Domestic training

Our adoption agency requires every family working with them to attend a training class put on by the social workers. When I first heard about the training class, I was a bit annoyed. First, we have already gone through a ton of training. Second, its in Columbus on a Friday. That meant Jon had to use a vacation day to sit in a class room.
It turned out to be not so bad. We turned it into a fun weekend, which you can read about here.
It wasn't the emotional, heart wrenching stuff we discussed in our training back in February. It was specific to the domestic adoption process. We covered every step start to finish. We heard from a birth mom that placed her baby up for adoption. She was very open about her story, how she came to each decision (adoption, the agency, picking a family etc). We talked about some new Ohio laws and court cases which are currently changing laws. We talked about meeting birth moms, gifts, potential areas of concern, walking the line between being happy about the baby and not ignoring the birth mom and finished with the finalization process. I thought I had all the information I needed especially being this far into the process, but I still learned quite a bit.

The hard part is to think about how random the process is. We have been turned down by a birth mom because she wanted her daughter to be an only child, at least for now. The birth mom that came to talk to us wanted the same thing. Its hard to hear that and slightly discouraging, but then they reminded us that just as many moms want their kids to grow up with siblings and seek out families with kids. Race has also been an issue for us. It matters quite a bit to some people and not at all to others. The same can be said for our religion, pets, hobbies, jobs, pictures we put on the profile etc. We will be the absolutely last choice for some, but the perfect choice for one mom. That isn't reassuring for a control freak like me! A friend told Jon that this is the best place to be right now. Its out of our hands and in Gods hands. We have no pressure. All our work is done. In a way thats comforting, but in a way it doesn't really make it any easier.

We did get a pleasant surprise. Another family in the training class is from Lakewood. We also met a family from Bay Village and North Royalton. We are on our way to starting a Cleveland adoption support group. We also got to finally meet our social worker. I've been talking to her at least once a week for the past 4 months. It was great to put a face to the voice.

So now we are home and back to the reality of waiting. Back to pushing the anticipation to the back of our heads and praying for more patience.