And I may be leavin myself open...

There is an Old 97s song called Murder or a Heart Attack. Don't be put off by the song title, the lyrics are amazing. Particularly this part:

"And I may be leavin' myself open 

To a murder or a heart attack 

But I'm leavin' the back door open 

'Til you come back, 'til you come back 

And I may be movin' myself closer 

To a real untimely end 

But I'm leavin' the back door open 

'Til you come home again, 'til you come home again 

And I told 

The neighbors, I put pictures up 

And handed out some flyers at the show 

And the whole town speculating 

Situation could've been 

Avoided if I'd only shut the window"

The song is about love or a lost cat but I think that it applies to this adoption process as well. 

Brian and I have been plugging away at attending the classes that the CD division requires for adoption from Foster Care. In the classes, they talk about scenarios and ask how we will handle them. i.e You get a call from school that your child has crapped his pants and then smeared it all the hallway walls. How will you handle it? Or your 4 year old daughter calls her Grandmother a fucking bitch when she asks her to put on her shoes. What is the correct response? 

My opinion is that they are trying to give real but worse case scenarios to see if anyone will blink and say "Nope. I do not want to do this" but maybe I am just in denial. Friends, acquaintances and family members ask if we are sure that we want to get "into this kind of thing." They have all heard stories about the crap that goes down. I KNOW people that have tried to adopt from Foster Care and it has not been a positive experience. 

P is an incredible kid. We have a pretty damn good life. So what the hell are we doing?

How can I explain...my heart, my head, my soul wants to me to go down this path. I recognize the possible danger that could be ahead but I have chosen to do it anyway. It could be the worse decision I have ever made. However, it could be the best as well!

It started with a whisper

I was sitting in church and they flashed a picture of a little girl on the screen. The sermon was nothing about adoption but I looked at the girl and thought "she could be mine." The thought shocked me and so I pushed it out of my head. ssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh

P asked for a sibling for Christmas. AGAIN. And I thought why not?  Right away I told myself that our life is so perfect with one kid. Why screw it up? I mean, we got lucky. He is perfect. Ok, not really .....but perfect for us.  Be happy with what you have.

Months later, I was sitting at a trivia contest that was raising money to build a school in Uganda. The priest stated the staggering statistic that there are 2.5 million orphans in Uganda. I leaned over to B and told him that we were adopting from Uganda. He laughed.

The whisper was still there... it was in my head...in my heart...my thoughts.  I started researching how to adopt from Uganda. So needed. So expensive. So scary. So.... I do not know...not right exactly...

P asked frequently why no siblings. I did not have an answer for him because I was asking myself why we stopped at adopting one child. We had always planned on more than one child. We told ourselves that we were adopting again almost immediately after P's adoption finalized. 10 years later and we had not done it. I told myself that it was too late. The kids were going to be too far apart in age. I should just be content. Right?

I was in a session with a child in foster care. He was so smart, so resilient yet so torn up from being in and out of foster placements. At lunch, I started thinking about foster care and those kiddos that I see in my counseling job. They have my heart. Not a whisper, an ache.

I was walking somewhere and I saw the Missouri Heart Gallery. I looked at every kid. I wondered about all of them. I prayed for them to find peace and a family. Everywhere I turned there was a child in need of a home. A mention of Foster Care. Discussions about adoption. Not a whisper a buzz.

The thought of adoption from foster care just started nagging me...hello..hello...you can do this... I said something to B and he did not dismiss the idea. I looked it up online about a million times. I found myself printing an application. I filled it out. Shredded it. Filled it out again. I asked P about whether he was serious about wanting a sibling. I tried to talk him out of it fully aware that I was trying to talk myself out of it. Not a whisper, a knock.

I carried the application around with me. Not a whisper a ROAR. One night I asked B to sign it. He did so without any hesitancy. I mailed it the next day. A call from CD. Classes are starting next week. Shit. We will be there. 

Slap. WTH are we doing? It is 8am. On a Saturday! These classes are PIA. We are going to miss P's football and soccer games. We have done them before in Illinois. Just as quickly, the thought occurs to us that they are designed to be this way. If we cannot make a commitment to 12 weeks of classes, then who is to say that we can make a commitment to child...or two..Holy Crap,did we just say that we are open to a sibling group?

It is no longer a whisper. It is a fact. And I could not be more confident that it is another of my best decisions. Thank you God for whispering in my ear...