other's day

"Go big or go home" is a phrase befitting reality shows more than reality. (Prototyping innovations on a small scale and growing gradually usually works better.) But when it comes to adoption, it's fair to say that this year we went big. We signed on with as many attorneys and agencies as we could afford. We had three matches with expectant moms, none of which led to an adoption. 

The last disruption, less than two weeks ago, took us to Reno for three days (more about that at some point). And then we went home.

Since our disruption in the fall, we've been working toward becoming a licensed resource family in the foster care system. In addition to a hell of a lot of paper work, it's meant asking myself what it will look like to parent a child I probably won't get to keep. It's meant leaning into being Trauma-Informed, a Helpful Member Of My Community, and a bit of a Badass (resource parents: I think of you as badasses). It's meant leaning away from my dream of being the mother of two kids.

But we kept the adoption door open because why not. And then it slammed shut. So, back to foster care, right?

Not so fast, said our licensing agency. They wanted us to heal. C.C. wanted us to heal. Specifically, she wanted a break from adoption professionals telling us how to talk to expectant moms; telling us our choices were too risky or not risky enough; telling us that if we'd just contract with one more agency, our baby would appear. 

Photo by Victor Hughes on Unsplash

Both of us felt a bone-deep exhaustion. I'm tired of trying to be perfect all the time, for nothing, we agreed. She felt the first part of the sentence most powerfully. She asked for a summer off from trying to be perfect. I felt the second half of the sentence. I'm always trying to prove myself to the voices in my head anyway; why not just resume our licensing process and get the chance to be in a kid's life? Why not be perfect for something?

But I've learned the hard way that pushing too hard, too fast usually gets me the opposite of what I want. So we're taking a break and catching our breath. Irrationally, I feel like I've been put in a time-out for being sad about something that wasn't even my fault, which pushes all my buttons. 

The button that says You're Not Allowed To Have Big Feelings, the button that says You're Not A Real Mom, the button that says You MIGHT Get To Be A Real Mom IF You Jump Through One More Hoop, In Addition To The 50 That Were Already Mapped Out.

When well-meaning people assign healing like it's detention, or remind us that the purpose of adoption and foster care is to provide "a family for a child, not a child for a family," I want to scream. I know that the fact of my screaming is just more proof that I need to heal. But other people are allowed to have children and character flaws. 

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

I wonder if this is what systemic injustice feels like. Hearing variations on "Why are you so upset?" after getting the shitty end of the stick time after time. Obviously, there are many protected classes I'm not a member of, but there are systemic problems in adoption, and it's on individual adoptive parents to take the punches. Adoptees and birth parents take punches too. I know theirs are bigger. The system gets to float onward like a sinister ghost.

The baby we almost adopted in Reno ended up in foster care because her dad didn't agree to an adoption. We're still in touch with her mom, who sent us pictures of the baby this week. It hurt, but I also felt honored, and sort of peaceful. We got a small taste of what it's like to truly support family reunification. So I get frustrated when someone says, explicitly or implicitly, that we have so much more to learn. I mean, we definitely do have more to learn. But we're also miles past being naive?

This clusterfuck of an adoption year has made me more grateful than ever for Dash and for C.C. But I'm an Olympic mental gymnast, and when I think about the four babies we didn't adopt and the two I miscarried—when I spend more energy trying to become a parent again than actually parenting—I feel like Dash must be a fluke, like I don't deserve him. The fact that, during our most recent adoption fail, he spent more time with his iPad and Doritos than ever, and saw me crying and stressing and tapped out, just reinforces my fear that I'm a shit mother.

(DCFS, if you're reading this, I am not a shit mother; or at least I'm sub-clinically so.)

I'm a tangled mess right now. I'm dumping this all into a blog post for people who know me, only. I'm scared that I seem ragey and pathetic and entitled and ungrateful. I am ragey and a little bit pathetic. I don't think I'm entitled or ungrateful, but maybe I'm those things too. I'm having so many flashbacks to 2011, when I believed every person I knew was painting a nursery and humming while rubbing her growing belly, and unbeknownst to me, all I was growing was a tumor. 

Since 2011, a chunk of those blissed-out pregnant people have gotten divorced or had health scares or lost parents or lost jobs; I'm wise enough to know that most people's lives aren't as perfect as Instagram says. And in a concrete way, most people actually have had more bad shit happen to them by the time they're 45 than when they're 35. And at least as of my last checkup, I was not, as far as medical technology could tell, growing a tumor (knockonwood). If that's what forward momentum looks like—a little wisdom, bad shit happening to other people too, and no tumors—I'll take it.

And I'll take this time to try to dust off my self-care practices and spend some quality time with my family. Fine. I'll do it.

I've been watching a lot of Real Housewives of New York. First the recent seasons, when they're all divorced and the show doesn't even try to show much of New York. They just stick the ladies in various vacation homes and let them fight. Then I started watching the older seasons, where they had more highlights and more husbands, fewer probationary rulings against them. I also started watching Better Call Saul. Only content about middle-aged people fucking up their lives for me, please.

Ramona is one of two RHONY ladies to appear on all seasons. She's a piece of work. Bug-eyed, blitzed on pinot grigio, a liar who seems to believe her own lies. She has one daughter, Avery, whom she tries to push into acting in the early seasons. In a rare moment of vulnerability, she tells housewife Heather that she thought Avery was born dead, because she was blue and the cord was wrapped around her neck. "That's why I never had another," she says.

Granted, she's saying all this to relate to and/or one-up Heather's story about her son's liver transplant, and by the end of the episode, they're accusing each other of being chronic interrupters, shouting over each other to do so.

At sixteen, Avery is predictably embarrassed by her mom's sexed-up outfits and spotlight-stealing ways. But when they're out to lunch one day, Avery reads her mom an essay she wrote for school called "My Role Model." It is all about Ramona, who tears up and hugs her daughter.

I was thoroughly verklempt. If messy, pushy Ramona, mother of one single child, could be—if not a real housewife (they all work outside the home and half of them aren't married)—a real mom, maybe I could be too.