It's All About Small Victories!

Jon and I have sent off our application packets to both the home study agency and the adoption agency.  What a huge relief and a small victory in the daunting process.  Both agencies made the drastic point that we must copy all forms, documents, and backup info (copies of birth certificates, fingerprint cards, etc.) prior to sending off our application packets.

Jon and I did just that and were both very curious exactly how many pieces of paper we had accumulated during this process.  Well, thankfully after an hour at a Kinko's copy machine, we were given the grand total.  128 pages.  That's right, I said it.....128 pages.  I think we both estimated on the low side.  Now we understand why they say it takes most couples six months to gather all of that paperwork.   But, what they didn't know is that Jon and I aren't a typical couple.  We are both "Project Terminators" who thrive on finishing things as fast as humanly process.  We estimate it took us just over a month and a half.

What comes next?  The social worker will be coming to our house soon (as of yet unscheduled) and doing our home study.  And our trip to our adoption agency is fast approaching (third week of Oct) for our seminar, In-Take Interview, and home study.  Yep, that's right!  Being out of state folks gives us the distinct privilege of going through TWO home study interviews and paying for them both.

Turn to the Left and Cough.....

Doc, you're hands are freezing!  Can you please help a brother out by warming those bad boys up before you tell me to "drop my drawers" and go in for the exam......down there!  In addition to the physical, I was grilled on everything from my bowel health to giving myself testicular exams.  Ugh, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. The worst part of this application process is over if you ask me. 

I had a 10:00 am physical and was told I needed to fast for 12 hours prior to the physical.  Considering I wake up at 4:15 am every weekday morning, I knew waiting until after my 10:00 am physical was done would be a make me one cranky bastard!  And boy was I right!!  I was in a state of dizzy delirium by the time the appointment was over at 10:45.  And in addition to fasting, I couldn't even eat gum.  I was rocking some serious hungry/bad breath in that tiny doctor's office.  Both the nurse and doctor wanted to have in-depth conversations face-to-face with me and I wonder if they could smell it.  I wanted to die!

I got a tetnus shot, had my cholesterol checked, and then was tested for a wheat allergy.   I have been given a clean bill of health and according to my doctor, fit to be a parent.  Let's hope some birth mother feels the same.  Jon was given a clean bill of health too.  One part of the application down.....598 to go!

Here a Form, There a Form, Everywhere a Form, Form!!

Oh my God!  How many times can two individuals fill out their address or sign their names?  Jon said that if we open our own adoption agency someday, we should figure out a way to auto-populate repeat information onto multiple forms (name, address, phone number, etc.).  I think he may be on to something here! 

Jon and I have been deluged in forms from both our adoption agency and our home study agency.  Our kitchen table, which comfortably seats 6, now uncomfortably seats stacks and stacks of folders, forms, and miscellaneous papers.  If I think about it long enough, I feel completely and utterly overwhelmed and unprepared.  But then I let "Organizational Keith" step in and come to the rescue.  Even though Jon rarely enjoys seeing "Organizational Keith" because it usually indicates he will be asked to help reorganize a closet, help alphabetize our spices, or help clean our cleaning supplies, I think even he was happy to see "Organizational Keith."  We needed someone to make order out of all of the paperwork chaos!  Thank God for sticky notes and paperclips.  And thank God that while I can organize like a son of a gun, Jon is better at translating what some of the questions actually mean versus what I think they mean.  We make a great team in that regard!

I would roughly estimate we have 75 pages of forms and paperwork to fill out and gather.  Some self-explanatory, but also some things I never imagined we would need:

• Autobiographies
• Doctor's Physical & Clearance
• Police Clearance
• Fingerprint Samples
• Family Disaster Plan (in case our house catches fire, gets picked up in a tornado, etc.)
• In-Depth House/Neighborhood/Family Description Forms
• Criminal and Credit Background Checks
• 8 Reference letters (5 for one agency, 3 for the other)
• A Budget (on each agency's individual forms)
• Applications/Intake Forms
• Policies/Practices/Procedure Documents
• On and on and on and on and on.........

We aim at completing a few forms a week as to not make ourselves crazy, but some (like the budget) are harder than others because they require you to "estimate" baby costs.  When  you don't have a baby and have never had a baby, estimating baby costs seems like an impossible task.  We could ask our moms I guess, but something tells me the cost of baby food and diapers has gone up since the 70's. 

We continue to plug away and hope to be finished with our forms packets for both agencies by the end of August. 

It is always good to have a goal I guess.....

Autobiographies

As part of our application process for the agency, Jon and I are required to write our autobiographies. This task seemed easy enough until they tell you that you cannot exceed four pages and that you have to hit several of the following talking points:

• Your year of birth
• Your childhood and upbringing, including family dynamics
• Your education and career path
• Your special skills, interests, or passions
• Any chronic or serious health issues
• Your faith, religion, and/or values
• Your greatest satisfactions and disappointments
• Marriages, significant relationships, children
• The people, events, or ideas that have had the biggest impact on your life (good and bad)

Since these autobiographies will be one of the first things that a potential birth parent will read to learn more about you when they are making the life changing decision of who should have their baby, it was both challenging and terrifying to sum up your life in two to four pages. Jon and I wanted to ensure that our lives did not come off smelling like roses (as nobody's has or actually does) though we don't want to overemphasize the bad stuff either and look miserable with life (not that we are, except maybe at really hard times).

Here is the summarized versions (click on the links and they take a few second to open) of our lives up to the point that we are moving forward with an adoption:

• Keith's Autobiography
• Jon's Autobiography

Home Study or "How Jon, Keith, and Their House Will Not Purposely Harm a Child"

As part of the adoption process, Jon and I have to complete a home study. According to Wikipedia.org, a home study is "a screening of the home and life of prospective adoptive parents prior to allowing an adoption to take place."

What does this mean for Jon and I? That a social worker will come into our home between one and three times to make sure our house is not a giant death trap. Additionally, in many cases they will come back for subsequent visits to interview Jon and I together and separately regarding our lives, our ambitions, our desires for having a child, and our plan for the child's immediate and long term future.

Here is where the complicated part comes in. Since there is no law the explicitly states that adoption for same-sex couples is legal or illegal in MN, we have to be very careful how we approach the home study. Ultimately, the home study company in MN will write up our home study report and send it to our adoption agency on the west coast which is what will be used to make sure our home is not a portal into the fiery pits of Hell and "clear" us for entering the pool of candidates to be chosen by a birth parent. From our understanding up till now, we have two options (which I am abbreviating in an extreme fashion below):

1. Find a home study agency in MN that will write the home study report listing us both as "Prospective Adoptive Fathers." This way, when we work with our west coast adoption agency, the laws of those states (which are far more liberal than MN) will allow Jon and I both to be listed on the birth certificate as the father and we will not have to do any legal tightrope walking in MN. Seems easy enough, right? Well, the problem is that most adoption agencies or home study agencies have an emphasis on religion. Most come with awesome names like ABC Christian Services, Catholic Charities of MN, Lutheran Social Services, etc. Out of about 48 agencies we found in MN, only three responded yes, they may perform a service like this.
2. If #1 doesn't pan out and a home study agency is only willing to write one of us up as the prospective adoptive father, then only one of us can legally adopt the child. We would then have to come back to MN, wait a certain amount of time and then go before a circuit court judge who would make the decision as to whether the second parent should be legally added on or not. What if the judge is Conservative?  What is the judge is anti-gay?  What if the judge has a Long Island Ice Tea hangover?  What if the judge has diarrhea and wants to make a quick decision to get to the nearest bathroom?  Ugh, we do not want to go this route.

So, we are in the process of looking at costs and determining which one of the three home study agencies in MN will be meet our needs and pray that one of them will write our home study up under the circumstances of #1 and not #2.

Bummer Dude!

Looks like the September seminar filled up (as our contact was out of the office yesterday when we accepted) and so we have to wait until about the third week of October. Boo hiss!

Agency Number Two - The Call

Well, we expected to have a little bit more emotional control on call #2, but alas, this did not happen! Okay, maybe I shouldn't say "we" as much as "I" because Jon was able to scarf down a packet of peanut butter crackers 2 seconds before the call. I think he was trying to play it cool though. Me, I was shuttering like a leave and it felt like someone was shooting fireworks off inside my body. So, how did it go?

AMAZING. AWESOME. PERFECTLY

Agency Two made our decision VERY easy. There were so many advantages to this agency, but the main positive point was that our guts told us this agency was right. The Client Manager was a wonderful woman who answered so many of our questions and went above and beyond the call of duty in regards to the information she gave us. Unlike the Agency One, she looked up if any birth mothers from their agency had selected a same-sex couple in the state of MN before. And guess what, there had been two!! And the people lived only a few miles from us. She passed on our contact information to them and we are hoping they contact us so we can hear about their journey and take any pointers from them.

The ONLY unfortunate thing about this agency is that they only take birth mothers from two west coast states, whereas Agency One took birth mothers from any U.S. state. This significantly reduces our exposure as Agency One places about 200 children a year, whereas Agency Two only places about 40 to 60 children a year. However, Jon and I do truly believe a few things:

1. Quality over quantity. You cannot replace a feeling in your gut that one Agency is a better fit for you than another.
2. It is all part of a master plan. We chose the agency that we felt was right for us and if we don't get a baby as a result, we won't regret it. At least we can say we tried it the right way.
3. The pool of available adoptive parents is going to be smaller with a smaller agency.

This agency is located on the West Coast and our next step is an adoption seminar that takes place over two days in September where we get all of our questions answered. They bring in lawyers, parents who have adopted children from their agency, birth mothers who have given their children up for adoption, etc. We also will have to officially interview to be accepted into the agency. Our calls to these agencies were our chance to interview them, but now the tables get turned.

Time to make some travel plans, start ramping up on our reading, and preparing ourselves to answer the most difficult questions of all.......how is that for a cliffhanger?

Agency Number One - The Call

We just had our first call with our first adoption agency. Because this is a public medium (the blog), I am going to refrain from stating agency names. Know this though, we are only looking at agencies that are approved by the Human Rights Campaign. And of all the ones they approve, we narrowed our choice down to two. Neither of these agencies are located in MN.

Due to the limited appointment times, Jon and I had to take an appointment in the middle of the work day. This meant we both had to call from our jobs and couldn't even be in the same room. Thank God for our iPhones which allowed us to easily conference call the agency.

Imagine if you will, those first terrifying seconds as you load into a huge roller coaster, snap your seat belt, and then begin the slow, torturous ascent to the top of the first hill. Clink, clink, clink goes the chain below your seat as it hoists you to the top. And right when you reach the top and get ready to go over the top of the hill.....pick up the phone and try to have a conversation about adoption. That is the best way I can describe our emotion the one minute prior to the call.

Overall, the agency answered many of our questions, raised a whole slew of new questions, and left one huge dangling question unanswered: Have you ever placed a child for adoption in MN with a gay couple?

This is a HUGE issue for Jon and I. We don't want to invest our time or money into an agency that has not successfully placed a child in MN with a gay couple before. There are far too many other obstacles facing this adoption to add that into the mix.

We did learn one other thing that we did not know. Well, we knew it existed in international adoptions, but certainly not in domestic, open adoptions. ICPC (or Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children) holds you in the state where the birth mother gave birth until they have cut through all the red tape with MN. This process can be fast or we were told to be prepared to stay in the state where the birth mother gave birth for as long as two weeks. Thankfully, UT and MS are out because they won't give babies to gay couples. Please God, can we avoid a state where two men and a baby won't be the weirdest thing people have seen in 20 years.....you know, like a Montana? Well, beggars can be choosers I guess. I would be a happy to go anywhere as long as we get a baby.

Agency Number Two will be contacted on August 3rd at 5:30 pm.

Book One - The Kid

I just finished a non-fictional book called The Kid: What Happened When My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant. It is about two men who choose open adoption; the book allows you to be a fly on the wall during the whole process from beginning to end.

Brutally honest (brutally!), sweet, and freakin' hilarious! A must read for any gay couple pursuing an open adoption.

Just ordered books two and three, but they haven't arrived yet.

Why We Want to Be Parents and Why We'd Be Good Parents?

It is like writing a resume; we knew our qualifications, but how do you get them into a short, succinct bullet point. We didn't need to convince ourselves, but would we be able to call up these reasons "under the gun" if we didn't write them down?

We were preparing for our first call to an Adoption Agency. We have been doing tons and tons of research on the web. We put our contact information on one website who immediately called and wanted to setup an hour long phone call.

Panic. Fear. Terror.

What would they ask? What should we be prepared to do or not do? We figured the phone call opener was going to be either:

1. Why Do You Want to Be Parents?
2. Why Would You Be a Good Parent?

So I did what I do best.....made a list......and Jon and I started thoughtfully thinking of reasons. It is with some embarrassment that I share this list with you, but we also want our baby to know how deeply we thought about these questions and what qualifications we used to determine our ability to parent:

Why Do You Want to Be Parents?

• Both have a desire to share with a child all the wonderful things the world can offer
• Both have the desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
• Experience as a couple, doing one of the most important things you can do in life (have a child).
• To play an active part in guiding and nurturing another human being to their potential.
• Would love to pass on our life lessons to a future generation. Our child will see that a more peaceful, loving world starts through parents who teach their children these values.
• From early on, we both agreed that life is never measured by material things (jobs/money), but instead measured by the relationships you have and create. We believe we could create a meaningful relationship with our child.

Why Would You Be Good Parents?

• We both have lived a life where we have learned the meaning of “unconditional love” and know we could provide that for our child.
• REPEAT ALERT - From early on, we both agreed that life is never measured by material things (jobs/money), but instead measured by the relationships you have and create. We believe we could create a meaningful relationship with our child.
• Both have friends and family who are supportive of our decisions and would be actively involved in our child’s life.
• We have the means to provide a child with a stable, loving environment.
• We have first hand experience with showing a child how important it is to be who you are and allow them express themselves in the healthiest way possible.

Time - A Gay Man's Worst Enemy

They say that you get your "Gay Card" taken away once you hit 30. Apparently the bar lights don't bounce quite as well off of a face full of wrinkles, crows feet, and years of fake tanning abuse. Thankfully, Jon and I don't frequent gay bars, but time was not on our side for a different reason.

Intermingled with all of our talks and question answering, Jon and I both talked about our time lines. This is another way of saying, what would our cutoff age be before we gave up trying to adopt a child? Jon's timeline was more forgiving than mine. Call it ageism, but I wanted to forgo the embarrassment of being the geriatric man who has to be wheeled to his son or daughter's college graduation.

Jon is currently 33 years, 1 month, and 26 days old. He would adopt a newborn baby until he was 42. Let's see where that puts him in the timeline of our baby if we don't adopt until he is 42:

Jon's Age When the Baby Graduates High School: 60
Jon's Age When the Baby Graduates College: 65
Jon's Age When the Baby Marries: 70
Jon's Age When the Baby Has Babies: 72

I am a young 31 years, 4 months, and 26 days old. I only want to adopt a baby up until I am 35. Let's see where that puts me in the timeline of our baby if we don't adopt until I am 35:

My Age When the Baby Graduates High School: 53
My Age When the Baby Graduates College: 58
My Age When the Baby Marries: 63
My Age When the Baby Has Babies: 65

There is a 7 year difference between my age and Jon's age. 7 years is a long time....ask a dog, that is one human year in their life. That is why we both agreed to start now, when we are still young and don't feel pressured to meet our timelines. This way feels more natural, more organic.

There is one thing we do agree on with time lines, once the adoption process starts (from our very first call to an agency), we are looking at about a 3 year window before we stop pursuing. There is only so much rejection a person can take before they have to move on.

Open Adoption - What Is It and Why Would We Choose It?

According to Wikipidia.org, "open adoption means that the birth mother and adopted family know who each other are. Even in an open adoption, the birth parents' legal rights of guardianship are terminated, and the adoptive parents become the legal parents."

What this means is that a birth mother (and possibly birth father) will be solely responsible for deciding who their baby goes to. Meaning, as long as each couple or single passes the agency's strict requirements and make it into the pool of viable candidates, they could be selected by the birth parents. Most agencies don't let the birth mother select until she is 6 or 7 months pregnant, but it is possible that they don't decide to give the baby up for adoption until after they have given birth.

I imagine an after birth call going like this:

Agency: "Hello Keith and Jon, a birth mother selected you in TX. She just gave birth and you can come pick the baby up if you would like."
Jon: (silence)
Keith: (chokes on mouthful of Green Beans he is eating for dinner)
Jon: (Begins Heimlich Maneuver)

This isn't as uncommon as you would think. Still, the choice is up to the birth parents.

Some people might think this creates huge complications for us and the baby. But if you think about it, I mean really think about it, it is what is best for the baby for a couple of reasons:

1. We get 100% custody of the baby.
2. We make an agreement for the amount of visitations and contact the child and birth parents will have. Both parties have to agree. This normally involves 2-4 visits a year and pictures twice a year (or so).
3. The baby never questions where they came from. There is no soul searching journey to find their birth parents who may have intentionally tried to avoid them by doing a closed, State adoption.
4. If the baby questions their birth parent's love, we can explain the inevitable horror of having to remove the birth mother's baby from her arms and how her heart looked as if it had broken into 5 million pieces.
5. We will know what kind of /problems/issues/diseases the baby is prone to based on the birth parents medical history which we can ask about at anytime.....to the actual source.....the birth parents.
6. The birth parents have the peace of mind of knowing and seeing that they made the best decision they could be seeing how cared and loved the baby is.

Finally, we choose this because many other options are not available to us and the few that are, are not really viable to us at this time. I want to clarify however, that even if the other options were available to us, this would still be what we chose.

Maybe Baby?

It was time for us to grow up. I mean it isn't like we haven't made tough or important decisions before in our life. After all, we were two men.....who got married....or was it committed....not the involuntary kind of committed, but the happily-ever-after-or-as-much-happiness-as-the-state-of-MN-would-allow kind of committed. We had always mentioned a baby in passing, but we never really forced ourselves to make a decision. And then one day, everything changed.

We were driving home from Jon's parent's condo in IA and my sister called and broke the news, she was pregnant. After congratulating her and hanging up......BAM!!! It was like I ran full-force into a brick wall! My sister was grown-up and made a grown-up decision to be a mother, meanwhile it seemed like Jon and I were just playing house waiting to be grown-ups. And then it hit me, it was like the Fertility Gods were working overtime and it wasn't just my sister who had grown-up.....everyone was growing up. Suddenly I realized, the past 3 months could be summarized as babies, babies, babies! When I really thought about it, EVERYONE I knew was having babies. 
And amongst all of the joy and pure elation, Jon and I could both feel an incredible sense of sadness swirling around inside of us. It felt so wrong and so selfish to be jealous at such a significant crossroads of our closest friend's and family's lives. But we couldn't shake the feeling no matter where we went. I blame my inability to shake the blues on the baby at Ruby Tuesday's who kept peek-a-booing with me, or the dad wiping the ice cream off his son's chin at Dairy Queen, or the JIF peanut butter commercial that made me cry (which I thankfully was able to conceal from Jon) where the little girl surprises her dad with a sandwich.

And then we talked and talked and then talked some more. And amongst all the talking came the questions. Would Jon and I ever experience the joys of parenthood? Even if we could navigate the laws and limitations of gay adoption, could we handle the stigma of being two men with a baby? Could we handle watching our child stigmatized as the boy or girl with "the two dads?" This decision would forever impact all three of our lives. No trip to Applebee's, plane ride, or parent teacher conference would go unnoticed by somebody in our immediate vicinity ever again. When Jon and I want to "blend," for the most part we can. But if we have a baby in tow, we would need to master a tactful answer to the inevitable question asked by every stranger we would encounter as they coo and ogle our baby....."where's mommy?" These are things most people don't ever have to think about, but they are thoughts that consumed us......or maybe just consumed me.

And then we answered those questions and came to a decision, which surprised us both. At the end of the day, giving a child a great life who might of otherwise had a terrible life, experiencing the joys of parenthood, having love and support from family and friends, and proving our skeptics wrong (that two loving people, despite their situation, CAN be phenomenal parents) pointed us towards the path to becoming parents.

So, let the journey begin. The process is being documented not to see how many hits we can receive or to gain notoriety, but to give our child, may we be lucky enough to get one, a journal to show them how hard we fought to get them. So that when that moment arises where the stigma of being the kid with "the two dads" catches up to them and they question why they couldn't have gotten more "normal" parents, they know our decision to bring them into our life was not light-hearted, but the most important decision we ever made and came from a place of undying love.