Adoption Corner: My Adoption Story - by Holly Wagg (Fall 2010)

ADOPTION CORNER: MY ADOPTION STORY

Prepared by Holly Wagg
Fall 2010

LGBTQ Adoptive Parents Group (http://www.lgbtqadoptionottawa.blogspot.com/) Parent Liaison for the Adoption Council of Canada (ACC) (www.adoption.ca)

Adoption was always a part of our family plan. In 2006, the future vision of our family looked something like this: two moms adopt a boy between the ages of 5 and 9, and then one gives birth to a baby a few years later.

In fact, we unexpectedly changed our ideal and eventually adopted our daughter and son at the respective ages of 11 and 9 in 2007 from the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa.

How it Started

In September 2005, exactly one week after our wedding, we went to an adoption information session at the Children’s Aid Society. We’d heard that only a small number of children become available for adoption each year in our city and that it would take us three to four years to be placed with a child. We were eager to have our names added to the list so that a child might become available to us when we would eventually be ready to parent.

We approached the worker after the session and laid out our ideal adoption scenario. Older child. Special needs were okay. Behavioural issues were also okay. She told us that we could likely be matched with a child and placed before Christmas, a mere four months away. This was much quicker than we’d expected and we were not ready. We temporarily shelved our adoption plans.
Finding AdoptOntario The following spring, my biological clock began to tick furiously and I once again hopped on the family-planning train. This time, my partner and I had a series of long, serious conversations about adoption. I read book after book about adopted children and the issues we could anticipate as adoptive parents. I found little published about public adoption and the adoption of older children. I turned to the internet to locate blogs and I read the ones I liked from beginning to end. It was during my online travels that I stumbled upon an adoption website that actually allowed you to view children and read profiles of those waiting to be placed. AdoptOntario was a last resort for many of these kids because they were hard to place and efforts in their own communities hadn’t been successful. I found myself celebrating for a child when his or her profile was taken down and saddened when more children were placed for adoption. One day “Rachel” and “Brad” appeared. While we hadn’t ever thought of adopting siblings, and they were outside our original age range, there was something that we both found compelling about the kids. Call it a gut feeling. Call it intuition. Call it mother’s instinct. I knew we had found our children. In that moment of finding “Rachel” and “Brad”, our lives changed. The life we had envisioned changed instantaneously from one young adopted child to two older children.

Making the Call

We expressed our interest in adopting “Rachel” and “Brad” through AdoptOntario, knowing that children featured on the website could be living anywhere in the province. We were mailed a huge package of forms to complete. The paperwork was challenging; it forced us to ask hard questions about ourselves that revealed some not-so-great things we had to come to terms with. Why would we be willing to adopt a child who was HIV-positive or deaf, but not a child who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome or who was blind? Why did we not want a child affected by global delays or of significantly impacted intelligence? In choosing adoption, we encountered ugly truths that we needed to reconcile within ourselves. Unlike biological parents, we did have a choice in the basic makeup of our children. We got to pick and choose from a checklist of traits and issues that would be used to help match our family with the children.

Coincidence #1

Shortly thereafter, we received a call from AdoptOntario to pass along the name and contact information of the children’s adoption social worker. We had passed our first test. This was also the first coincidence that indicated to us that the universe wanted us to parent these two children. From anywhere in the province, we had chosen kids living right in our own backyard. “Rachel” and “Brad” were living in Ottawa.

Coincidence #2

In the two weeks before the meeting with the social worker took place, we cautiously spoke about the adoption with acquaintances who were current and former foster or adoptive parents. We spoke in hypothetical terms. It was during one of these conversations that the second coincidence was revealed. It only served to further solidify my belief that these were our children. My partner was speaking with a colleague who also happened to be a foster parent and shared that we were looking at a child-specific adoption. Her colleague asked for more information on the kids. My partner, Jules, began to recall details from their profiles and her colleague began to probe for more information. The colleague seemed to know as much about these kids as we did. That’s because the colleague who sat one cubicle over was the foster parent to the kids we were interested in adopting.

Since we knew the foster parents, we also quickly came to know the children’s real names: Robin and Brandin.

Child-Specific Match

It wasn’t until we had completed Parent Resources for Information, Development and Education (PRIDE) and our home study that we actually moved forward in the adoption process. Robin and Brandin hadn’t been matched during this time and we proceeded as a child-specific match.

Given that the children were older, we strongly felt that they needed to have some input into who would eventually make up their forever family. We recognized that not only were we asking them to accept being adopted, we were also asking them to say yes to being adopted by two Moms. They had never met any gay people before, and we knew from their social worker that when they spoke of family, they envisioned having both a mother and father. Not so much because they couldn’t imagine having two Moms, but because they had never been asked to consider it.

Becoming a Family

We met Robin and Brandin twice before they knew we wanted to adopt them. It was on the third meeting that we asked.

Under the ruse of the foster family needing child care for the afternoon, Robin and Brandin were dropped off at our house. Just like our social worker had told us, we explored the neighbourhood, played at the park and had lunch at our kitchen table. We were incredibly nervous as we weren’t sure that this would be the day to tell them. We had repeatedly practiced exactly what we would say. We just didn’t know when we were going to say it.

It was because of Robin that the moment presented itself. She was sitting in the living room and said, “I wish you two could be my Mom and Dad. Um, well, my two Moms.”

My partner and I looked at each other. We then told the kids we had something to ask them. We let them know that we wanted to become parents and that we would like it if they were to become our kids. We were so anxious when we finally asked, “Would you like to join our family?”

The kids shouted, “Yes!!!” and quickly followed this by asking which bedrooms would be theirs. They spent the rest of the afternoon with us, asking lots of questions and imagining what their lives would now become.

Leading Up to Gotcha Day

While the usual rule of thumb for transitioning is one week per age of the child, 11 weeks would have been way too long for the kids, the foster family, and us. After a five-week transition, Robin and Brandin moved in with us on February 5, 2007.

That morning, we picked the kids up from their foster family’s home. It was a joyful and heart-wrenching day full of emotional conflict. The kids were happy to have a forever family, but even then, they weren’t sure forever was a sure thing. It was heartbreaking to see them cry as they left their foster parents and siblings of 2.5 years to move into the home of parents they’d known for mere months. They were excited to move into their new rooms – the first time they’d had a bedroom of their own – that we decorated together with paint colours and furniture they had picked out. They were scared because in two days they were going to start at a new school. We were thrilled that we were finally moving towards the adoption that we had dreamed about for years, but we couldn’t be over-joyous because it was such a hard day for our kids.

We called February 5 our Gotcha Day and we celebrated it quietly as a new family with a giant chocolate chip cookie and ice cream.

Transitioning to Parenthood

On Sunday, we were a childless couple. On Monday, we became parents to two children at the same time. We became mothers to kids that we really knew nothing about experientially. What was Brandin’s favourite food? Did Robin ever have chicken pox? Why could Brandin not self-entertain? Did Robin really, for sure, believe that dragons were real? Why did no one tell us that neither of our kids could read? These are the things (among others) that you won’t find in the kids’ social histories.

Our kids came to our family with their own histories, voices and personalities. It was a huge learning curve for both of us – on becoming a parent and in building a parent-child relationship with a not-so-little person you knew so little about. I gave up my job and career and suffered from post-adoption depression during the first year.

The first two years with Robin and Brandin were hard for the entire family. Very hard. The parenting curve, the adoption issues, the endless advocacy at school, behavioural challenges, the shuttling from appointment to appointment to appointment, and finding the appropriate learning and social resources took a lot of energy from the family. Our families didn’t live close by and we didn’t have a solid network in place to support our new-found parenthood.

Parents with bio children in our kids’ school didn’t really understand our issues, and at our younger age, any parents we knew personally all had kids under the age of 5. Given our respective ages, and the close gap with our children, we were often judged or misjudged as being teen mothers or as bad parents when our kids acted out in public. It’s one thing to have a two-year-old have a temper tantrum in the supermarket and quite another when a nine-year-old does it. Especially when you have to get down on the floor and join him.

Once we found other adoptive parents who were dealing with the same regression, attachment, anger and behavioural issues, it became so much easier to deal with our kids’ acting out behaviour. The validation this network of people provided me, their insight and hope, made each day just a little easier. They answered my questions and absolved my guilt. For every two or three difficult moments with the kids, there was a counter moment that made the journey worth it. I began to live for the small victories. This connection became so vital for us that we started an adoption group for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer) parents in Ottawa.

Never once did we doubt that Robin and Brandin were our kids and that we had made the right decision. We always knew it was going to be hard and it would challenge us as human beings. We never anticipated that it would be as hard as it was, or how strong we were, both as individuals and as a couple. Robin and Brandin are our children and we are their parents. We chose our kids, just as much as they chose us. They often tell us that the best part of having two Moms is that they get double the love.

It’s been over three years and Robin and Brandin have settled in. We now only deal with the mundane (well, as mundane as motherhood can get) issues of being parents – slime on the bedroom ceiling and a refrigerator that constantly empties itself.

Robin recently graduated from grade eight and she was the MC for the ceremony. She also won an award for excellence in drama. Brandin also recently celebrated his grade six graduation. We’re happy to report that both children have cracked the reading code and they’ve become voracious readers.