Agencies

I was shocked that the placement agency I had selected suddenly shut down their India program. Journeys of the Heart seemed to have a decent track record, unlike many of the agencies. They will not return the money I paid even though they have done nothing! This obstacle meant that I was more discouraged. Many agencies out there promise alot and have no idea how to handle things in the increasingly centralized process that India is using. Most of the agencies do not have any Indian staff and don't have anyone on the ground in India to keep things moving. They charge alot of money and I know too many people who are still waiting without any signs of a referral. India's CARA is keeping a tight grip on new registrations, keeping the list more or less closed to any new families, so that it appears unlikely that new families will get referrals any time soon, even if you can get registered. There are some families coming home with their children. Many wait longer than ever. And the process even after referral is unpredictable in length. Intercountry adoption gets harder and harder every year.

Stalled

Since my return from India, a little over 2 years ago, I have been trying to get myself to a place where I am ready to start the 2d adoption process. However, given the increasingly difficult timelines others are experiencing and the ever-more-challenging rules and mystery of the Indian process, I remain ambivalent about whether I should indeed proceed. The 1st time was really the worst experience of my life and not something I feel ready to face again. Last time I was alone and it was hard enough, this time Sofi would also be forced to suffer, so I don't think it is in her best interests at this time. Instead, I decided I would explore adoption locally as there are soo many wonderful children in need of a family like ours. I am now in the process of being approved as a foster parent, which is the procedure for adopting children whose parents' rights have been terminated. The process is transparent and I feel much more comfortable embarking on this next journey.

Sofi is keen to have a sister. And tells me that her sister grabs. She draws pictures for her, and is clearly happy about the idea of a sibling. She is wishing that we would get a baby, but is accepting the reality that her sister will be closer in age to herself and not a little baby. She agrees that babies really don't play much and mostly sleep, eat, pee and poop. We still don't know when it will all happen, but likely it will be in 2014, once we are licensed and approved.

India week at school...

 

 

4th birthday photo...

 

 

somewhat recent photo...

 

 
with Naani, on our way to London for a visit.

Further developments...

As the rules in India keep changing, agencies are shutting down their India programs. I had selected Journeys of the Heart as my placement agency - check paid and everything - but now they have closed down their India program. Appartenly, their India point person has moved to another agency. The uncertainty lingers on. Meanwhile,  I am working on getting my paperwork done, so that I can have my social worker visits start and end. It's taking alot longer than anticipated. Sofi is waiting eagerly for her sister Tara to come from India.

Sharing your personal story of adoption

An adoptee can share their story of adoption. But it is wise to only share the story with people who have earned the right to hear it. In reality, it is hard to know when that is. And how much to reveal. Ultimately, it's your child's story.

Cherishing our daughters of India

Today I am reminded of one of the incidents in my adoption journey. I cannot properly recall the true relationship, but roughly, my mum's cousin's daughter-in-law's cousin sister, or someone similarly distantly related to me, had a 3d daughter. Her husband, and I believe his family, were disappointed. They are not bad people. But the culture of India, and especially in our home state of Punjab, is that, a girl is a debt with no reward. In financial and economic terms, she is measured as a pure burden. You clothe her, feed her, maybe educate her, and then you must give her a good dowry in order to get someone to marry her and take her off your hands. In financial terms, parents worry. A son however, will take care of you (you hope!) and his wife will bring in a good dowry to the family. He will never leave you so it is perceived to be a good investment to put everything you have towards him. So, this family, was anxious about their 3d daughter. My mum's cousin had become aware of my mission, to adopt a truly needy daughter of India who needed me. With the best of intentions, she and her daughter-in-law drove me to their village, where I met with the mother of this 3d daughter. I was told that this little girl was available to be adopted, to save her from a life where she was resented and treated harshly. She was approximately 15 months old. She would not leave her mother for a moment. Her mother clearly loved her. I said nothing much. But on leaving I told my family that I could not adopt a child in these circumstances. She had a family. I would not interfere in that relationship. And she was not truly an orphan in the sense she would have to be for me to want to adopt her. Some months later, not long after, the girl's father had a bad accident. The family believed it was a direct result of them not honoring their 3d daughter. I understand they took that sign as a warning not to mistreat her. I hope and pray that she is doing well in her family.

And glad every day that I was united with Sofi. The love of my life.

Indian kids working...

Time to get back on the horse...

Preparing for an international adoption is gruelling. There is much talk of all the paperwork, but what it really means, your life has to be in a certain place of stability before you can succeed in completing your paperwork. Perhaps it's the same for everyone, but the 1st adoption is so all-consuming, that inevitably you get behind, really really behind, on what seems unimportant - like paperwork. Having spent the past 6 months getting things more or less up to date, I feel I can proceed with my paperwork. Interestingly, the new agency I am working with in Nevada requires that all the paperwork be completed before you will be assigned a social worker. Previously, you started on the paperwork and the social worker visits at the same time, so that motivated you to keep going on the paperwork part even more.

When I think it's silly to keep up this blog, however erratically I have time to post any news, I know it is worth it since I have been messaged many times by potential adopters who seek more information, insight and encouragement. It gives me great pleasure to be a tiny source of help to people in the process. No matter how discouraging the news is, like with CARA shutting down its program again so that it is not accepting any more applications, those of us who are determined know that it is even more important to keep adopting. CARA is putting up more hurdles. Orphanages claim to have less kids available  - for the process. But anyone who really knows the life of 90-something percent of Indians living in dire poverty, we know the kids are there. And they need us.

International adoptions from India into the US are declining. If things continue as they are, numbers will shrink even more. Here is what the US Government numbers look like:

Adoptions from India to U.S. by year

2011	226
2010	241
2009	297
2008	308
2007	411
2006	319
2005	323
2004	406
2003	473
2002	461
2001	542
2000	500
1999	472

It's a shame.

Single Motherhood...

Being a Single Parent Is Many Things. But It Is Not Failure."

Slate readers on the upsides of single parenthood.

By Allison Benedikt|Posted Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013, at 9:00 AM ET

When couples celebrate their 10^th anniversary, they might buy important jewelry and give it to each other to wear. Sometimes they surprise each other and hide the jewels under napkins or in soup bowls. That's because a decade is a long time, a long time to share towels and make compromises and most often raise kids. In marital circles, it is an accomplishment. In unmarital circles, OK, in my unmarital circle, a decade of parenting—alone, without the relationship part—is not an accomplishment. It is a Sisyphean feat. It is like jogging to Uzbekistan. Or deciphering the human genome. I am going to buy a ruby and bake it into a cake and forget that I did it and give it to myself. Surprise! Happy anniversary!

These are the words of Pamela Kripke, who last week wrote an essay for Slate about her experience as a single mother. Under the headline, "It's Better To Be Raised By a Single Mom," Kripke detailed the feats and failures of single motherhood and, most importantly to her, the grit she is sure she has passed on to her two daughters—"the beauty that emerges from the strain, the impediments, even the sometimes terrifying knowledge that their parents might fail them."

We asked readers to write in with their own experiences, either of being a single mother or of being raised by one, and most also proudly identified this somewhat intangible characteristic of grit in their kids, a pride both for their kids and for a parenting job well done. From single mother Sarah Wilson:

I've been a single mom for over two years. It wasn't by choice. I was married and trying very hard to make my family work. My ex-husband walked out two weeks before Christmas while I was in the middle of law school exams, leaving me with a child who had just turned 2, a mortgage on a house that was underwater, and no idea how I was going to make it. Of course my daughter is going to be tougher and more resilient as a result, but not because I've short-changed her, or sent her to daycare, or told her there wasn't money to play soccer this year. Plenty of kids face those kind of "challenges" and much more. My daughter is going to have grit because she's seen it modeled by me her whole life. Mommy got out of bed, finished school, kept the house, paid the bills, and handled herself with grace in the face of obstacles.

Another single mom, Nancy Mure, echoes this sentiment—that there is a great benefit to what she is modeling for her children:

I am a flawed human most days, always apologizing for being scrambled or forgetting this or that, but my kids don't see me as perfect, and I prefer it that way. Where our previous life was seen by most as kept in a neat and tidy box as a "together family," it isn't now—and we've all learned to function in that. We are the privileged ones. We are the ones who have the coping mechanisms needed to get through life.

From those who wrote in, it's clear that single mothers appreciate this grit in their children, but do children appreciate having had to acquire it? Annie McDonald, who was raised by a single mother from the age of 2, says yes:

My mother, sister, and I would spend family evenings at the kitchen table licking green stamps to fill out the $5 booklets from the local pharmacy. We turned those booklets in not for prizes (as some do), but for cash so that we could buy groceries. 

My mother fixed the plumbing and the wiring when she could. She installed linoleum, ceramic tile, and wall paneling. She framed out a wall in the basement to create that second bedroom. She learned how to make stained glass windows and took on small commissions.

She raised us with a firm hand and was a strict disciplinarian. Granted, she had her faults and was by no means a saint. But she raised us with a capacity for learning and curiosity that was unparalleled among my childhood peer group. And from our experiences, my sister and I have developed incredibly strong coping devices that have gotten us through hard times of our own.

What about having no male role model in the house? For Wilson, the absence of a husband will, she hopes, actually serve to help her daughter find a good mate later in life. "I hope she'll learn from our teamwork that she deserves a true partner in her future life. If I had stayed married to my ex-husband, I might have inadvertently taught her that women work, cook, clean, and raise the kids while men do what they want."

Mure goes further, expressing a certain freedom that she feels exists in a household without "the man voice":

Minus the man voice, the lines of communication here are wide open. There is no intimidation, no judgment, no apprehension. If someone's feeling something—it's put out there. We discuss it. We find the humor in it. These conversations usually occur at dinner, the meal we eat together every night. The meal cooked by me and appreciated by the kids. The meal eaten on the table my son sets and my daughter cleans up and the meal over which conversation flows. 

Dave Steel, who grew up without a dad around, doesn't see it quite the same way. "Like other fatherless boys," he writes, "my life was defined by my dad's absence. In fact, never knowing my father shaped me as much, or more, as did being raised by mom alone." Like the others, Steel goes on to write about the resourcefulness he gained out of necessity:

While other kids my age were given cars when they turned 16, or drove around in spare family cars, I developed and executed a game plan to acquire a car and driver's license entirely on my own. I took the city bus to a grocery store, got a job bagging groceries, opened a bank account, enrolled in a driver's ed school across the street from the grocery store where I worked, got my license, and bought a junker for $400. Doing all of this took a year, and the car ended up lasting four months.

But he also writes beautifully about how difficult it is for a young man to grow up without a male model in the house—"becoming a man when you've grown up without one in your life is like building an airplane while flying it"—just as single father Robert Danberg writes beautifully about figuring out how to be a good dad to his kids. "I am a father unlike the father I had," he writes, "simply because a man whose children were born in 1965 understood the blessings and obligations differently than a man whose children were born in the '90s and '00s. You could say that, as a father, I've tried to be what I've understood was a good mother."

While most of us tend to view the family structure options as (a) two-parent family, (b) single mom-led family, or (c) single dad-led family, Pia Volk wrote in to remind us that there is a "(d)":

My 8-year-old son and I live in a shared flat with three other adults, a journalist and two doctors. We are like a family, just that we haven chosen each other because we like each other rather than because we are connected by bloodline. My flatmates teach my son skills that I don't have: One plays chess with him, the other piano, the next one soccer. By law, I am a single mother. By life, my son is a tribal project of the modern kind.

From the sons and daughters of single moms to the single mothers and fathers themselves, one thread that carried through all of the reader responses was a thoughtfulness about what parents pass on to their children—this idea that single parents aren't just scraping by and parenting from a haggard haze, but rather that they are molding their parenting philosophies to the circumstances of their lives. Take Theresa Verhaalen:

While many of my daughter's schoolmates have parents who disallow their children from setting foot to pavement on the way to school, I don't have time for that. While it may be frowned upon, I look at it as granting her a path to self-confidence in a world of paranoia. This way, she learns to use common sense.

I doubt I'll forget the day when she walked six blocks to a friend's house. The mom called me while I was at my desk, alarmed. "Were you aware that she was out there alone?" I calmly answered that I was happy she did this on her own, but she hadn't notified me before (which was the truth, the sly bugger). I had to listen to a litany about danger/responsibility/strangers and on and on. When the convo was over, I later patted my daughter on the back for her intuitiveness, told her not to walk to that friend's house again, and let it be.

It's not about throwing caution to the wind as much as it is about using common sense safety. I want my daughter to know how to handle emergencies, to have the freedom to trust her instincts. I am training her to be an adult after all. Where two-parent households may view it as unfortunate that she walks to and from school, that she doesn't have the amenities that go along with having a larger financial budget, I shrug it off.

Being a single parent is many things. But it is not failure. Not in my house.