Dylan Stafford

My wife and I are certified to adopt. We are officially a “waiting family” and somewhere out there a woman is pregnant and we will become the parents of the child she is carrying.

It is amazing that this can happen.

We spent the second half of 2011 taking all the steps required to adopt: paperwork, classes, CPR training, well-baby training. More paperwork and actions than getting a mortgage, but hey, a mortgage is only a 30-year commitment, children are forever.

I’m glad the process exists. I’m glad there are hoops to jump through because I wouldn’t want people adopting children on a whim.

Our adoption agency is Holy Family Services (HFS), which was founded in 1949, by Dolores (Mrs. Bob) Hope. The Hopes adopted four children according to Google. It humbles me how actions taken in 1949 by someone I’ll never meet–founding an adoption agency–will play out in our lives, the life of our birth mother, and the life of our new child, 63 years later, in 2012.

My cousin Joel adopted his two sons through HFS, ten and eight years ago respectively. It’s through Joel that we learned of HFS.

Holy Family Services places infants from the five counties of Los Angeles, whose mothers are voluntarily placing them up for adoption-that means we’ll be receiving a “Made in the USA” model, not some exotic import from China, Guatemala, Africa or Russia. Smile. We’ll let Angelina Jolie & Madonna cover the other continents.

The adoption journey differs from the natural pregnancy journey we had with Jackson back in 2006-2007. The biological road markers–conception, counting the weeks, counting the trimesters–those signs don’t exist in adoption. We don’t have the tummy-clock, we’re not watching Marisa’s tummy getting bigger and bigger.

Back in November, on a beautiful fall Saturday, we attended one of the classes offered by Holy Family Services, a “Pre-Adopt Workshop” required to be an adopting family. The workshop was held at USC, in the social services building. I had to miss work at UCLA. Honestly, I had a bit of an attitude going into the day, and not because I had to miss work and spend a day on the USC campus-UCLA’s arch rival.

“We already have a child. We’ve kept him alive and healthy for four-and-a-half years so far. Why do we need to take a class? I’m a busy guy and I don’t have time for this.” These were the thoughts going through my mind as we followed the GPS over to USC’s campus, the GPS that directed us close-but-not-quite-all-the-way to where we needed to go.

There’s nothing like the special kind of lost feeling that I get, the first time I visit a new university.

Marisa was next to me in the car, on the phone with her uncle. We were running late, and the GPS had dead-ended me and I didn’t know where to go next. I was mad at Marisa and silently blaming her for both being late and not helping me. The day didn’t bode very well. I parked with the hazard lights flashing, got out, and started asking random sidewalk people if they knew where the social services building was located.

After three shrugs and “Sorry-don’t-knows” one of the girls I had already asked came running back and pointed, “My friend just told me. It’s that building over there.”

We parked, filled a meter with quarters, and circled the building on foot until we found the open door.

We were one of four couples, plus a single woman who was going to adopt by herself. There were donuts and tangerines and a box of Starbuck’s coffee. Someone had gotten impatient and ripped the snout of the coffee box, so pouring coffee was awkward, but when there’s caffeine involved, I can be patient.

Were the couples our competition? Did we need to shine brighter than them to “get a good baby?” Thoughts like these have been coming up for me through the whole adoption process. The thoughts frustrate me because I start to feel like I’m competing for a used car on Ebay and that’s not the way I want to experience welcoming a human being into our family and into our life.

All my spiritual training has been coming to my aid. “Turn it over to God. I’m not in control. My job is to take the footsteps, not to worry about the destination.” All those simple cliches have been nourishing and useful to me.

To start the workshop, after we went around the room and introduced ourselves, our facilitator gave us each a blank piece of paper and said, “OK, let’s have you each anonymously write down your biggest fear about the adoption process.”

We each wrote something, folded our papers, and handed them to the front.

“I’m worried the birth mother, or her family, will come later and take the baby away.”

“I’m worried the baby will be sick.”

“I’m worried the baby will grow up and tell me ‘You’re not my real parents.'”

My worry was the second one, about sickness, and it was the same worry that I had when Marisa was pregnant with Jackson. Back then, in our pregnancy, our prayer was always, “Please let us have a healthy, happy baby.” That was our over-and-over prayer, healthy and happy.

The social worker told us about sickness, “You’ll have a full medical report from the hospital about your new baby, and we’ll actually require you to also take your new baby to your own pediatrician within the first 72 hours, so that you get an additional opinion. Of course, just like with biological kids, illnesses can show up later.”

Just like that, twenty minutes into this day that I’d been telling myself was worthless, and I already had my biggest adoption fear exposed, addressed and resolved. Adoption was just like regular pregancy, you had some information and things were subject to change at anytime.

The other two fears, of the baby being taken or the teenager saying “You’re not my real parents,” weren’t such big worries for me, but in the course of the workshop, those fears also were addressed and alleviated.

<<To be continued. I’ve been up since about 5:30AM, but I have to switch over into “Go to work” mode.>>