Chapter 1
It has taken me years to be able to chronicle the events surrounding my children’s adoption. How can I truly capture the emotions? How do I share some of the sweetest, saddest, and truly the most horrifying events in my life? How can I paint the picture of sheer terror we lived through? My children have been the greatest gifts I have ever received – but I almost didn’t survive them.
Trying to capture the essence of what they have been to me is about as easy as trying to describe the rich beauty of a perfectly blended four part a capella harmony, or the majestic sunrise over the Smoky Mountains. I can hear the music and see the image in my mind. I can hear the voices ranging from the deep rumbling bass to the impossibly high soprano. I can feel the chords being sung, partly because I hum along trying to find my own note to make a fifth part of the harmony. I can see the sunrise breaking through the smoky ridge of the mountain side. I can picture sitting on the porch of the cabin I rented several years ago with a steaming cup of tea. The orange sun started creeping up. The water droplets refracting the sunbeams, shooting coral, pink and silver laced purple slivers through the sky.
Imagine that your one dream in life is to become a parent. I had never been able to decide what type of career I wanted – I still have a hard time settling down with one career for the rest of my adult life. There are simply too many different things out there to try, too many adventures to be had to settle for just one path. However, I always knew that I wanted to be a mom. My plan was to get married and start having babies right away. That wasn’t exactly the way things worked out. It turned out that pregnancy wasn’t an option for me. Fortunately, there were other options.
My husband, Alan, and I went through the rigorous process of the adoption agency home study. We were both police officers at the time, and I’m pretty sure that the background check for the adoption was more extensive and thorough than anything we went through with our department. It certainly took much longer! We were required to attend parenting classes, have our home inspected by the fire marshal, and make changes to locks, have an escape ladder, fire extinguishers, and updated fire alarms.
We spent close to five years being investigated, having our finances combed through, neighbors, friends, and family members interviewed, all while going through numerous adoption social workers. The adoption side of social work can be incredibly stressful. The ultimate goal is to attempt to reunite the children with their parents. The parents have to show that they are trying by going through whatever training the social workers deem necessary. It could be that one parent is violent so they have to attend anger management training. One or both of the parents could be drug addicts, requiring rehab.
Whatever the issue, the social workers from the Social Services side have to try to mend these families all while protecting the children. During the mending process, the children live in foster homes. Some of the foster homes can be just as bad as the birth home. During the time that we were going through our home study, there were stories in the news about a foster family who, for punishment, had tied the children to trees and left them outside in the cold for hours. It’s easy to understand how these situations could lead a social worker to feel burnt out. It started to feel like every time one of these stories came out another social worker left our adoption agency.
Each time one left the agency, we pretty much had to start over. It is not a process that flows easily. There were several times when I came close to giving up, thinking that parenthood quite possibly wasn’t in the cards for me. Then came the suggestion that we should become licensed as foster parents so that we would be able to bring home children who weren’t yet legally available for adoption. This would give us a better chance.
I have to admit, I was hesitant at first. The idea of bringing home a child, growing to love the child, and then having to return them was heartbreaking to me. Although, it was better than never having a child in our home. It was also a better solution than what we had been doing.
The agency had a website with all of the children who were available for adoption. The site had each of their biographies; the child’s age, their background, any emotional or behavioral issues. There was a day when Alan and I were looking through the site and it occurred to me that I had just ordered a sweater online and this felt pretty much like the same thing. We stopped looking at the site after that.
Then one night the call came.
“Hi, Paige, Alan, this is Barbara. I was speaking with my contact at DSS today. If you are available tomorrow, they would like to meet with you to discuss a possible placement.” I was writing down the information in Barbara’s message and getting very excited.
“Alan, this is great! We may actually get to bring home a little one soon!”
“Paige,” my husband sighed, “do not get yourself too excited. Every other child we have asked about has been unavailable or they have told us that there is some emotional or behavioral diagnosis that we are not equipped to handle.”
“I know, but we didn’t ask about this one,” I said. “They must think we can handle this one.” We had both just walked in the door from work. I still had on my uniform and was trying to kick off my boots and pull my hair down out of the tight bun I usually wore on patrol. The next day was a regularly scheduled day off for me and Alan would be able to meet me during his shift, if he wasn’t on a call. I called our social worker and set up an appointment for the next morning.
