what to do when a social worker from foster care is about to visit your house

First: Put the wine box in the cupboard.

Second: Find the smoke alarms you meant to install last year. Read instructions. Learn that installing smoke alarms requires a drill, which you do not have. Swear. Improvise with long nails. Hammer your finger. Swear some more.

Third: Freak out. Run around the house with a broom.

Fourth: Finally pry the tacked-on Obama sign off the porch rails with a putty knife, in case social worker is a Republican.

Fifth (ten minutes before social worker is to arrive): Remember the giant hookah that really is just a souvenir from Dearborn, Michigan, but looks exactly like a bong. Fish out of closet and cram into box in basement. Put other box on top of this box.

Sixth: Freak out. Run around the house with a broom.


I don’t write much about our adoption process, for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that the more I write about it, the more I think about it, and mostly I try not to think about it, unless I am attending to some piece of vital related business. Also, even when I do consider writing about it, there are things I prefer not to reveal and thus I would end up writing in that aggravating blogger code language, you know, the kind where people say “Something happened/is going to happen/may happen/probably won’t happen but there’s a miniscule chance that it may happen, and I can’t say anything about it but it’s a thing, so everyone be curious now and I will tell you nothing.”

Also, I fear expressions of sympathy. Nothing makes this process more difficult than expressions of sympathy. My least favorite ones, which I should add I have never heard from any known reader of this blog, go like this: “You guys would be such great parents! It’s so unfair that they make it so hard to adopt for great people like you when there are stupid people having babies all the time.” Yes, that’s helpful, thank you. I never even know where to begin with this kind of remark. It’s offered in kindness, so you don’t want to be a bitch about it. But such comments are not just, nor truthful. They presume a world where unjustly detained adoptive parents are prevented from saving hoards of needy, parentless babies by soulless bureaucrats bent on creating obstacles. I ranted about this here, so I won’t retread the territory, other than to say that this assessment of the situation is drastically off the mark. Potential adoptive parents go through a lot, but we are still by far the least victimized parties in the adoption triad.

And beyond that, ranting about the perceived injustice of undeserving people having children does nothing, absolutely nothing, to make me feel better about anything at all.

About two weeks ago, I hit a wall on this adoption thing; I felt just utterly discouraged. That meme I did earlier, where I said I was “fine where we are with this”? That was sort of a lie, or maybe wishful thinking. I am not going crazy for a baby—honestly, parenting terrifies me now more than ever—but I got hit with this wave of discouragement, the this-will-never-happen-it’s-all-pointless kind of discouragement. We’ve been officially looking for about a year, and nothing has panned out so far. Figuring out the best, most ethical means to domestically adopt in a red state where reproductive issues are a never-ending battleground has been really tricky. We don’t feel good about hardly any of the agencies in this state. Our litmus test, when we were at that stage, was to go straight to the “For Birthmothers” information. If they presume the term “birthmother” in a preliminary, advisory stage, we’re already suspicious, because pregnant women who are considering adoption are NOT birthmothers. They are expectant mothers who deserve unbiased information about all of their options. If the information that the agency offers such parents includes admonitions against abortion and/or any sort of coercive language (language that even subtly portrays the hypothetical waiting adoptive parents as more deserving of a child than the hypothetical pregnant woman seeking advice), well, that was it. We crossed that agency off the list.

And thus, we crossed off almost every agency in the state, and settled on private adoption, which has its own problems. One of them is that it requires “networking” in order to find a baby. We never really found a way to be okay or comfortable with that—which is not to diss on this particular means to adoption, it can be done thoughtfully and well—but just to say that it is really not us, and our attempts thus far have been fairly half-assed. And we hate talking to lawyers. So nothing much has happened on that front.

In the past few months, a series of events has led us to consider foster care adoption. This is not to say that something is going to happen tomorrow or next month or with anything resembling immediacy. [Insert obfuscating crypto-bloggerese here.] But we are going to start training to be licensed by the state as a foster home. Even if you’re only interested in adoption and not foster care, this is a necessary step, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that this is why, on Tuesday morning, I was going through the pre-social-worker-visit chicken dance.

She knocked on the door at noon, and the second I opened it, my cat Bonzo made a rush for the door, which he does sometimes, despite being an indoor cat who would not last two seconds in the wilds of the condo parking lot. This is how I came to completely ignore her offered hand and instead dive for the floor to restrain my hell-cat. Apologizing for the unintentional diss, I invited her in, transferring the cat to my left arm so that I could offer my right hand. At this point, she dropped her purse. I liked this woman immediately.

Her accent was Scottish or Irish or something British Isles-y, and she looked about my age. The minute she sat down on the couch, Bonzo assaulted her with a series of head-butts, which are his way of saying, “You seem cool. Pay attention to me now.” She assured me that she loved all animals and the head-butting was no problem. Then she suggested that we do a run-through of the house, so she could point out to me everything that would need work to get us up to foster licensure standards.

Rather than putting it off, I took her straight to the basement, with the same blurted caveat I offered the last time a social worker visited us: “Our basement is full of beer bottles because my husband is a brewer so we look like total alcoholics but I promise we’re really not.” She was not phased. (Relax! I told myself. She’s Irish! Or…Scottish! How can someone who watches as much BBC as I do not place this accent?) We did a complete tour, during which I learned that we need the following: Two handrails built, for both staircases; child guards installed at top and bottom of both staircases; knives to be placed in location unreachable to small children; locked cabinet in which to store alcohol; three more smoke alarms; two more carbon monoxide detectors; outlet plugs; a two-story ladder; and locked medicine chest to store medications, medicines, and any other substance that might be in any way toxic. Then we talked about paperwork.

This all sounds like a tremendous drag, but by the time she left I felt better about everything, the whole deal. She was just so real and approachable, and unlike every other adoption professional I have spoken to, she did not seem to be making a pitch. She did not candy-coat the difficulties involved in foster adoption, which made me trust her more. With every difficulty you encounter, she said, there is a supportive community of people involved in foster care who will help you out. Just hearing that made me feel less isolated.

And she did not make me feel defensive or insane for wanting to go back to school and parent at the same time (her response was to tell me about a single working mom she knew who adopted three kids out of foster care), and the first thing she did was compliment me on our house. The house thing may sound trivial. But it meant a lot to me. We live in a slightly scrappy condo in a working class neighborhood and have been known to have some class-related insecurity around this whole adoption thing.

Eric and I talked about it later (he was at work during her visit, but since we both have to go to a bunch of trainings he’ll have plenty of time to get the score), about how pursuing adoption has made us feel perpetually inadequate about our careers, our income, our religion (re: undefined nature of or lack thereof), our modest home, the state of our front porch. It isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault that we feel this way, other than perhaps our own for allowing ourselves to be so dogged by these insecurities. But talking to someone from the foster care world was such a different experience from talking with the lawyers and social workers we’ve encountered thus far. There was no inkling of judgment from her, nothing that set my teeth on edge, no weird class tension…the main thing that came across was her experience and her love for foster kids. She seemed like someone who has seen every kind of family under the sun.

As I said to Eric, I think this may be more our scene. We’ll see.