I should definitely be cleaning right now. In less than two hours a woman will be coming to judge my home (very literally) and I’m sure I should go take the clean laundry out of the dryer and get it put away in case she needed to look in the dryer for some reason. But instead I wanted to take a minute to document what it feels like during those moments before a homestudy.
It’s stressful. Super stressful.
We have done countless homestudies over the last 16 years when we first started the international adoption process. I actually don’t know how many we’ve participated in, but I think conservatively it’s been about a dozen. The impending adoption of our littlest foster daughter means we’re getting ready to do what should be our last homestudy and it’s a closing of a chapter I gladly welcome. An international adoption, plus 13 years as foster parents means we have been examined in every way possible. We’ve joked that by this point we should be able to show up at the police department and just show them our hands and they should be able to identify our fingerprints on sight. But they don’t. So every two years we make the trek to get fingerprinted again and again. When we started this process they used actual ink and now it’s just digital. We’ve been homestudied enough times that we can watch how tech is changing the process. We are old and this is getting old.
As a mother, can I tell you what my biggest fear would be? Someone coming to my house with license to poke around however they want. They have to document whatever they find and point out any areas where I’m failing. Then they’d talk to my kids to ask them what they think of my parenting, our family, my marriage, our extended family and our community, etc. Whatever my kids say (WHATEVER THEY SAY) would get documented and go into an official record that would get disturbed to OUR STATE GOVERNMENT and then handed to a judge who can decide if we are fit enough parents to be able to keep the child in our home that has only ever known us as her parents.
This is the waking nightmare that is the adoption homestudy process.
We’ve filled out information about our childhoods, our marital woes, our relationships with our siblings and parents. We have to get our doctor to sign off on our fitness to parent and they need to include certain test results from a physical we now need to participate in. They have our social security numbers, marriage licenses and birth certificates. The pile of documentation is incredible. And all this info goes to OUR STATE GOVERNMENT.
As we were talking about what would happen today my high schooler was pushing back on why he needed to be interviewed. He has track practice he doesn’t want to miss. He loves his baby sister and doesn’t understand why he needs to defend that to someone. Could we do this via FaceTime? Couldn’t she just trust that we’ve done this enough times that we know what we’re doing? Couldn’t any one of the hundreds of people we’ve known in the foster care world vouch for our family? Why should we have to do this again?
I told him that if the licensing lady didn’t do her job, I would personally file a complaint. I know we’re safe. I know we love this baby. But I know how vitally important it is that all this gets verified. I want a system where we know kids who have experienced trauma are not going to be more traumatized by growing up in abusive or neglectful adoptive homes. I want adoptive parents to have training. I want their kids to have a voice about if this is what they want for their family. I want this process to be thorough as much as I hate how thorough this process is.
I don’t want to clean my baseboards again. I don’t want to stress about what bizarre thing my 8-year-old will say. But I will do absolutely anything to be able to be this baby girl’s mom forever. I am happy for the world to know how much we want to be her family and that we will keep her safe. She will be loved and cherished in our family, just like the rest of our kids. On the day they declare her to be legally my daughter, I want everyone in that courtroom to feel 100% certain that this is for her good.
So I will wrap this up and go make sure the table isn’t sticky and any cleaning chemicals are safely stored away. I will once again beg my kids to be honest and not sarcastic or attempt to be funny in their answers. I will humble myself to this process out of love. She’s worth it.