Reality Writes

Last night was a big one! We went to Dopsh Cons (new nickname) to meet with Amy our social worker. She was super nice and answered every one of our newbie questions. She and her partner adopted through Adoption Connection so she's been in the exact same situation as us. My observation with social workers is that they have kind eyes and gentle voices.

First she outlined the process going forward. As a gay couple we'll face different but not necessarily harder challenges in the duration. One challenge might be if we are matched in a state with laws forbidding LGBT adoption. We might have to bring the birthmom to California to have the baby. I guess we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.

Next she did our first pair interview. The questions were about our relationship mostly. How we met, what we like and dislike about the other person, what we do for fun. It's a little strange getting interviewed about personal topics. It almost felt like therapy but the good news was, digging deep didn't wet the well with tears if you catch my drift.

Finally, she gave us our sizable stack of forms to fill out. Most of them are just signature required but some of them are more interesting. I'd say the two big ones are the personal REFERENCES and the personal PREFERENCES. Yes that's right. The references are to be 3 people who are not relatives filling out a questionnaire about if they think we'd be good parents. The preferences form is what situation we would be comfortable being matched with. You really have to do a lot of self examination with the latter form. We are faced with a multitude of factors that could result in any number of congenital defects or pre-natal substance exposure. But we only get this one life so we're throwing all caution to the wind, yo. We're just hoping the baby arrives healthy and happy.