Another Chapter One

I’m still not smoking. Four weeks, three days, and some hours according to the little thing I put in Facebook to track it. And I hit 80,000 words tonight, though I’m not quite finished with the first draft of the novel.

I have started on another project which has been interesting. I’m looking into becoming a father.

On Thursday, my partner Ian and I went to the Southern California Foster Family & Adoption Agency, at a complex in east Los Angeles called St. Anne’s, which is a hundred year old maternity home for teenaged girls. Since we missed the orientation last Thursday, we met with Robyn, one of the directors of the program before hand. Basically what they do is concurrent foster/adopt to solve the old chicken-or-the-egg dilemma where California only likes to place children in foster homes which want to adopt, and it’s next to impossible to adopt (unless you go private) unless you’ve already got a foster kid. So at the end of the eight week course, we’re going to be certified as both foster and adoptive parents to get the system running.

The meeting consisted of us, two other same-sex male couples, one other same-sex female couple, five opposite-sex couples, two single men, and one single woman. One of the first things that was discussed was how a child gets put into foster care to begin with, and it’s always an accusation of some kind of abuse, from abandonment to sexual abuse to physical abuse. As a result, very few of the kids are without some kind of issues, and the agency has begun offering therapy, since according to Robyn, “All the kids need it.”

Not surprisingly, older kids are the hardest ones to place. Over 50% of the kids are Hispanic or “mixed” Hispanic (as George said on Seinfeld, “I don’t think that’s the word we’re supposed to use.”), about 20% are black or “mixed,” and the rest are white, Asian, American Indian, or some other group. Pretty evenly divided boys and girls.

We talked through the flowchart of what follows what, and a couple things struck me as being particularly peculiar about foster/adopt, beginning with the first phone call saying a baby is available. We basically have 24 hours or less to say yes or no. So, that’s pretty alarming to imagine 24 hours before a baby comes into the house, whether you have a crib or not, whether you’re in the middle of crunch time at work, or are about to leave on a trip, whether you’ve done any research into day care or nannies … You just have to say yes and accept the lightning strike, I guess.

Then there’s the whole legal aspect of it. The schizophrenic part of foster/adopt is that the baby is put with you because you want to adopt it, but the state’s interest is in trying to get the birth parents to step up and show they can handle it. So there’s court hearing after court hearing, and visit after visit from social workers as well as court-sanctioned visits from the birth mother and/or her family. So you bring into your house these people who basically abused the baby you’re taking care of, and you’re being all chummy with them to facilitate them taking the baby away from you. It’s vitally important we treat them with respect, for the good of the kid. It sounds tough.

Now, it sounds like a fair amount of negatives, but Robyn said that as awkward as the system is, it’s so much better than the old one, definitely for the kids and also for us. It goes from foster-to-adopt being a many year process to being potentially less than a year. Oh, and we have a couple fifty page applications to fill out, asking such loaded questions as whether our childhood was happy and how we would raise a child of a different race “respecting and teaching them about their culture.”

Overall, it’s such a strange dramatic mixture between the inspirational and the depressing. We decided it’s a good thing that our home life is utterly, utterly devoid of high drama.

The novel, however, is just reaching the moment of high drama, which is why I have to sign off.

More to come …