from the book There is No Me Without You, by Melissa Faye Green.
Dr. Rick Hodes is a white, Jewish, American medical director who has lived in Ethiopia for more than twenty years, serving the Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel. Hodes has five Ethiopian adopted sons and half a dozen foster sons.
Dr. Hodes recently had a family meeting. The boys had flopped over sofas and chairs in the living room and looked at him.
“Are we a real family?” he began.
“Yeah, Hodes, we’re a real family,” said Addisu Hodes, fifteen. Addisu wore his long hair in cornrows and favored satin soccer jerseys since he was a soccer star in high school.
“Are we a happy family?” asked Hodes.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re a happy family,” said Mohammed.
“Do we have any family problems?” asked Hodes.
“Well, all right, yeah, there are some problems,” the boys agreed.
“Okay,” said Hodes. “What’s our worst problem?”
The boys conferred briefly among themselves, after which Dejene removed his music earphones and announced, “Farts.” (373)
An Adoption Journey
Julie:
A couple of years ago when we were fairly early in our adoption journey, Bernie invited us to present a service on adoption. I suggested that she get back to us the following year, after the adoption had gone through. [Insert laughter.] When we started the process in August 2006, we were told that people like us, who were open to children of any race or sex and comfortable with mild disabilities, would likely be matched with an infant in less than a year. When Bernie mentioned the service topic again in early 2008, I suggested that we wait until November, since it is National Adoption Month – and because surely we would have a baby by then [insert laughter] and would have the perspective of people who had been through the adoption process from start to finish. Although we have had quite a journey so far, we are a long way from the finish line. Throughout the process, we have kept in mind the very UU notion to appreciate the journey, not just the destination.
Kevin:
In today’s service, we will attempt to offer a brief overview of our adoption journey and the infant adoption process in general. We should provide the disclaimer that our story does not reflect every adoptive family’s experience, and that people adopting through foster care or adopting older children – and even people who are adopting domestically or internationally through the same agencies as us – might all have completely different journeys. We will answer some common questions, introduce you to some adoption lingo, and share with you a little bit about our own adoption process and the spiritual journey that has accompanied it.
Julie:
The first and most obvious question that people ask us is “Why do you want to adopt?” The short answer is “It’s a great way to start a family.” The longer answer is:
- Both of us always wanted to have kids one day;
- I have some health issues that might be complicated by pregnancy and had always planned to adopt; and
- We discussed all of this early in our relationship, and came to the decision together that we would try to pursue both adoption and having biological kids.
So how does one go about adopting? We started the process by looking into agencies in Virginia. Some friends had gone through [a Catholic agency] and had a great experience. We wondered if we had to be Catholic to adopt through this agency, but soon found out their motto: “We serve you not because you’re Catholic, but because we’re Catholic.”  Soon after learning about [this agency], we went to an orientation meeting at the Roanoke office and felt very comfortable with the agency. At the orientation meeting we had our first introduction to proper adoption terminology. We learned that – especially in front of children – it is important to say
-
- “Birthmother” and “birthfather” rather than “natural mother/father” or “real parents”[1]
- “Making an adoption plan” rather than “giving up” or “placing” a baby
- “Transracial” and “transcultural” adoption, which describe families in which people of one race or ethnicity adopt a child of another race or from another culture
- Open, Semi-open, and closed adoptions: open involves full contact with birthparents; semi-open generally includes contact with birthparents through the agency; closed means there is no contact between birthparents and adoptive parents
One of the most important concepts that we learned in this first meeting was that there is something called the “adoption triad.” The triad includes the birthparents, the adoptive parents, and the child.
Kevin:
The joy that comes with adoption is built on a foundation of losses in all three parts of the triad. Here is an image of the adoption triad: the triangle represents the common bond shared by all three parts of the triad.
Interactive activity………………………………Building Upon Loss in the Adoption Triad
Losses for:
birthparents
adopted child
adoptive parents
Gains for:
birthparents
adopted child
adoptive parents
While these examples of losses and gains are specific to the adoption process, building upon loss is of course not unique to adoption, but is something that we all go through in life on a regular basis. Please join us in singing Hymn 17, which speaks to intertwining joy and sorrow in our lives, and then Julie and I will continue with our story.
Hymn 17 – Every Night and Every Morn
Julie:
Our adoption process began with the knowledge of these gains and losses, joys and sorrows. After our orientation meeting, we began the adoption process by completing an initial application and paying a small fee. Even in this early step, we had to make major decisions. We had to indicate whether we were comfortable accepting a child with disabilities or a child who had been drug- or alcohol-exposed. We had to specify the age range that we would accept. We had to check boxes next to a list of races we would be comfortable accepting. Both of us were looking forward to the experience of parenting an infant, so for age we chose <12 months. We would consider disabilities on a case by case basis. We were open to twins or sibling pairs if the oldest child was under two years of age. We were comfortable with any race and thought our families would be accepting of the baby regardless of race.
However, there was no “Any Race” box for us to check.  We learned that waiting families would be placed in EITHER the white list OR the biracial and African American lists, but could not join all three. In the adoption world, “biracial” refers to a child who is African American plus anything else, and Latin and Asian babies end up on the white list. In general, agencies have a harder time finding families who will accept African American and biracial babies, so the wait time for these children is often shorter and fees are subsidized.  Maybe we are idealistic to think that each individual has inherent worth and dignity, but I was surprised and disappointed to discover blatant ranking of value by race across agencies and adoptive families. It seemed like all the more reason for Kevin and me to join the African American and biracial lists.
As soon as we submitted the initial application, we began imagining our child – not only thinking of the range of possible skin colors and hair textures, and the mystery of our future child’s personality, but also of the experiences we would share together as a family. “By this time next year, we’ll have a baby!” we said to each other often. “Do you think he’s already been conceived?” “What if she has already been born and is out there waiting for us?” In the beginning, I had the sense that “our baby,” the one that was destined to be ours, was out there somewhere in the cosmos and just had to find his or her way to us. At the orientation, and then at adoption training sessions, we heard over and over again that no matter how long the wait, when you get your baby, you know this is “the one.”
Kevin:
We tried to keep our family members informed during each step of the process.  This was important because our child would become not just our son or daughter, but also a grandchild, a great-grandchild, a cousin, and a niece or nephew. We wanted our family to be as excited as we were about our future child. We were happy to find that many of our family members were excited about the adoption from the beginning, and adapted very quickly to the idea of a black or biracial infant joining our family.  Even family members who weren’t totally comfortable with the idea of adoption have tried to be supportive. We are hopeful that once everyone meets our son or daughter, they, too, will share in our joy. We are grateful not only to our family but also to our many friends who have been extremely encouraging and invaluable throughout this journey.
The first major step in the domestic or international adoption process is the home study. It involves filling out forms, having interviews with a case worker, and providing lots of notarized official documents, including medical histories, financial records, background checks, and letters of recommendation. In our first interview with our case worker, we learned that once we finished the home study, we could get a call at anytime for a baby. He told us that he might call us on a Tuesday and say “Be here on Friday to pick up your child.” However, he also advised us not to decorate the nursery, buy baby supplies, or start getting excited, because the wait would be the hardest part. “Trust me,” he’d say “when you get that call, you’ll pull everything you need together in 48 hours.”
For the home study we also had to write lengthy individual “autobiographies,” and prepare a scrapbook. Our scrapbook and the scrapbooks of two other prospective adoptive families would be presented to each set of parents considering an adoption plan for their baby. The scrapbook included photos of all aspects of our lives, as well as “Dear Birthparent” letters.
We completed all of our home study paperwork by November of 2006 but due to our first case worker retiring in December, the homestudy process was extended for several additional months.
In late February, we headed down to Roanoke for our first interview with our new caseworker. We allowed ourselves an extra hour of travel time, but got stuck in an endless traffic jam on I-81. We tried backroads and sideroads and finally made it to Roanoke just under the wire. In our meeting that day, we were informed that, once our home study was complete, we could expect to wait a minimum of one year for a baby.  This news caught us more than a little off guard. We had already begun preparing our home, our lives, and our thoughts little by little for the baby. Suddenly we were faced with the fact that we might not have a baby that semester – or that summer – or even by the end of the year.
On our way home from the interview, traffic was even worse. We tried to take 11 North but that road was even more backed up than 81. We ended up having to go south to find a road that would eventually take us north. We made it partway up the Blue Ridge Parkway and discovered that the parkway was closed due to ice. We turned back yet again and made our way through a series of southern, eastern, then northern and finally western rural roads to get home. Sometime during the trip, as we sat in traffic and tried to wrap our minds around the coming months and year without a child, we realized that the day’s experience was a metaphor for our adoption journey. What normally took four hours round trip took about eight and a half hours of travel time. The adoption journey we had expected to take no more than twelve months now loomed ahead of us, stretching into the future.
Julie:
In early March 2007, our new case worker came to our house for the official home visit. It was a strange experience. Our house had never been cleaner and as we toured through each room it felt like we were realtors speaking to a prospective buyer. We passed the inspection and finalized our home study. Finally we were officially on the waiting lists!
Despite the warning of the long wait, we received our first call about a potential situation that month. We were considered, but in the end the mother decided to parent. We didn’t receive another call until October, when we began hearing about one situation after another for the following month. Our new case worker approached matching with a very different methodology than our first case worker, who had planned to call us only when a birthparent had chosen us. Instead, she emailed us about any possibility that seemed to be a close enough match. The potential birthmothers had all sorts of requests – a family that hikes, a family that is mainstream protestant, a family that already has an adopted child, a family in which one of the adoptive parents was also an adoptee, a family with at least one African American parent, a family that is fundamentalist Christian, a family willing to accept twins, a family with a stay-at-home mom . . . the list of requests went on. Many, but not all of these requests clearly ruled us out.
With each potential baby or set of twins, we had to decide whether we should be considered for each situation, and, once we said “yes,” be prepared to drop everything in our lives and pick up the baby in the next few days. Each prospect was exciting but also overwhelming. In addition to the logistical preparation, we had to prepare ourselves to be parents to this particular baby. Each scenario presented different questions: What did we need to know to be good parents to a baby with developmental delays? How will we handle people’s comments about our son’s missing fingers?  What challenges will this child face when she is an African American teenager with white parents? Will this baby make it out of the ICU? In most situations we sat on pins and needles over a weekend, week, or even a month, waiting to hear if we had been picked. Sometimes the agency forgot to call us after the birthmother made her decision. Many of the times the mothers decided to parent. Other times other families were chosen.
The case workers expected us to practice non-attachment: Don’t believe that this baby might be yours until the match goes through. Don’t get excited. Don’t get emotionally invested. Do be prepared to suddenly have a son or daughter and drop everything in your life, but don’t get attached until you’ve had the newborn for ten days and the birthparents’ right to change their mind has expired. Although we tried to remain calm and said over and over again “This might not work out,” there was always the clause of hope that followed – “But if it does…” Each time our hearts opened up to the particular child, and then felt the letdown and heartache of this not being the one. At times while we waited it felt like the whole universe was pointing signs toward us and that this baby or these twins were destined to be ours.
After the first five or six possibilities fell through, a realization began to sink in: there was no one baby that was meant for us. This was completely random. The universe was all chaos and coincidence. “Our” child was not out there waiting for us. A day would come when we would be picked, and when we held that child in our arms, he or she would become our child. Between now and then, we had no child – here or in some ethereal realm.
As most of you know, I’m theologically a Unitarian and actually believe in God. I believe in something that is greater than all of us and that connects all of us on a spiritual level. This god is sort of the abstract element of the interdependent web of all creation: it is the strands of life and love that tie us all together. But I have simultaneous and contradictory perspectives on God that coexist happily in my mind. I don’t know whether any of my theologies are “The Truth,” but I make the conscious choice to believe in them because they are meaningful to me and give meaning to my life. So I’m also a UU who prays to a personal, less abstract God.
From the beginning of the adoption process, I prayed often that we would end up with the baby that most needed us, and that the parents considering adoption would make wise decisions. I prayed for best case scenarios. I prayed that they would choose the family that is right for their baby. I once (and probably only once) begged that we might be that family. I became a little more desperate as each possibility fell through. I tried praying to ancestors and to my grandfather who had recently passed away. Surely he could work some magic to bring us together with our baby. I prayed to friends who had passed on and might still feel connected to the living: show us a sign. I saw butterflies everywhere and often in pairs when we were being considered for twins. Was this a sign from the universe? With each failed situation, though, my heart ached and I was mad at myself for believing that this might have been the one. For the first time in my life I considered that I might be an atheist; it seemed impossible that any higher power or even an interdependent web could be involved in any part of our lives. There was nothing mystical or logical about this process.
Kevin:
While I, at times in this process, toyed with the notion that there was one child out there that was “meant for us,” I don’t think I ever fully embraced this idea. Like I suspect it is for many of you, it is so easy for me to fall in love with a child and feel a connection that I know that when we are matched with a child he or she will be the right child.
While I don’t regularly talk about or put labels on my spiritual philosophy, I think the term that best describes me is agnostic, in that only material phenomena are objects of exact knowledge. I believe there is one truth out there, and whether that means that there is something beyond the world that we can see or touch, or whether what we can see and touch is all there is, my experience thus far tells me that there is no way to know which is true.
Nonetheless, I do enjoy musing about the possibilities. A metaphor that I sometimes call upon to visualize the feeling of connectedness between people is based on an idea that Julie devised and shared with me several years ago. The whole of humanity can be thought of as a cloud, composed of countless water molecules intermingling and coexisting. Whenever a person is born, it is akin to a collection of molecules condensing to form a raindrop. When a person dies, the drop of water reenters the cloud – the molecules from that drop no longer stick together, but spread out and again intermingle with all of the other molecules. Thus we are all connected to each other in a way that is best summed up in the definition of the Hindu word namaste: that which is divine in me recognizes that which is divine in you.
With this in mind, I know that when we meet our son or daughter, we will have no trouble forming strong connections.
We also had to think about less interesting but equally important issues, like “Do we have enough money in our savings account to pay for the adoption, diapers and formula, and to cover the loss of Julie’s income during her unpaid leave[2] for the next 6 to 12 weeks?” In some situations, the costs were just too high and we had to say that we could not be considered. Although our agency has established rates, many of the situations were coming from other agencies that did not have families on their lists who would be a good match for the adoptive child. The fees for these external agencies ranged from the same rate as our agency to 20% of the adoptive family’s income, to much more. We tried to be considered for as many situations as possible, but after sixteen failed possibilities in eighteen months, this process was getting more and more difficult.
Julie:
When our case worker came to our house in March 2008 to renew our home study, she surprised us by suggesting that we look into international adoption. There had been a dry spell at our agency, it seemed. Even though we were at the top of one list and in the top three of another, we were faced with the continuous prospect of knowing that we could be matched next week or two years from now. There was no way to gauge how long it could take.
Our case worker told us that another family she had worked with had adopted from Ethiopia through Children’s Home Society (CHS) and had an amazing experience. They brought their daughters home six months after they started the process. They had been completely impressed by nurses, doctors, and caregivers on staff at the Care Center where children live as they wait to be adopted. They even received a DVD of their children’s time in the care center – a priceless item when the children have questions about where they came from, and the life they knew before adoption.
When we began the adoption process, we had ruled out international adoption because it seemed to be far beyond our financial means. Over two years, though, we had found that domestic adoption could be equally unaffordable. Nonetheless, we had been saving as much as possible, and realized that we were now in a position where we might actually be able to afford adopting from Ethiopia.
We spent a little over a month researching and considering whether Ethiopia was right for us. We meditated and tried to calm all the spinning thoughts about the transition. I wondered if it white westerners pulling children out of their homeland and culture was a good idea, or if it was a consumerist, neo-colonial way to make a family. And another question loomed: If we stayed with domestic adoption, would we have a baby sooner, or would it continue to be torturous with one failed situation after another?
Kevin:
We researched international agencies, and found that Children’s Home Society not only provided an incredibly organized path to international adoption, but also provided education and humanitarian aid around the world. In Ethiopia the agency has built nursing and medical schools, as well as care centers for orphans and schools for children. They work with the local Ethiopians to build and run these organizations, and their investment in the local community’s welfare is clear.
The more we learned, the more adopting from Ethiopia appealed to us. While the domestic decision was narrowly about our family, this decision seemed more expansive. Our sense of adventure was ignited by the thought of traveling to Africa and learning about a country and culture that, until now, had been completely foreign to us.
We made the decision in late April to apply for international adoption through Children’s Home Society, but to stay on the domestic list until our dossier was approved.
Julie:
As soon as we made the shift from domestic to international adoption it felt like we had moved out of a never-ending traffic jam and onto a superhighway. Instead of edging along with one foot on the brake, we had found our lane and it was open. This summer we gathered all of the new paperwork for our international home study and spent many a lunch break at the credit union getting documents notarized. Our case worker at the domestic agency reworked our original home study to address international adoption. Close friends of ours offered an unexpected monetary gift to help defray the costs. The universe was in alignment; everything was coming together.
We were invited to meet other adoptive families and Ethiopian officials at the Ethiopian Embassy in DC in June. This visit confirmed for us that the Ethiopian government is supportive of Americans adopting orphaned children. The government officials work closely with our agency and want to see these children going to families who can provide good lives for them. I began reading about Ethiopia and felt good about our decision. I learned that, “[i]n 2005, Ethiopia had … 4,414,000 orphans.  Out of all these children, [only] 1,400 departed for new families abroad that year” (Greene 268).
Kevin:
We turned in our dossier and officially joined the waiting list for Ethiopia on September 22, 2008. Â As part of the international training process, we found that now instead of practicing non-attachment we would need to learn about attachment parenting; this includes things like Julie and I being the only ones holding, feeding, and changing the baby for the first few months, until the baby understands that we are mom and dad, and that he or she can trust and depend on us.
Julie:
International adoption has opened a new door and a new journey for us. Rather than thinking “We have another year to wait,” I’m thinking “I only have a year to learn as much as possible about Ethiopia and prepare myself to be a good parent to this baby!” I feel my horizon expanding as I learn about Ethiopian culture, history, and art. In addition, we are connected to a network of other families adopting from Ethiopia who share their stories and support one another throughout the process and continue to do so after the adoptions are finalized. I’m integrating Ethiopian art into my pottery and our home. I am participating in a quilt square swap with 12 other women who are waiting for babies from Ethiopia. I once again feel like we’re part of something bigger – like there’s something greater than us that binds us all together. Our eventual child, Kevin and I are members of the interconnected web of all creation, and soon we’ll find each other in this chaotic universe.  Lately I’ve been feeling optimistic again, and thinking that we went through all of this for a reason, and that maybe each step in our journey so far has been preparation for what we will need as parents: love even when there is heartache, hope even when there is disappointment, and above all, patience.
[1] Throughout the service, we will often refer to the “birthmother” rather than the “birthparents.” In the majority of adoption situations, the father is out of the picture; this is a major reason that women feel forced to make an adoption plan for their child or children. The economic stress of single parenting is too much for the birthmother and she wants her child to have opportunities in life that she cannot provide.
[2] Adoptive parents who are state employees are not eligible for the maternity leave that biological mothers receive as paid “disability leave” after giving birth. Men are not eligible for paid paternity leave, but may also take unpaid FMLA leave. Faculty (men or women) may arrange for peer coverage depending on their department.