Relax, the Adoption Home Study is Not So Bad
When I was still a prospective adoptive parent, nothing intimidated me more than the state-mandated home study.
I remember my anxious preparations after our appointed social worker from the adoption agency called to set up our first home study visit. Andrew and I both arranged to take the morning off from work so we could meet her in our apartment.
Before she arrived, we scrubbed the apartment clean. Ludicrously clean, even cleaner than if my mom were coming to visit. Every surface had to be clear. Clear like our consciences.
We simply did not know what to expect. Would the social worker be looking to either “pass” or “fail” us?
My oil paintings covered every wall of our apartment and included sensuous nude portraits from one of my life painting classes. The portraits, so casually displayed on our walls amidst still lifes and landscapes, suddenly made me nervous. What if she found nude paintings offensive?
What if she found our home to be inappropriate for a child? I began to doubt myself, and I worried, worried, worried until finally I just took down the nudes, shoving the canvases under the bed, feeling a vague sense of self-betrayal.
This is one of the realities of adoption: you have to convince outside parties that you are qualified to be a parent. Is it fair? No. Life’s not fair. Sure, two fertile people can spend a night together and become parents, even if they are not ready to be parents.
You can point to thousands of parents who have borne children and say that they have strikes against them – they may be neglectful or abusive or plagued by addictions to alcohol or drugs, perhaps sufferers of very serious mental illness or a simple inability to commit to work or family, who knows, who cares, you can easily find a zillion examples of the unfairness of it all.
The fact is, when you are looking to adopt, someone is looking for the skeletons in your closet, which simply does not happen when you conceive naturally.
The day before our scheduled home study visit, Andrew and I had received our CANTS clearances (Child Abuse and Neglect Tracking System), a requirement for adopting parents. Seriously, why isn’t this clearance a requirement for all parents? How bizarre is it that having a child is a right for some and a privilege for others?
That being said, it surprised and relieved me to learn that nobody was expecting adoptive parents to be perfect. Yes, the adoption professionals were looking for skeletons in our closet, but it did not mean that we had to be Mr. and Mrs. Brady.
For example, Andrew and I were hesitant to acknowledge that we were still seeing a therapist due to the loss of Matthew. What if the adoption agency thought we were unstable? Hoping it would not be a black mark against us, we confessed.
Fine, good, just give us a letter from your counselor saying she believes you are emotionally available to be parents. So we did. An inconvenience, yes, and who knows what we would have done if our counselor had thought we were not capable, but that did not happen! So, it was okay to acknowledge that we were in therapy.
Then I admitted that I occasionally took Xanax on airplanes, because I was afraid of falling out of the sky. Fine, understandable, it was not a big deal.
As the adoption process continued, I realized that the agency knew we were human, with human needs and weaknesses, and whether or not I was afraid of flying did not determine what kind of parent I would be. Anyway, I got over my fear of flying before our adoption was finalized because we took so many plane trips.
The critical moment during the visit came when the social worker asked us how we resolve conflict. Andrew looked at her and deadpanned, “Swords at ten paces.” I glared at him. Why couldn’t he have said, “we talk it over and reach a compromise.” After a moment of stunned silence, the social worker let out a laugh.
Later in the evening after Sue’s visit, Andrew paced the apartment, looking for the sports section he had left lying on the bathroom floor.
“Carrie, where did you put the Trib?” he called impatiently.
“I don’t think I touched it,” I replied. And I really didn’t want to get up to look, since I was tucked under a blanket on the couch, half asleep.
After ten minutes of listening to Andrew slamming around in a futile effort to find the sports page, I got up and helped him look.
“Think, Carrie. Where is it? You were racing around cleaning up every room in this apartment before the home study visit. You made it look like nobody even lives here.”
“Babe, I swear I didn’t touch it.”
The next morning, as I heated up some water for oatmeal, I found it. I had hastily shoved the offending newspaper into the microwave with a dirty coffee cup as Sue Stewart rang the doorbell.
Sheepishly, I offered it to Andrew. He rolled it up and swatted me with it. “You swear you didn’t touch it, huh?” As he walked away, I saw a grin. A welcome sight those days.
Carrie is an artist and a writer living in Evanston. According to her, ‘I was actually trained to exercise the other half of my brain and worked for years in the Financial Services sector after receiving an MBA in Finance from Kellogg. But I had a change of brain after going through the harrowing process of adopting our daughter Katie, and I could no longer think in columns of numbers. I thought instead in splashes of color and shades of light and dark.’ When Katie was nearly a year old, Carrie left banking and started her own oil painting business, Artwork By Carrie. Working as an artist has allowed her to create a flexible schedule to spend more time with Katie and her second daughter, Annie Rose. Read her blog, Portrait of an Adoption.