For more than a year, we hoped somehow to amass $20,000 to $30,000 to adopt internationally. I found Ethiopian children could be adopted for $16,000, and there was a volume discount—the more you adopted the cheaper they were. Racism and ableism played a hand in the supply and demand of adoptable babies. White children without disabilities cost the most.
My attempts at getting the money turned comically desperate. I tried winning $10,000 from America’s Funniest Home Videos. I had submitted a tape of our German shepherd, Walt, playing tetherball. It wasn’t completely ridiculous; he got air like Tony Hawk. I was confident he would have beat out the ubiquitous toddler hitting his dad in the nuts with a bat. While I did get a contract, he never made the final cut, and I realized I had pinned too much hope on this scheme.
One morning in April 2008, while still in bed, I turned to Ward and said we should adopt through the foster care system. No revelation. No real epiphany. It was a totally pragmatic decision. We wanted a kid, and the state had free ones.
“Sounds good,” Ward responded.
Ward is like the Gary Cooper of husbands, which can be maddening when you want to talk about something but awesome when you just want to get on with it. The next month we went to an informational meeting on state adoptions at DHHS, and we got on with it.
To get a child from DHHS, you have to attend twenty-four hours of classes, twenty-three hours of which are basically designed to scare the crap out of you about the prospect of adopting a child in protective custody. Our instructors, Doris and Susan, were both mothers who shared their personal horror stories of trying to parent their “damaged kids” who were adopted from foster care. They also provided numerous examples gleaned from years of anecdotal-evidence gathering that sounded like plot lines from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
By the second night of class, it was clear these women wanted to prepare us for the worst kid we could ever imagine. They were real buzz kills when it came to getting in the dreamy parenting mood, and I wondered, Is this really the way to market these kids? What about playing up the resiliency of the human spirit? Did these kids know this is how they were being portrayed? Could they sue for defamation of character?
Halfway through the classes, I reached my limit of hearing about the killing of yet another family pet at the hands of a crazed eight-year-old or how you can love your little adoptive kid all you want, but if he has RAD (reactive attachment disorder) there is nothing you can do to get little Charlie Manson to love you back. In fact, your attempts at loving him might be met with resentful anger. I was glad we were hopeful to adopt a toddler because I figured I had a good chance of surviving an attack by someone under three feet tall.
I shared my fears with Ward, and he felt the same way. During the next class, we divided into small groups, and I took the opportunity to poll my group of prospective parents on their thoughts, whispering because I didn’t want Doris or Susan to know I was questioning their tactics.
“Hey, I have a question,” I said. “Is anyone else freaked out about all this killer-kid stuff?”
Charles, who stood about 6 feet 2 inches, weighed 190 pounds, and had three biological kids, said, “God, I can’t take it anymore! I’m having nightmares!”
“Charles, be cool!” I looked over my shoulder to see if Doris or Susan were on to us.
The consensus with the others in the group was the same: what had we gotten ourselves into? Ward and I agreed this was our path, based solely on financial reasons, so I needed to make this okay in my mind. I started searching online to see if this anecdotal information was borne out in any data. I began with high profile cases of children who killed their biological parents. I also searched “adopted children killing their adoptive parents.” In reality, kids had a greater chance of being killed by their adoptive parents. And, overall, children are less likely to kill their parents, biological or adoptive, than be killed by them.
Before class that evening, I presented my findings to Ward, which I had titled the “Menendez Theorem.” I told Charles as well because he seemed so much more distraught than any of us. For the remainder of our classes—whenever Doris or Karen told a particularly chilling tale—Ward and I took turns whispering out of the side of our mouths, “Menendez.”
During another class, we were instructed to create a family profile that could be sent to DHHS workers throughout the state. The profile was essentially a marketing tool to engage a worker on our merits as prospective parents, or as Karen explained, “Adoption staff are overworked. No one will contact you. You contact them.”
A perky lady in our class who wore matching pastel-colored sweat pants and hoodies got the jump on all of us. She brought in a marketing confection she had whipped up overnight: handmade, colorful, laminated bookmarks with her family’s profile on it, employing both text and photos. She had pulled fluffy yellow yarn through a perfectly punched hole at the top.
I hated her. What if this junior Martha Stewart got our kid with her artsy crafty ways? Where once we were all classmates, we were now future adoptive parents in competition with each other. There were only so many kids, only so many caseworkers, and only so many ways to set ourselves apart from
