I have wanted to be a mom my entire life. My family tells stories of me playing Mommy to any real baby I could get my hands on as soon as I started to walk. I always had at least one doll with me. I would make lists of names for my future children as soon as I could write. I started babysitting at age eleven and was in high demand every weekend through graduation. Becoming a mother – and a good one! – was my main goal in life.
Then I fell in love with a man who told me very early into our relationship that he didn’t want children. Ever. I was so young and smitten that I told him I was willing to sacrifice that dream for him. Truthfully, I was just certain he would change his mind. I mean, how could someone not want to be surrounded by cute little babies, I thought! We got married a year after we met and as the years ticked on I started to panic because he wasn’t changing his mind. After an accidental pregnancy and a miscarriage, I realized that he meant it. He really didn’t want a baby. He was sad because I was so heartbroken by the miscarriage, but he was relieved there would be no baby. I mourned the lost pregnancy and the possibility of any future babies hard.
Somewhere along the line (before the miscarriage even) he had mentioned that if he ever were to change his mind about becoming a parent, it would be to adopt an older child. He found babies repulsive (so needy, always crying and leaking gross fluids all the time), but felt a pull towards older children in need of parents. I continued to bring this up as a possibility (relentlessly, I admit!) over the years. Once I moved past the grief of losing my dream for a baby, I realized that I just wanted to be a mom. It’s all I had ever wanted. How I became a mom didn’t matter. I fell in love with becoming Mom to a child who was already out there, needing one. Finally, during the holiday season of 2008, just after our ninth wedding anniversary, my husband said he was on board with taking the next step in exploring the adoption process.
Florida does not have a foster to adopt program. The goal of fostering in our state is always reunification. Because our goal was adding a child to our family permanently, we didn’t feel fostering was the route for us to go. We chose to pursue approval for straight adoption from the foster care system. This meant we could only be considered for children who were already legally free for adoption. The same training class, MAPP (Model Approach to Partnership in Parenting) is required for both fostering and adopting. We started our training in May, 2009. We spent six full Saturdays in training. There were four couples in our class, including us. Three of us were going the straight adoption route and one wanted to foster. The class had started out more than double this size, but shrank to use the four couples after a few sessions. Though we all completed the training, only one other couple (straight adoption) ended up being licensed and they have not found a match yet. The classes were emotionally exhausting and very time consuming with lots of homework to be done before the next class. In addition to that, we had a long “to do” list of things to get done in preparation for our home study (background checks, health exams, purchasing items like a certified fire extinguisher, locking up all medicine and chemicals, getting fire and health inspections our home, etc.).
Our training was completed and home study approved at the end of July 2009. We started searching the photo listings and heart galleries and inquiring on children immediately. We spent hours every day searching and making contacts. We heard back on very few of the children we inquired about. It was an exhausting, overwhelming and frustrating process. We were considered at match staffing as possible parents for several different children. Each time someone else was picked it was devastating. When you know there are thousands of children waiting for a loving home and your loving home is approved to adopt, each day that you wait for your child is maddening!
We finally found out we were matched with a little girl in Texas who had just turned 9 in December of 2009. We had inquired about her in October and were actually chosen right before Thanksgiving, but due to the holidays and sick case workers they forgot to tell us for three weeks! This little girl had been in foster care for five years, after dealing with neglect, abuse, poverty, parental drug/alcohol abuse and domestic violence during her first four years. She had an alphabet soup mixture of diagnosis’s, was in a psychiatric hospital at the time we were matched and was on anti-psychotic medication after becoming physically aggressive with her last foster mother. When we heard her story, so much of it just seemed so situational that we weren’t scared of. We decided to proceed. Texas mailed us her file and we spent a whole day camped out in our case workers office reading it. Then we gave our official “yes” and the process of being placed with our daughter began! We were told to expect four weeks for ICPC (process required to move a child from one state to another). That seemed like an eternity, since her region of Texas doesn’t allow contact between the child and prospective parents until placement is about to occur. It actually took over four MONTHS. Then it was so close to the end of the school year that we waited a few more weeks. We FINALLY were able to fly to Texas and meet her in May of 2010. We had not even been allowed to speak to her on the phone prior to this. We met her at lunchtime on a Monday and she was ours forever that Friday!
We arrived home together in Florida exactly six months to the day of being chosen to be her parents. She seemed very over medicated, sleeping for sixteen hours or most days. We started working with her new pediatrician right away to get her off all medications. We wanted to get a baseline for her behavior and issues, so we could see what was really necessary. We started therapy, but there are no attachment therapists or therapists trained in trauma in our area. We tried therapists from two different organizations, but found traditional therapy to cause more harm in her settling in and attaching to us than helpful. Our instincts that the severity of her behaviors was largely situational turned out to be correct. We deal with the typical behaviors children with trauma histories show, including tantrums, separation anxiety, defiance, arguing, lying and hyperactivity, but on a milder scale than we she’s exhibited in prior placements. Since there are no attachment/trauma specialists in our area, we are doing that work ourselves. We try to use a very therapeutic parenting style and do attachment activities together. She has made amazing progress and is really starting to open up to us about her past and her feelings. We love her and she loves us back.
She has been home for almost a year now. We finalized the adoption in November of 2010, one week after her 10th birthday and one year and five days after we were chosen to be her parents. It has been a hard year. Parenting a child with a traumatic background is harder than we ever imagined. No amount of training, reading or research can prepare you for the reality of living it day in and out. My husband is a certified elementary teacher who has been a full time substitute teacher for the last few years. He deals with challenging behavior for a living. I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in early childhood education with emphasis in infant/toddler development and special needs. My job is to provide parent training and family stability services. None of that prepared us for how exhausting and challenging parenting a child from foster care is! I remind myself all the time, “They call older child adoption special needs adoption for a reason!” I have never regretted bringing her into my heart and home, no matter how overwhelmed, frustrated, scared or exhausted I get. She is my daughter and I will do whatever it takes to help her continue healing. We are fortunate that despite fighting it at times, she truly wants to heal, too.