Do I have the courage to tell you this whole story?
That’s what I’m asking myself even as I type these words. For days now, in moments when my mind is spinning with all the questions and what-ifs, I’ve asked myself how I would explain all of this . . . How I could tell you this story.
Honestly? I don’t want to.
I want to keep it close to my heart, to hide it away in the hopes that it will hurt me less if it stays hidden. But then I understand that when things are hidden, we give power to the fear, the negativity, the lies. I don’t want to allow that to happen. I want so badly to be honest about our experience—mostly because I didn’t know this experience was even a possibility and because I wish I had truly understood.
Would it have changed our choices?
I’m not sure. But the hope that by being honest about what’s happened to our family we might empower or inform other prospective adoptive families is what has me writing these words down now. I hope I have the courage to include them in this book, because truthfully, after building a career based on total honesty . . . I hesitate telling you this now.
But here it is.
When I was pregnant with our son Ford, we decided that we wanted to adopt a little girl someday. As Christians we are called to care for the orphans, the widows, and the oppressed. These are not just a handful of words from the Bible; they are the tenets of my faith. And so we began to research our options and settled on international adoption. Our reasoning—the irony of which is not lost on me in hindsight—was that we were afraid of involvement from biological parents. We were so naïve about so many things back then, but our fear was that biological parents might come back into the picture and take the baby back. We reasoned that if we were an ocean apart, that scenario would be impossible. Eventually we narrowed our search down to Ethiopia.
I remember feeling so overwhelmed by the paperwork, the blood tests, the home visits. I had no idea we were at the very beginning of a journey that would last nearly half a decade. So without any real perspective, I planned and dreamed and waited for news from our agency that we were slowly inching our way up the list. We were in the Ethiopian program for two years.
Toward the end of the second year we received word that Ethiopia was “pausing” its adoption program, and our agency told us to consider moving to another country’s program. I felt frozen about what to do next. Moving to a new country meant starting all over again. New paperwork, new meetings, new waiting lists . . . I believed God had called us to Ethiopia, and I believed if we were faithful he would make a way. We decided to stay in the program. Every month we’d get an email from the agency.
Still no movement.
The government office that handles adoptions is still on hiatus.
No word.
Six months later they closed adoptions to the United States completely.
I felt stunned and unsure. If God had called us here, and if nothing came out of the work and pain and fear, what had been the point? All the dreams I’d had about going to Africa as a family to meet our daughter made me feel foolish in retrospect. For the first time I asked myself questions that would pop up again and again over the next several years: Should we still try and adopt? Should we just feel content with the incredible blessing we have in our three sons? Should we give up?
I am not by nature someone who sits long with a problem. I am also not someone who gives up. I started to pray and research and scour the internet for what we should do next.
Maybe we were supposed to do domestic adoption . . . Maybe we’d gone through what we did because we were always meant to adopt our daughter from the States and she wasn’t even born yet. That answer felt right, so I researched some more.
The more I looked into what was available, the more I believed we should adopt from foster care. We felt called to Ethiopia because they have an unrelenting orphan crisis, and we thought we could help there in some small way. Foster care was the same for me. There were so many children in Los Angeles County who needed love and care; both were things we could offer in abundance. In LA, you have to commit to doing foster care before you can be entered into the adoption program. At first we were terrified of what this would mean for our family or how it would affect our boys. Then we decided that exposing the kids to this reality and showing them how we could tangibly show up for other families who need us was worth it.
We entered the system for foster-to-adopt.
What we didn’t know at the time was how difficult that journey was. We didn’t understand that we’d get foster placement with a medically frail baby and that the department would have no knowledge of her extreme medical need. We didn’t know that they would call us three days after she arrived and beg us to take her two-year-old sister—going from a family of five to a family of seven in a matter of days. We didn’t understand the delicate dance of managing a relationship with biological parents who were, in many ways, children themselves. I personally didn’t understand how traumatic it would be for me when the girls eventually transitioned out three months later.
I mourned the loss of the foster girls and tried to wrap my brain around what I now knew about this broken system. I thought we’d have months before we got a call for adoptive placement.
It came thirty-four days later.
I was sitting in my office at work when I received an email from our social worker. The subject line was: Twins?
We never anticipated taking twins. We weren’t signed up for two babies at all, but apparently agreeing to take on the second girl in our foster care journey had made it possible for us to consider it.
We weren’t told much about them. The girls were three days old, they’d been abandoned by their mother at the hospital . . . and we had thirty minutes to decide. We sat on the phone together and talked through it while freaking out. Newborn twins? Could we do it? Were we ready after so recently experiencing the loss in foster care? We prayed it over, and ultimately we called the social worker and said the biggest yes of our whole lives.
After waiting four years for an adoption call, we barely slept that night. We spent hours coming up with names. We were so excited we couldn’t eat the day we went to pick them up. At the hospital I thought I might be sick waiting for them to bring the babies into the room. And then there they were—so precious and tiny and beautiful I felt like the luckiest person in the whole world because they were ours. Certainly I knew that in foster-to-adopt there would be hurdles and roadblocks, but the story we were told about them led us to believe that reunification was a slim possibility. We took them home and didn’t sleep for days because, well, newborn twins. But we didn’t even care. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
Four days later, at ten o’clock at night, the police rang our doorbell.
What a harsh and shocking sound. I was so surprised when I heard the doorbell that night that I wondered if a package was being delivered—that’s how outside the realm of possibility this was for us. The doorbell rang in the middle of the night and my first thought was, Is that the almond butter I ordered?
I think that memory is the hardest for me; I mark it as the last moment I still held on to a naïveté about how things really functioned in the world we were now a part of.
It wasn’t FedEx.
It was two police officers, informing us that someone had made an anonymous call to the child abuse hotline about our family for our previous foster care placement.
I stood on my front porch wearing boxer shorts with little hearts on them. My mind was foggy from sleep deprivation, and I tried so hard to understand the words that were coming out of their mouths.
Over the next few days I would learn just how common this practice is in the foster care system. Because the child abuse hotline is anonymous, anyone can do it. Anyone can say whatever they want. They can do it for spite, to harm your family, to draw attention away from themselves, or a million other reasons I’d prefer not to think about anymore. I obsessed over them for days, and the obsessing did nothing. No matter what we said or did, we could not escape it. The result of a phone call like that is an intense investigation.
Now, let me pause here and say that an investigation is necessary. Of course it is. Child abuse is a horrendous, deplorable crime, and if the system doesn’t investigate it, how will they protect the children in foster care? I understand this on an intellectual level. On another level, I had to sit in my living room and listen to someone from the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) ask my sons questions about whether or not “Mommy and Daddy ever hit each other when they got really, really mad.” Or if someone ever “touched them underneath their underwear.”
I tried so hard to be strong for my boys in those moments. I tried to keep a smile on my face while holding an eight-day-old baby and telling them, “It’s okay, buddy, just answer them honestly.”
When the boys left the room, I sobbed quietly while signing documents that gave the DCFS office the right to pull the boys’ medical records, to review their school documents, and to ask them further questions.
The whole time the litany that kept playing on repeat in my mind was, I am the one who pushed us to do foster care. I exposed my family to this system. I worked so hard to make sure my children would never experience the trauma I’d experienced as a girl, yet I’d unwittingly called it down on our family.
I had no idea.
I was so extremely naïve about what could happen to us. I assumed that the worst thing we’d manage would be the trauma the children in foster care had been exposed to . . . It never occurred to me we’d be attacked simply by virtue of being involved in that world. And I knew—we knew—we were completely innocent of this suspicion, but ultimately our record will show “inconclusive.” Not “innocent,” because how can they clearly say we are innocent when they are working with accusations and the child in question is too young to speak? This isn’t a system where you are innocent until proven guilty. This is a system where you are guilty until deemed inconclusive.