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.