I just got an email from her saying she'll finish writing our Home Study up this weekend and get it reviewed Monday and then we'll have it early next week! So amazingly exciting! This process all took a bit longer than we anticipated but the end is in sight.
So, during the interviews with the caseworker, she brought THE BLIND SIDE up several times. And I've seen the movie before, but it's been a long time, so I didn't really remember a whole lot of details. So after she left I ordered it on Amazon and it came a few days later. We'd talked about having the kids watch it too, but I couldn't remember if there were inappropriate things they shouldn't see at their age.Justin and I watched it a few nights ago. I warned him that I was probably going to cry. And boy did I. There would be something that would come up and I just thought of our son being in similar circumstances and the tears sprang forth! The part where Michael sees his bedroom in their house for the first time and says, "I've never had one of these before." "What, your own room?" she asks. "No, a bed." I just lost it, turned to Justin and said, "let's go buy him a bed!" The movie certainly did get to me on many, many levels.
Since learning that we would be adopting an African-American son, we've both been paying a lot more attention to racial issues that surround us. We've read discussions on social media, especially ones that pertain to white families adopting children of other races. And it scares me to death. It intimidates me. Because I'm not a heavily opinionated person. I'm non-confrontational. It's easy for me to let things go and to try to focus on positive issues instead.
This change that is coming has forced me to look at things a lot differently.
A discussion that comes up a lot in transracial adoption circles is white privilege. I won't go into that, because I really don't want to. But it was interesting to have a different view while watching THE BLIND SIDE. It was easy to look at it as the rich white family taking in the poor black kid. Hollywood makes everything look very pretty and perfect. There's going to be issues. There's going to be problems. I mean, that's not what I hope for, but it's what I have to mentally prepare myself for. I'm going to be in a lot of uncomfortable situations and I'm going to flounder sometimes. But in the end I just have to remember: I'm going to love this child. And I'm going to have his back. And we're going to be a family and we need to keep that as our focus.
The last update that I'll close with is that we DO have a few children we want to start inquiring on. The other day we went throughly through the profiles of the children on adoptuskids.org that fit the criteria. Searching for 12-13 year old African-American boys in the us brings up over 160 results. That is so many children who need families. We went through and anyone who generally fit what I remembered, we read their profile and determined if they might fit. There were a lot of factors to this--if they could live with other children, or younger children in the house. If they had to stay in a certain state. Their own biological siblings. My gut feeling. And then we printed off 20 something profiles.
Our biological children came in while we were doing this and wanted to be a part of the process. Liam wanted me to print every single boy and take them all in. He's a lover. And Makenzie would get so excited when a boy had similar interests to hers. It was amazing seeing them get emotionally involved in the process, long before they ever meet their brother face to face.
Right now, we have 4 children we want to start off with. Maybe none of them will work. Maybe we won't work for them. Maybe our son is one of those 4. I don't know yet. But it's a start.
So, pretty soon we'll be able to move forward and learning more about these wonderful boys!
