Adoption: The Home Study Process

Life is full at the moment …Not everything is going the way or the speed I hope for, but hey as I said in my last post, I need to let go and just go with the flow for 2016. So here I am flowing through January and continuing into February; I am a Pisces after all…flowing is in my nature.

I am happy to report that the adoption process is creeping forward. We officially applied at the end of November, but then it took several weeks for our application to be reviewed and have a social worker assigned to our case. We got a call in early January asking for our home study fee to be paid so that our application could officially move forward.  I eagerly paid and then proceeded to hear nothing from them for 10 LONG days (seriously! A whole  new form of torture).

When the social worker finally called she apologized and said she had been busy with matches (yep, felt as big as a thumb tack for being annoyed). After a quick, casual “no problem” I learned that the timeline to book a meeting with a social worker is a lot shorter than I expected; we were having our first meeting within a week. Woo hoo! My adoption agency world is definitely not dealing with the same backlog of appointments as my fertility clinic world, that is for sure. 

The lead up to our first meeting was full of excitement and eagerness. I have read some blogs/forums where people were stressed about and hated the invasive process…but for me its been something to look forward to each week.  It feels amazing that things are moving and I feel like we have nothing to hide and someone would have to be crazy to not realize we would make good parents. (Guess you could say I have a lot of confidence we will get a big ole approved stamp at the end of this whole thing…lets hope I don’t jinx it).

So, tonight will be our third of four meetings, with the last one being in the home next week. Tonight’s topic is ‘motivation for adoption’…so my guess is we will be walking down the infertility memory lane.  Good times!   I have to say though, despite tonight’s tough emotional topic, I find our meetings just a verbal rehash/dialogue of everything I filled out in the application – family/work/education/medical history. If you aren’t making stuff up about yourself, or trying to remember the facts you hid or the embellishments you made, I have found it all rather easy to talk about yourself for two hours. (I recognize not everyone will feel this way…but hey, I am just writing about how we are feeling).

Bottom line, my goal to let go is coming along. I feel like I have loosened the grip on the quest for motherhood. Its funny…all of a sudden, infertility and adoption, is not my whole life and guiltily it is a vacation I have been waiting years to take. In response to letting go, the universe seems to be blessing us with moving forward.

Happy Groundhog Day!