30 days and …?

Okay, so we’re not at 30 days yet since we sent out our file to Mychael’s worker, but today is 4 weeks by the calendar and there’s still not a word. Lee and I talked about this on the drive home from Chicago yesterday (after many interesting — occasionally unexpected, though more on that later — conversations with each other over the course of our trips) and I think we’re both in the same place about this. I’m not feeling the same level of excitement/nervousness/anticipation I was when we were waiting for his preliminary information. And all we really got then was a list of his diagnoses plus some basic information about his family and how many times he’s been moved while in care. Instead I’m just waiting and figuring we’ll find out in the nt week or so maybe and that there’s nothing we can do anyway until we know more.

But what’s frustrating is that as I understand it we’re supposed to be the top priority in adoption decisions. We’re a licensed in-state family with an active homestudy and openings in our home now. I believe we get priority over out-of-state families making requests, but I don’t know whether that means out-of-state families get just a cursory review before they’re refused within 30 days and we get more or what’s going on. We just don’t know.

And however you want to mark the 30 days, whether we’re waiting until next Monday to start pushing again or not, 30 days is a long time in the life of a child. 30 days (again, my understanding of things) means his caseworker will have gone out to see him one more time, will have written up updates on how he’s doing. His foster family will have had to fill out paperwork and get reimbursement for him again.

I think the wait is getting to Lee more than I’d realized. She told me the other night that she’s been praying for a sign, that if we’re “meant” to adopt, Mychael will work out for us. At the time, as we were falling asleep and she didn’t want to talk about this anymore, I got panicky because it sounded like she was saying if Mychael didn’t work she was over this. But she meant that we’ve put in a year and at this point she’s not really willing to put in more than another year at most, maybe less. She doesn’t want to be a first-time parent at 50 and while she still has a few years to get there, I can see why being older makes her feel she wants closure now rather than later.

So she doesn’t mean that Mychael is our last chance, but rather that time is limited for her too. And until we hear about Mychael, we’re not allowed to get information on any other kids in state care. We have to just wait until we have information from his worker about whether we’re approved, if we’re approved read his file and make a decision, then move on with that decision and either get to know him or start in with someone else. Or we’ll be told that we’re not approved, and I think that would be a blow to both of us unless there was some really strong rationale to find a better placement for him, because his issues seem so mild in the scheme of things and we could meet his cultural needs on several fronts and I think if it’s any reason other than “he needs a dad in the house” (and even that seems like a potential cover for homophobia) we’ll both have some mopey-reevaluation of ourselves to do. (And was that a long enough sentence for you? Hope so!)

So that’s how the waiting is going for us. Our new front porch should be finished today. It had been that fake wrought-iron, and it was flaking and looking pretty nasty. So we hired the guy who’d previously painted our porch and around all our windows to come and put up new wooden posts and I’d found a composite railing system on huge markdown, so we’ll have crisp white columns and white railings against our faded brick house, and it should look great. My garden is coming in nicely (and I’m writing from the side patio now!) and I need more sedum as groundcover but other than that am finished planting.

Our trips were great and I’m sure I’ll write more about being the white girl with the shea butter in a group of black women and about how great it is to see Lee with other black lesbians and about how cool it was to end up at Chicago’s Black Gay Pride even though it was just a park full of gay teenagers. In fact, I think that was cooler than if we’d ended up at the other park with fancier parties. Just seeing these young people being themselves and having a place to explore and express that safely and supportively meant so much to me. Lee sort of rolled her eyes, but I think she was impressed too. We talked about how like and how unlike these kids seemed from me shyly going to gay youth group for the first time in high school, her edging her terrified way into gay bars as soon as she was legal. In a year of gay-bashings and young teen suicides, it was so refreshing to see this laid-back, wholesome, young queer fun.