New House - New Adoption Mission
We have a final time for the closing! 3:00 Thursday - in 50 hours we will officially be homeowners for the very first time. Then, in another 2 days, it will be Christmas.Tonight we are driving to a little shop in Georgetown, KY where we had UK Christmas stockings personalized with our names on them. After the closing, we are going to go hang them on the fireplace in the new house.
We are staying here for Christmas. While I am sad that we won't get to see family, I'm grateful for the timing of all of this.
Michael is teaching a winter interterm class - next week he will have off, then he will teach every day the first week in January and finish right before Spring semester begins. We need next week to move into the new house before everything starts for Spring.
Not having children makes this Christmas more difficult, but it also makes this transition much easier. There will be no concern of upsetting a child who has already had to move out of their house once.
I am looking at adoption agencies around KY, and thinking about which ones I'd like to talk to. Once we are in the new house and everything is put away, we will select an agency to do our homestudy. Michael's paycheck from teaching winter interterm will pay for that in addition to paying off another outstanding bill. The blessing will be not going into debt for the homestudy. Sicne I kept all of the information from our homestudy with the state to be certified as pre-adoptive foster parents, I figure I can make it go fairly quickly.
I am going to look into non-profit agencies here in town (and close by) that do domestic adoptions. Catholic Charities sounds good except for this: they prefer to do open adoptions. I will most likely write about that later, but I can tell you that in an informational presentation, the respresentative from Catholic Charities talked about open adoption and that most adoptive parents and their children will visit the birth mother several time a year. I respectfully assert that this is something I cannot do. I understand that placing a child for adoption must be an enormously difficult task - but so is adoption. I'm open to anyone reading this to respond about your thoughts on open adoption - and why you would choose it or not. It is a highly personal decision - and I respect those who choose it and those who do not. I could also tell you my reasons for not wanting to do an open adoption - but I feel I'd be setting myself up to be attacked. Furthermore, there is no "nice" way to say that I do not wish to share my child with the birth mother, or have a relationship with her. I do not mind an information exchange of sorts, or my child knowing who their birth parents are after a certain age. It's fine that people know what we looked like, what we did for a living, etc. But it is not fine to know us personally and be a part of our lives. It just isn't us. But again, I may write more about this - I just don't want folks to feel a need to attack me for my politically incorrect view on open adoption. No matter how many times I've heard the good news preached about it - it sounds awful for reasons I've yet to be able to fully articulate.
So, if we can find a good agency willing to do a closed private adoption, and we can adopt a fairly young child who is bi-racial or African American, I will be willing to go domestic. Otherwise, my happy self is looking elsewhere.
Thank you for your support and encouragement. Again - if anyone has experience with open adoption - or making that decision to have open or closed - feel free to share how you came to that decision.
posted by No Longer In Crisis @ 12/20/2005 12:57:00 PM
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