Another Thanksgiving in the books

Another Thanksgiving in the books, possibly (hopefully) our last as a family of two (humans - can't forget those furbabies).

Thanksgiving 2022 - check

By the weekend's end, we'd set up our first Christmas tree - of the artificial variety, so you'll be seeing this guy again.

Our very first Christmas tree! We're so ready to be those parents for our future foster/adoptive kid.

I also installed a smart thermostat, a pretty sweet upgrade that will ensure we stay as eco-friendly as possible while ensuring our future child never has to come hold to an under-heated household. At this point, I'm not sure I can think of anything else we could do to prepare our home for this child/young adult we so wish to welcome. From our new locking wine barrel bar (keeping liquors behind lock and key) to the locks on all the tool boxes, the freshly drilled and installed locks on our kitchen and bathroom cabinets (keeping meds and cleaning supplies locked up), the acrylic protection on our one lovely original work of art, the new gender-neutral bedroom decor, the freshly-corded cat tree, and a million smaller details to ensure our home was as safe, clean, and well-kept as possible, we've done our part. Having hands tied by an agency that somehow, for over a month now, hasn't had a single staffer capable of performing the psycho-social assessment, that final step needed for our foster parent licensing, is driving me up a wall. The kid who we'd expected to contact by mid-December will now have to spend the holiday season unaware that there's a family out there that very much wants to open their doors to them.

We've done our part to prepare our home for our future foster/adoptive child.

"A teen who's available in December will still be available in January. You have nothing to worry about," says our agency director, completely missing the point that the holidays are such an important time of year for a child to feel loved and wanted. And that's not even touching on the use of the word "available" to describe a fellow human being, which makes my skin crawl.

It's killing me that there's nothing I can do to drive this timeline, and not for lack of trying: I went so far as to source an agency willing to sign a memorandum of understanding with our own so as to complete our home study at our own expense, only for our agency director to swear a new hire would be ready to begin our interview in-house at the start of December. And now, as the final days of November slip by, we're left with radio silence.

It's killing me that Nicolas is so relaxed about all this. He simply shrugs and says it's going faster than we'd initially planned. But we hadn't initially planned to lose our hearts to a child, a teen at that, in a way we didn't know we could.

It's killing me to not know anything more about a child who's stolen our hearts other than what I can see in a three-minute, carefully-edited clip and a few sentence blurb. Was that video ever a proper representation of the kid? Did it make him happy? proud? Even if it did, is it still true to this day? What else is there to know about this young person? Is that virtual representation of a kid that stole our hearts even an accurate and sufficiently complete representation of a human being who's out there today hoping for a family? And would that human hope for us? What would a move to California mean to a child who may never have traveled that far in their whole life?

It's killing me to not know how this kid celebrated Thanksgiving. Did they eat well? Were they happy? Did they feel loved? And thinking of them going into the holiday season, I wonder what their hopes may be. Do they even bother writing a Christmas list? Will they have family or loved ones with whom they'll spend Christmas and New Year's? Is it weird or even creepy for me to care this much about a perfect stranger I've only gotten to know via a three-minute video? Am I wrong for feeling this way? But then again, doesn't this kid (and every kid) deserve a mom that cares this much?

Am I imposing my own personal lens over this entire situation to my own detriment? For a child who's spent years in the system, a lack of family as the holidays approach may not have that acute pain I'm assigning it from my bias as a person who's never felt this lack. This world that I've only properly gotten to know over the past few months has been this kid's day-to-day for years, nothing new. Maybe it's not so important if it's December or January when it comes to getting the news that a family wants to chat. Maybe the date is entirely secondary to the news itself. Maybe.

There's just so much maybe in this all. With answers gated by bureaucracies that could make molasses tell you to pick up the pace. And there's this surreal experience between Nicolas and myself: it's as though I've already become a parent while leaving him behind in the pre-children world. I hear this sort of thing happens to heterosexual couples having kids the "normal" way - a woman becomes a mom once the pregnancy begins, but a man takes another nine months or so. I'd assumed this all came down to the biological experience, so you can imagine my bewilderment that we're somehow living this trope despite our distinctly non-traditional family planning.

A delightfully validating take on choosing not to have a bio family.

And none of these musing have even touched on how wildly our plans have evolved over the course of just a few months. Had you told me this past summer that by Thanksgiving my heart would be aching for a high schooler, I would have looked at your like you were crazy (and also told you wtf - seriously, I'm not a creeper). I don't think I realized that you could fall in love in a parental way. Sure, people talk about it all the time in the context of a doctor's visit when they first hear that heart beat. By that logic, why can't I feel it when adoptuskids.org sends me to a Vimeo link and I first a kid telling me hello? But this isn't the societally accepted narrative, so navigating these emotions feels all kinds of confusing.

Back in September, we had a plan: adopt a 5-10 year old, maybe two - perhaps a sibling pair. Enroll them in after-school classes at the Alliance Française de Berkeley until they're ready for the Oakland Francophone Charter School. If we could secure a scholarship, why not even the Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley, with all those fancy rich kids and a campus just ten to fifteen minutes walking from our home? By the time our kids would be ready for high school, if all went well, we could move back to France, completing the magic of forming our adoptive, bi-cultural, bilingual family. Maybe we'd even adopt Latinx children who already spoke Spanish because learning French would be that much more accessible for them. We didn't care about our kids' race - we'd love them all the same. Oh yes, we had a plan.

We hadn't thought about the ties that even kids in foster care have to their communities and loves ones. We didn't know that, in the face of so much loss of identity and sense of self that comes with family removal, the importance of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity grows to fill some of those holes. We didn't know that racially-blind adoption could in fact be a disservice to a child. And we certainly didn't know that the path to legally-available elementary-aged children was through concurrent parenting, with 70% odds of those children reuniting with their bio families, possibly after well over a year of them living as a part of our family, during which time we'd be on the hook for weekly visits with the bio family. We had no idea that the route around this minefield of heart ache was via the adoption of teens, a wildly overlooked subset of the foster children population with depressingly low odds of anything but ageing out, and frightening statistics about life outcomes thereafter. When a social worker casually mentioned the teenager option to us, she seemed to think this would convince us that concurrent parenting was the only route (because teens, really?). A few deep conversations later and we were on a completely unexpected journey.

What could it mean to adopt a teen? Would they ever think of us as mom and dad? Did that even matter, as long as they were family? We underwent a total paradigm shift - suddenly we found ourselves poised to be exceptionally young parents, aiming for a relationship that (if all went well) might ultimately become some sort of hybrid parent/cool-aunt/uncle. But frankly, sweet. Who doesn't want to go through life being a cool aunt/uncle? The more we dove in, the more we discovered what a magical age this could be. Teens are old enough that they have to consent to their own adoption, meaning we won't just choose our child but our child will choose us too. (Don't get me wrong, there's a massive power differential here for any kid who hopes to find a family, knowing turning us down could mean the difference between adoption and ageing out, but at least they'll have a voice.) Speaking of their voice, at this age these kids are starting to really come into their own - they have a sense of self that you just won't find in little kids, which gives us the opportunity to find that special kid out there who's growing into just our kind of human being.

Letting go of visions of bedtime stories and hand-holding while walking to school has made way for some extraordinary possibilities to pair up with a young person who we could be uniquely well-suited to shepherd into adulthood, as their biggest advocates, mentors, and cheerleaders. It's an opportunity to expand our tribe with chosen family that can "fit" us in the way that bio family often can't. Imagining an adult relationship with a child who just feels like their mom/cool aunt/tribe "fits" fills my heart. I know there's no guarantee, and I'm sure that me one year down the road will scoff at 2022 me's naivety, but heck, why not revel in the possibility? We have to start each journey filled with hope.

Our life plans have been going in ways we hadn't imagined just a few short months ago.

What this means for our bigger life plans is something we've yet to untangle. This certainly delays the vision of packing up and heading back to full-time life in Europe by the decade's end. We could hardly tell a kid who already lost one family that their second chance is peacing out to Europe. Maybe the new plan will be a hybrid 50/50 lifestyle between Paris and California. Or maybe our kid will fall in love with Europe that same way a young twenty-something-year-old woman I know once did. What's amazing is that there is no plan, and for now that's okay.

What's not okay is how many kids are going to bed tonight without a family, especially one certain special kid whose bed is made and waiting, to which this kid is heart-breakingly none the wiser.

Snapshot of a mid-30's Millennial life

About a decade ago (already?) I sat down and really digested where I was at. It helped a lot to pause and reflect on the journey I was on, something I haven't had much of an opportunity to do over the past few years of #startuplife. But I've been chewing on a few things, and I think it's time to a post on the thoughts of a mid-thirty-something-year-old.

What does it mean to be here today in my mid-thirties?

My twenties were a time of exploration, of wide-open possibilities, and of one-days. A decade later, some of those one-days are just starting to become todays. The exploration phase has been replaced by the nose-to-the-grindstone phase, like when the booze has to be replaced with the caffeine as you transition from brainstorming to hammering out a project. Here's a snapshot of an older Millennial's mid-thirties existence.

Career

When you're young and ambitious and generally successful, you have vague grand visions of what the future might hold. I remember my frustration while still in school when my dad sent me a cover story on a certain young college-drop-out, a rising star in biotech (before she became today's Elizabeth Holmes) and I wondered why I was taking so long to launch. I finally have launched. It can be hard to accept that my peak will never get me on the cover of a magazine or into any Top X People Under Y list. My peak is working for the richest man on the planet in arguably the coolest neurotech company out there. I own a little slice of this pie and we're going to see how much it grows. I get to make cool tech for people with disabilities, for whom I also get to use my platform to advocate internally at my company. And my job even lets me do cool things like privatize fancy restaurants or yachts in between the tech. Yet somehow, there's a part of me still struggling to embrace the fact that the brightest my star ever burn is as an integral member of a remarkable team, but never as a celebrated individual. Some of these limitations are of my own creation: I choose to sleep, to enjoy friends and sports on weekends, and to have a life outside of work. And yet there is still somewhere a sense of loss, of unfulfilled promise, that can be hard to acknowledge and accept. My career might not have been the nebulous glamor that I'd once vaguely envisioned, but it's fucking awesome. But that's easier said than internalized.

Marriage

That's right, 25-year-old me, someone really is going to put a ring on it! And it'll be a good marriage, an easy marriage. We're drama-free (a blessing it's easy to overlook), and I know that we can handle what life throws our way together. I've got a husband who doesn't mind that I'm rarely useful in the kitchen (beyond mixing cocktails), that I am constantly running in many directions, and that I'm almost always busy coming up with some new Big Plan. When Netflix peddles neatly packaged romances, it can be hard to remember that real life is much less shiny and lacks the well-defined story arc, and that doesn't mean it's missing something. And in fact, ours is on track to get a major win: we are poised to acquire our second nationalities, strengthening both our hands in this game of life.

Finance

Source

You can't make up for not saving a cent from your twenties overnight, but we are on track. The rate at which I'm collecting new passport stamps has wildly reduced, but that comes with the territory of 1. living in the US (less time off, and more time required to travel abroad), 2. having a two-body problem (tough to align two schedules for exciting adventures), and 3. hunkering down on the career and savings fronts. And it's not all about things we can't do: despite the Millennial trope, we've recently become home owners. Our home, like the rest of our finances, is good. No, it wasn't my dream that I'd spend well over a half million for a simple two-bedroom in a slightly sleepy former industrial neighborhood a few miles out from the happening downtown city center, but in today's housing market, I was able to access home ownership within biking distance of any restaurant or bar that might tickle my fancy. Cheers to that!

Community

What a fabulous development this has been over the past year! After missing yet another holiday season at home back in December 2021 and then planning back-to-back chandeleur parties over the first weekend in February to avoid cross-contamination between friend groups, I think we finally snapped and decided we'd had enough with the Covid paranoia. Deciding it was time to start coming out of our bubble and initiating our monthly board games nights is one of the best decisions I think we've made as a couple. We've built up a group of people from a surprisingly interesting set of backgrounds who all come together around games, conversation, and a home-cooked meal once a month, and they bring so much warmth and kindness. It's taken quite some time to get here, but this finally feels like the roots we'd been struggling to plant since landing in California.

Family

This has never been something that I've wanted in the traditional sense. Having a husband who is happy to chart out our own path is such a blessing. Our three fur babies bring us so much joy, and our home certainly has the space for our own unique addition. Despite decades of constantly being told that I'd change my mind or just hadn't yet met the right guy, adoption has always been the path I've dreamt of. And we've finally begun the journey. Although I've occasionally mourned the opportunity to get to meet the human that could be half me and half Nicolas, biological parenting is not the track for me. I have no desire to bear a child, to endure the sleepless nights and the endless diapers, the sticky hands, the pre-verbal frustrations. And I honestly find so much more meaning in giving a second chance to a child in need. I've been heartened by the responses of our friends and even family to our plans. It's been surprising to see how our ideas have changed now that the abstract is beginning to become a near-future plan. Our thoughts about target age, bilingual/bi-cultural integration, and possible international family moves have all undergone surprising revisions as we learn more about the system and the needs of the children in it.

I've been wrapping my head around the idea that part of finding happiness is deciding what kool aid you're okay drinking while still not forgetting that you are drinking somebody's kool aid. There are so many structural inequities and problematic issues in just about whatever we do that the best we sometimes do is just minimize the harm, hopefully do some good, and learn what things we're okay to compromise on without losing ourselves in the process. It's funny that nobody teaches us this along the way, but maybe even if they did it wouldn't make sense until we live it and learn it ourselves.

Nothing is as shiny as I'd once imagined it might be, but everything is solid. My health is such a non-issue that I didn't even devote any notes to that. Nothing feels particularly glamorous, but I suppose this is a snapshot of a privileged mid-thirty-something existence.

Discovering our new home

We've officially called Emeryville our home for a full year now, but between full-time jobs and Financially Responsible Life Decisions™, we still haven't gotten to properly know quite a bit of our home town. Cue the parental visit, a perfect excuse to play hosts (with our newly liberated guest room!), show off the classics (a tour of the Marina, Berkeley Aquatic Park, the absurd produce selection at Berkeley Bowl, cannelés from La Noisette pastry shop, and bingsoo at U:Dessert Story), and get to explore some new local highlights (Novel Brewing and - who knew? - the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley). We even hit up a Zac Brown concert because why not? 2022 has been the year we've finally begun splurging on a variety of concerts, so rounding it out with a night of country sounded about right.

Highlights of the visit: a walk along the Emeryville Marina on a particularly clear day - Golden Gate in full view!; a Zac Brown concert at the Oakland arena - nosebleed section still gets a great show; a mango sticky rice bingsoo, yes please; our first trip (finally!) to our neighbors at Novel Brewing - tasty enough to be the first of many.

Sightings from an afternoon spent wandering through the University of California's Botanical Gardens at Berkeley - a really remarkable place to lose yourself.