My Thoughts on the "Rules"

Before I try to catch everyone up on our story, I thought I'd back up a minute and explain how we got here.

I fully realize there are "rules" in international adoption. Adoption agencies embrace these to varying degrees, from absolute allegiance to all of them, to allowing families to make their own decisions. The agency I work for, allows some flexibility on most of the "rules", which allows me to work there and feel good about the adoptions I am part of. The agency we have adopted through, is closest to my heart with regards to the "rules".

So my philosophy is that the "rules" are good guidelines for discussion among family members making adoption decisions, and probably also with the social worker doing their homestudy. I respectfully and firmly disagree with agencies that require families to follow all of them.

If you are unfamiliar with international adoption, these are the rules I am talking about.
1. You should not adopt out of birth order. Meaning - you should only adopt a child younger than the youngest in your home.

2. You should not add a child to your family less than a year from your last addition.

3. You should not adopt 2 unrelated children.

4. You should not "artificially twin" children. Meaning you should not adopt a child with less than 9 months of age difference from another child in your home.

5. There should never, under any circumstances, be a reason to disrupt an adoption.

I'm sure there are others, but these are the huge ones.

I fully realize that what I am about to say is controversial. That's the point. It is my opinion. I don't intend to speak for anyone else. Since my family has broken many of these, I'd like to share our reasoning.

I believe that all of these rules are put in place by well-meaning social workers who want to protect children and families. There are many horror stories behind the rules. Aren't bad experiences usually the grounds we use to set new laws in this country? There is good reasoning behind each of these, and I don't disagree with the reasoning.

My disagreement is with binding all families to them without discussion. I believe every family is unique. We parents know our kids best. So with the help of a wise homestudy worker, a family can truly make the best decision for their family.

Chris and I come from the world of foster care. As a state foster care family, none of these rules are part of things. You often take in kids in less than a year's time. You often take in unrelated kids, and they are sometimes the same ages. We had many kids older than our oldest biological child. And sometimes kids are moved because there are issues with the placement - it isn't the right fit for the child or the family, and since the relationship is not legal and final, there is no one to blame in that. The child is able to find a family that better meets their needs at that time, and the foster family is able to heal and grow in ways they couldn't during the placement. So that's our history. But I have a few more thoughts to add.

The birth order one, is a big one for me. I grew up in a family of 6 kids from 2 marriages. I was the 4th in the line-up, but the oldest in my parents' marriage. I wasn't screwed up by having 2 birth roles. In fact I feel pretty enriched by it. I have all the traits of an oldest child, but I also have 3 amazing older sisters, and got to have the experiences of being a younger sister. I'm not advocating divorce, but I am saying that families are sometimes more complex than they first appear.

I work with blended families in my work. In the process of becoming a new family, these families have grown and stretched, and worked hard at forging new roles and relationships. - All of the experiences that they will need as an adoptive family. So in looking at some of these families (as mine was), say there are older kids from one marriage, and younger kids from another. Adding a very young child would preserve the new roles of the family, but would definitely disrupt the youngest child's delicately balanced new role. Adding a child in the middle makes perfect sense to me. The oldest kids keep their places, and the youngest kids keep theirs. For some families this makes the most sense, and to me, this is a decision that a family will know the best answer for.

In our family, Chris and I started out as foster parents 10 years ago. Our first child was 16. We are already unconventional right there. We both truly enjoy older kids. We also fell in love with specific kids, who happened to be older. Our boys are used to our family having flexible roles, and the younger two maintain their roles as youngest anyway.

When we added E.R., she came into our family older than our new birth son. She absolutely adores her role as big sister, and no one can imagine J.T.'s life without his sister. She also entered our family 6 weeks after his birth. It was a rough summer, but that is how the timing of her adoption worked out. And Chris and I are used to adding sibling groups to our family in foster care, so again, this was a decision we felt comfortable making. And we wouldn't change a thing about it now. I guess my point is that while we gave the rules much thought, we made the decisions that we felt led to make, and they were right for us.

Our most successful foster placement was a child that was 3 months younger than our oldest (so an artificial twin), and older than our other son. That child fit into our family much more easily than their younger sibling who broke none of the "rules".

My final argument is based on my faith, which I fully realize won't apply to everyone. But as a Christian, I feel that adoption rules are guidelines. Jesus said nothing about what kind of child we could adopt, or where they should fit into our family, or what to do if there were serious safety issues after their adoption. So I believe that it isn't an agency's right to dictate those rules as some sort of adoption gospel. Maybe the biggest reason is that I believe that above all, Jesus wants us to take care of the children orphaned in this world. And in my opinion, the best way to do that is in a family. Any rule that will decrease a child's chance of having an opportunity at a family, should really be evaluated. Teens, like our girls, are pretty darn limited if their only option is a family that has already raised their kids. There are some great families like that. And there are many more like ours - with energy, and space, and a deep commitment to making a difference for a young person who needs a future and a family.

Another issue with the birth order question is that the rule is looking at the adoptive family. The other huge factor in the equation is the new child. Were they the oldest, the youngest, or the middle in their birth family? Does middle mean middle of 3, or of 18 - big difference. Adding an older child to your family that was an older child in their birth family might make more sense than adding a younger child to your family that was the oldest in their birth family, or an older child that is the oldest in your family, but the youngest in their birth family. Or any of these situations might work great, depending on the personalities of the kids involved. But discussing the new child's experience makes sense to me - and we don't seem to do that. We just expect them to fit into the role we assign them, yet the rule basically says that the family's other children can't adjust their roles. Confusing!

In a perfect world we wouldn't even need a discussion about adoption disruption. But this isn't a perfect world, as adoptive families know as well as anyone. Sometimes a placement doesn't go well, and it doesn't get better over time. Sometimes there are safety issues, and the safety of other children in the home HAS to factor in somehow. We had several foster placements that ended when things weren't working. One was intended to be an adoption. I know how excruciatingly painful those decisions are, and I can only imagine how much more painful after a legal adoption. We can only support families to the best of our abilities, and then continue to support them in the painful decisions that sometimes have to be made. I don't really expect anyone to understand what we went through, but the support we received meant everything to our healing. And the child we loved, was eventually adopted by the truly "right" family for them. To preserve an adoption at the cost of the rest of the family - I'm not sure is the best thing for anyone involved, but that is a decision that MUST be made by the family that will live with the consequences either way.

So I don't feel particularly defensive about my stand on the rules, but I do feel strongly that parents are capable of making the best choices for their families. And if I am defensive it is simply because if we had been forced to follow the rules, not one of our 3 adopted children would be part of our lives - and that would be a tragedy for all of us.

And that's how both of our adoptions have broken the birth order rule, and one added 2 unrelated (biologically - aren't we adoptive families always trying to explain that biology isn't everything?) kids within 6 weeks of each other.

We are totally happy with the decisions we made, and I wanted to explain why.

So Much to Say...

We have been home 2 weeks now. It has flown by, but also seems like forever ago that we were in Ethiopia.

I have no idea where to start. This adoption is so different from our last. There are so many more layers involved because of the girls' ages. There is so much more that I feel protective about. I'm not sure where the lines are about what is okay to share publicly. This isn't just my story, or Chris and my story. It is theirs - possibly even more. I've been tempted to end this blog with their arrival. (It doesn't help that blogger has some changes, and for some reason I can't log into my blog anymore! I can only get in by clicking on a link when someone responds to a post. So if I disappear completely, that is is what happened). I'm just unsure how to proceed, and how to have a family blog with older kids, whose friends all have access to the information!

So I don't know how this will all work out long-term. But for right now, I'm coming to the conclusion that our story needs to be told, somehow. There are older kids aging out of orphanages and transition centers everyday. If we can encourage even a few people to take this leap, and take a chance on changing a young person's future forever, then it is worth it to me to try to figure out a way to protect my kids, and still tell our story.

So let me sort this out over the next couple of days, and then I promise pictures and updates for everyone that is trying not to hound me. :)

We are doing great overall. I always tell the families I work with that the first 2 weeks of placement are the absolute hardest. Post-placement panic is real, and can affect everyone in different ways. And then there is the grief factor, and language barrier, and cultural differences, and the hard work of becoming a new family that is a bit different from what everyone knew before. That is where we are at.

This is different than a younger child adoption. And by younger, I mean 10 and under. It is deeper, more confusing, and in some ways scarier for all of us. Our girls can cook, and we are committed that they often have food that is familiar to them. They are fluent in their native language, Amharic, and we are committed to it always remaining their first language. Our phone rings off the hook with calls from friends around the country. It means a lot to Chris and I to see their faces light up at the familiar voice of friends they shared their lives with.

Lots of the attachment advice we treaded through with E.R., just doesn't seem to apply in this adoption, with our teenage girls. They needed school quickly, and jumped in. They need old friends, and deeply need new ones as well. Yes, I'm all for grieving and making sure there is space for that, but at their ages, they also need joy, and memories, and new adventures. So Chris and I are formulating our own attachment philosophy for way-older kids. It is much less clear than the theories we are used to, and much more interesting to think about in so many ways.

With E.R.'s adoption, we were an American family, committed to embracing Ethiopian culture in our family. With this adoption, we are becoming a sort of blended Ethiopian-American family. Since we are committed to the girls keeping their Amharic, the girls speak Amharic to each other and to their friends. The hard part of that is that the rest of us are left out of their intense joy, humor, and probably sadness. The things that are too hard to translate in the moment. But we are getting used to that. And I enjoy seeing their lively expressions, when they can talk to each other, and not have to think about how to say something. They can just "be". And they both need that right now.

So we are great. And this is hard. It is hard in ways I was prepared for, and in ways I wasn't . And we love both these girls so much more deeply than we could have imagined.