Our Almost Adoption Journey

Recently, we were as close as you can get to adopting; the ball was in our court, we just needed to say, “Yes.”

It all started about 4 years ago when I saw a weekly segment on our local news station present a child who is legally-free to adopt in our county. These kids are usually hard to place for any number of reasons and so airing them on television gives them a better chance at getting adopted.

Well, this child that captured my heart was a precious (elementary age) boy. I can’t really explain what it was about him that drew me to him. Maybe it was his shyness, maybe it was the fact he wanted a Mom and a Dad, maybe it was God planting a seed in my heart. Of course, we were recently married and it was not a good time to adopt since we still had a lot to learn about married life.

Fast forward to last year…we were on the cusp of our foster care license and this precious boy was featured a 2nd time! This time he was outgoing and funny and full of joy. He had entered his teenage years and was thriving in a stable and loving foster home, but his foster parents were not in a place where they could adopt him. By the time we were officially licensed I looked him up on the county’s heart gallery (a website specifically made to introduce families to kids available for adoption) and on his picture it said he was potentially matched. I was happy for him and hoped it would be a permanent solution for him. We then moved forward with foster care and welcomed “Carson” into our family.

Fast forward one more time to a few weeks before Carson and “Maggie” would be reunifying. The precious teen was featured a 3rd time! This time it was an urgent need to find a forever family because his foster parents were still not in a place where they could adopt him and he needed to move on to a family that could. For a week he was on my mind and after talking to Paul we decided to just inquire. We called his social worker and she had just presented a family to this young man the day before.

Alright, he is going to have his forever family, great! That is perfect timing because with Carson and Maggie reunifying we really were in no place emotionally to open our hearts to another child without first, taking time to grieve the losses.

A few weeks after healing from our grief we attended a foster-to-adopt conference at a church a couple hours away. At the conference we ran into the young man’s social worker! She recognized our names and said she was just talking about us the other day because she decided the family was not going to work out for him and our names came up.

We find out later in the week that since our adoptions worker had retired in the last year (unbeknownst to us) we needed to be assigned a new adoptions worker to move forward with adoption of him or anyone else. Thankfully, we requested an adoptions worker in August when we knew our kids would be reunifying and we finally had one assigned to us in October. It was worth the wait because our new adoptions worker is amazing. We like her A LOT!

We noticed that with “The System” there is a lot of waiting and then suddenly you get a call and things move rather quickly. We received a call that some time-sensitive things were happening and families were being evaluated for the best match for the precious young man we saw on television. We waited again and then we got a call and we were chosen as the best match!

His social worker and our adoptions worker came to our home for what is called “The Telling” where they share everything they know about the child. It was almost 4 hours long and there was so much information our heads actually ached. We were given 3 full days to make a decision to adopt him or not. They gave us phone numbers to call and his thick file to keep during the decision-making process. Usually there is a lot more time given, but unfortunately this was one of those cases where things needed to move forward and quickly.

If we said Yes, we would give his worker an album we needed to create called The Family Book. This album introduces the child to our home and our family through various photos. The following day we would meet the child on his turf, at his foster home with his foster family and his worker and our adoptions worker. It was to be an hour long introduction. After meeting the child, we would need to visit him everyday until he was placed in our home. In this case, he would be moved in within 3-4 days of meeting him.

It was an incredibly long and difficult 3 days for us. We really wanted to adopt him. We re-read his file, we made phone calls, interviewed his foster mom, prayed and sought out wise counsel. He passed all our “deal-breakers” and we agreed with his social worker that he was the best match for us. But we kept coming back to the fact that our current living situation was not the best environment for him to thrive.

It was an emotional weekend. I cried over this situation more than I cried over my two foster babies leaving. It didn’t matter that he was almost half our age, that our only real parenting experience was our two foster kids for about a year, that he was in The System for a decade, or that he had more than a dozen placements. One of the reasons his worker chose us is because we are inexperienced and we are not rigid and founded in rules, but are calm and flexible and willing to try new things, which is what these kids need. We had a great number of resources to help us along on our parenting journey and we were teachable and ready. Still, we know what we were considering was crazy by a lot of standards, but not God’s standards of loving kids (no matter the age) who are rejected by the rest of society.

We realize that some who hear that we were on the brink of adopting a teenager from The System would think we wised up and “dodged a bullet”. But that bullet is a person’s soul who God created and loves unconditionally. That bullet was going to be our son. That bullet would have been totally worth taking right in the heart.

We did have to say no, to do what was best for that precious teenager even though that sounds counter-intuitive. Instead of the phone call the workers requested, we both took the morning off and we walked into their office to tell them in person that sadly we could not be this boy’s forever family at this time. It was the right closure for this brief and hurried journey. We couldn’t have asked for a better conversation with the two workers who showed us tremendous understanding and grace.

We have grown a lot as a couple through this experience and are thankful for this in the midst of very deep sadness. As we grieve another loss this year, we are grateful that God is always good, gracious, and sovereign.