Our baby steps toward adoption

It’s official – we’ve gotten the ball rolling on adopting a Venezuelan kid.

A year after this process started kicking around our heads, we’ve made our first tiny step toward actually making it happen. We began the process in Brazil, and it got cut off for the obvious reason that we left the country. Somehow it always seemed like this was the place where it would make sense for us to adopt, and our first meeting really made it feel that way.

The process we’ve now started is not actually adoption, but rather a clever arrangement that makes adoption a lot quicker and, from what I can tell, a lot more likely. The program is a foster care set-up carried out by a private foundation, where we take temporary custody of a child for at least two years, at which point we can begin a formal adoption process. The difference is that if we go straight to the adoption process, we will likely end up waiting for three, four or even five years for a judge to rule that a given child does not have any family that will take care of them.

One you’ve already been caring for a kid for two years, you’ve got a much stronger case to make to a judge that the kid should stay with you permanently. Biological relatives that do appear seeking custody ]will find themselves having to explain to a judge where they’ve been for the last two years and why the kid should be separated from a loving family. This organization, called Fundana, has never had a case of a foster parenting that did not end up in an adoption.

The first instructions we got from Fundana in the email about the meeting was to be on time. Truth be told, I’ve never seen such an amazing display of punctuality in Venezuela, where most things are assumed to start half an hour to an hour after they’re scheduled to. It was set for 8 30, when we walked in at eight there were already at least 20 people sitting in the room. The director showed us a movie of adoptive parents describing their experiences, and then explained the basics to us. “Don’t come here looking for blond-haired blue-eyed kids, we don’t have any of those,” she said, barely cracking a smile through the entire hour she talked and answered questions, though still managed to get some laughs out of us. “You have to learn to flexible. This is not an easy process. It’s going to take a lot of work for these kids to get used to another environment.”

People give me a range of reactions when I tell them we’re adopting. There’s usually some understandably polite tip-toeing around the issue of whether we couldn’t have our own kids (we couldn’t). There’s some expression of how we’re doing something good for the world, with varying sincerity. And then there’s sort of cautious probing to figure out if we’re adopting at birth, followed by consternation at the fact that we’re not.

It’s true that these are kids that have gone through really tough situations. I admit it’s something that worries me. It takes a lot in this country for social service agencies to take kids away from their parents. I don’t know what’s in store for us. There have unfortunately been cases of families who take a child into foster care and then realize after a month that they can’t handle it, dumping the child back at Fundana, forcing the child to suffer abandonment for a second time.

Then again, I wasn’t the easiest kid to deal with. (Think I’m a drag now? Man, could my parents tell you some stories …) Isa’s been very optimistic about this, and that’s helped me a lot. There’s a tendency to see these kids as damaged goods, and there are really good reasons to believe that someone should give them a chance.

Yes, these kids are probably never going to go to Harvard. In some ways I’m almost relieved of that. Whatever suffering is involved in adopting a 5-year-old kid from a Venezuelan orphanage, I’m not sure it’s necessarily more than the travails of parents who spend 17 years of their kids’ lives preparing them for standardized tests, studying their college opportunities and cautiously cultivating their admissions-board-friendly hobbies. I understand of course why parents do these things. But I also hear them complain about how exhausting it is to get sucked into the vortex of buying the right house so they can get into the right schools so they can track their kids into right ultra-competitive courses extracurriculars.  

The last time I faced the prospect of being a dad, my reaction was a lot more cerebral than emotional, much like this time. I’m ok with that. Nothing that people read or study prepares them for the moment of having a kid. For the same reason, I’ll never know what it’s like to bring a kid into my life until I actually do it.

It’s also another commitment to Venezuela, the socialist rice paddy nobody can believe we moved back to after having a chance to live in paradise (I really love that turn of phrase, forgive me for using it so often). It means Isa and I are probably here for another four years or so. It also means that during two of those years we won’t be able to leave the country with our foster kid. It means people are going to have to come visit us. That’s OK because we’ve got the room, and I swear, Caracas isn’t as bad as people say it is.