Daddy, Papa and Me

Time, process, experience, life have created a few differences.

The last adoption was a private adoption through an agency, this is a 'fost-adopt' process through the county. There are some huge differences, and striking similarities between the two and over the next few months I'll highlight them.

As a gay couple six years ago it seemed finding an adoption agency that would work with us was a bit more of a search. They weren't difficult to find, but they weren't 'a dime a dozen' (is anything anymore?) either. It feels this time that finding an agency for a domestic adoption isn't quite as much a search. Of course then we were living in Germany, so we had to narrow our subset of agencies that would work with gay men further by those that would be able to do homestudies and work with Americans living overseas. We found the one (and maybe at the time the only one) that did, in Pennsylvania. That subset might be larger now, three?

Since we live in the US now, we could have enlarged our search space. Yet this time we decided to go with a fost-adopt process with the county instead of a private adoption. In this process, instead of working with an private agency privately to find mothers who have decided to put their children up for adoption, we are working with the county to find children who had to be taken from their home for various reasons (there are a lot of pros and cons and praises and criticisms we'd have of both systems... but those will have to wait for another post). The child is a foster child in your home for several months and then adopted, that's the basics.

There are some huge differences right out the starting gate between the private adoption and the county fost-adopt.

Cost is the big one. The private adoption ended up costing us up towards 40,000 dollars (there was a failed one, there are no refunds). The fost-adopt costs... nothing. In fact there is a small stipend while the child is a foster child in your home and a smaller stipend after adoption and health insurance is provided till they are 18. The stipend isn't near enough to cover the cost of raising a child, but it is a bit of help. I hate the fact that money and adoption are so, so very, intertwined (don't get me started on lower costs for some children than others) . Sadly, it's a fact of life. And in the facts of our life, financial considerations do matter.

There are other considerations of course, more important ones. The are children that desperately need a home and we would love to have an older (2-5 year range, but we are open to older) child (most children in the fost-adopt program are older than two, most private domestic adoptions are children younger than two). So our needs and wants match. We have many friends who have adopted through the county in the fost-adopt program, Emma has many friends adopted this way. We know these adoptions work to make amazingly wonderful families (with some work).

There are some similarities. Fears. And though there are minor twists to the fears, they basically add up to the same.

Can we afford adding a child to our family? Living in San Francisco isn't cheap, housing, schooling, feeding. We feel stretched as it is. We were stretched then, we are really stretched now.

Will be disrupt our wonderfully blissful life? Then? It was blissful then, 6 years ago. We found our soulmates, I had a perfect job, we were living in a fairytale town (Heidelberg) in Germany and were traveling everywhere, we had a close community of friends life was blissful. We were about to disrupt that, would it all fall apart? Now? We live a blissful life now, we still have our soulmates, we have a wonderful daughter and a close friend (who started out as an au pair :), I have my own company, we live in a beautiful house in an amazingly stunning city, we have so many good and close friends and family. Will it disrupt that? Will it all fall apart?

Could we even come close to loving this child as much Emma? I never thought, we never thought, it possible to love another individual so completely, so instantaneously and without any condition as it was this child in our home. I guess those are similar fears then and now. I worried then about 'bonding' and worry now. Before I had no experience of that deep bonding you have with your child, and now that I do, I worry if it's possible again.

Will our children love each other? There is so much more to this. Emma is thriving, will this make it worse or better? I have to say, she has wanted a new sibling so badly for so long, this will be either a disappointment or the fulfillment of her dreams (or both :)).

Oh the fears go on. But even in what I wrote above the answer to those worries seem to be there. We've successfully navigated the worries and have built a wonderful life, we will do it again. We've planned and wanted a second child since the beginning, and now the journey begins.

We've completed our orientation, our intake interview and our training (20 hours over three weeks).

Now the paperwork. Now, there's a similarity. Mounds of paperwork involving every intimate detail of your life from your financial assets and debts to your relationships with your parents when you were a kid. Paperwork delving into every aspect of your life from your birth to your future plans. Nothing changed there. Had to do it 6 years ago, have to do it now.

The paperwork will be done soon, we are then on to the homestudy (4 months or so) and the matching (immediate to months and months).

And it begins...