Operation Insemination

We had no warning. In fact, she just never came home from day treatment with bio mom. 

We are soooo done with DCFS.  I put in my “2 Weeks Notice/You Suck” with the state. Not signing up for any more of their bullshit. Best interests of the child, my ass.

And this is why we can’t recycle Squeaker’s nursery….her crib is enormous and now we need two. Or maybe we could push out a wall….hmm….

We officially changed our request with the adoption agency from one infant to:

two infants, twins or unrelated, as young as possible at time of matching, as close in age to each other (if unrelated). One boy. One girl. 

Holy cow. 

I get to decorate a new nursery. (This will be my 4th). Couldn’t I just re-cycle the other nursery stuff, you ask? Well, yeah, but where’s the fun in that?

Squeaker only gets more adorable by the minute. Bio Mom is sincerely working hard, doing well, and making progress in treatment. Squeaker gets to join her during the days now at the treatment facility. 

Our international adoption is rolling along…we’ve progressed from the “Shit Ton of Paperwork” Phase to the “Waiting to be Matched” Phase. Yes, Shit Ton of Paperwork is the official term for it. 

With the future a baby that will never ever go away (yay) until we push her out to college (yay), and our frustration with Squeaker’s idiot caseworker, we think we’re going to hang up our foster hats once the little one goes. Re-juice, regroup, and try to live like normal adults whose every moment doesn’t hinge on what DCFS feels like doing that day. 

Relatedly, I write “her” because we started the process while we still had Little Bean, thinking he would be ours forever. It only made sense to request a girl from our agency.  We’re playing around with the idea of taking one of each….or twins….are we crazy? The additional cost is minimal if we were to adopt 2 together, rather than turning around in a year or two to Brangelina it.  Yup, just used “Brangelina” as a verb. 

How do we feel about having a short-term placement? 

I think we’re okay with it. Our international adoption process has moved extremely smoothly and we know that we will have a permanent child in the future.  Of all the birth parents I’ve dealt with, Squeaker’s bio mom seems the most put-together. I can tell that she is devoted to her baby, and she seems like a good mom to her other children (who have remained in her custody this whole time). Not that it’s our job to say if she’s a “good enough” parent or not….but I think this family would be a good example of foster care actually working as far as reunification goes.  Above all, we feel like Squeaker will be okay if she goes home, which is not something we’ve felt with other babies. 

We still have lots of fun buying unnecessary baby shit and cute pink frilly things :)  And, its been fun to buy some baby gear for her bio mom in anticipation of her reunification. Kinda like a baby shower…

I wish we could say we are just as invested in Squeaker, but we’re not.  If she seems fussy, we’ll give her a bottle early rather than stick to her routine - something we hardly ever did with Little Bean. When grandma and grandpa give us a hard time about not letting her (or any of our babies) watch tv, we give in and let her “watch” Dr. Seuss.  We worked really hard to establish and maintain Little Bean’s nap schedule, ensuring that he fell asleep in his crib every time.  If Squeaker cries in protest, we’ll let her fall asleep in her swing or vibrating bouncy seat because it’s just easier.  She is still loved and well-taken care of and happy and content, but it seems more like long-term babysitting than forever-parenting.  I guess we’re just more relaxed because we know she’ll go home to a more relaxed-style of parenting anyway…

Does that make us bad foster parents? I feel guilty even writing it. 

Bathtime with Mama was part of Little Bean’s nightly routine. Our fourth night with Squeaker, we did bathtime and because we didn’t have a lot of girl pjs yet, we made do with some of Little Bean’s pjs.  It about sent me over the edge. The only thing I could think of while lathering Squeaker with Johnson’s Baby Wash was that this used to be our every night with Little Bean.  And now there’s no more Little Bean, but this new little baby instead.

Our latest update is that Bio Mom has been diligently working to get Squeaker back.  The Caseworker thinks it’ll be quick. 

The call for Squeaker has been confusing from every angle.  It wasn’t as exciting as we thought it would be, in fact, the whole scenario gave us a weird feeling from the beginning. We were both shocked to get a call for a girl, which is ridiculous as we’d last had a boy and don’t really care either way.  We waited a week and a half after the initial call to find out if she was actually coming or not, during which we teetered between near-indifference and mild excitement.  After the initial rush of her arrival faded away, we were left with this little stranger.  Not our baby.  Someone else’s.  Not Little Bean.  

Maybe we feel this way because she’s not meant to be ours. Maybe it’s too soon after loosing Little Bean to reopen the wound of a possible child. We don’t know. 

I remember thinking after loosing my first foster baby girl that another little baby might make things better. In the four months that passed between loosing her and getting Little Bean, I had time to grieve. Time to sit in misery.  Time to be angry and depressed and wonder if things would ever be right again.  Four months is not nearly long enough to grieve the loss of a child, but I felt that the worse was over.  The blurry beginning of our little family with Little Bean only stung the wound I thought was healing.  But there was Beau Jangles, so excited, and my parents and hers, overflowing with joy at our new son.  My baby girl’s memory has become less painful and more distant as time has passed.  Little Bean didn’t fill the hole.  Time, faith, and new hope did.

The emotions have been difficult, but at the end of the day, we have a beautiful, healthy baby girl to love and cuddle and hope for…

The casualness of it still astounds me.  No paperwork, nothing for me to sign, just a car in the driveway and there’s our baby for the next month or year or forever. 

The CPS worker mumbled through some information (possibly true, probably incorrect) while opening the back car door and there she was, with her little blue eyes wide as saucers at these new people and this new place and having just been carted over state lines in a different carseat with different smells and different everything.

They always look so small and endangered at first.

And then only more differentness and newness as I unbuckled her and instinctively cradled her close to my chest.  Differentness and newness for both of us.  I haven’t held a baby girl since loosing Peanut.  That was almost a year ago.  But there was so much sameness too.  I had flashes of getting Peanut and London while the CPS worker explained what a burp cloth was.  The excitement, the trepidation of the future, the overwhelming sense to “get everything in order” and organize baby products.  Rapid-fire nesting, I guess.

And then it was the 3 of us.  Completely nonplused, we mixed formula while ordering Domino’s as Grandma and Grandpa headed over to welcome the new little one into our world.  Squeaker’s wide-eyed stare quickly turned into ear-to-ear smiles.

Our new little roommate  : )

I’ve dreaded writing this post. Dreaded putting into words how we lost our son, almost 4 weeks ago, when things were so close to being done.  The gritty details of court, bio mom failing to follow through, and criticisms of ICWA don’t matter.  When all is said and done, the Indian Child Welfare Act and the half of Little Bean that was Native American was what determined the end.

I had been down this road before.  I, better than anyone, know that anything can happen until an adoption is final.  Little Bean came to us 4 months to the day after loosing my baby girl, who had been mine for five months, just a month shy of an adoption finalization date.  If anything, I should have been cynical and skeptical from the beginning.  But despite the fresh pain of loosing my little girl, this image won out:

Our little family, on the first day with Little Bean.  Beau Jangles, head over heels in love with such a tiny little bean of a person who squawked (sometimes) and snuggled into your neck and gave you the most pensive looks while suckling away at his bottle.  Her excitement and insistence that this was our baby was contagious. Too enticing to resist.

Six months later, I still held on to her optimism that Little Bean was our son. It was what got me through the ups and downs leading up to court, where bio mom failed to veto ICWA and allowed the tribe to place him with his uncle.  I guess at that point, optimism wasn’t really a viable coping strategy.

The hard thing was that we already “lost” Little Bean once. We were misinformed about a secret, non-existent court date giving the Tribe jurisdiction (stellar “caseworking,”  i tell you). You would think that the actual loss would be a little easier the second time around. After all, we’d practiced.  Practiced the crying, the packing (read: pack-crying), the telling ourselves that it would be okay, and the suffocating sorrow that makes you want to crawl into an elderly woman’s towel closet and die.  Practicing doesn’t help.

Court was on a Tuesday.  I had to tell the nanny to not bother coming Wednesday, or Thursday, or anytime in the near future.  I had to tell the family and friends who all love Little Bean. Worst of all, I had to tell Beau Jangles.  We don’t get to go to court together, since that’s a right reserved for straight foster couples only (separate but equal, y’all).  We had three miserably sad “goodbye” days, and then Friday morning, he was gone.  Shotgun Jane (caseworker) bounced around like an annoying macaw that gives you the overwhelming urge to either strangle or shoot it (we did neither), while the rest of us loaded his things into the car. A final hug, kiss, and rub of his little mohawk, and that was it.

And then we were just numb. There was nothing else to say. Nothing else to do. Just the pain of having lost the little boy you had planned your future around. And now the shit of it is that we have to plan a new future, sans Little Bean.

The weird part of foster-adoption is the suddenness of it all. Just like that, Little Bean was ours, and we were parents who had to worry about things like diapers and middle of the night formula mixing. And,  just as abruptly, he was gone. Our lives are changed by phone calls and court dates. The only certainty is uncertainty and the complete inability to plan.  People tell us that they “don’t know how we do it.”  We don’t know either.

This is our favorite recent pic of Little Bean.  We have it framed in a 11 x 14 in the dining room. 

After six attempts with at-home insemination, we decided to move on.  Pregnancy has never been our first priority.  I think we might have skipped trying for it all together if adoption were more affordable and permanent.   

Everything has been on the table as we’ve rode the roller coaster with Little Bean.  We’ve discussed doctor-insemination, even in-vitro, and both domestic and international adoptions. 

We are wildly optimistic about adopting Little Bean.  Even though we haven’t heard from Bio Mom, we’ve always felt that he was our son.  And, because we want a little sibling for him, we have decided to pursue an international adoption. 

We signed with an agency a month ago and are in the paper-chase phase.  We so badly wish we could say WHERE we are adopting from, but since same-sex international adoption scene is pretty much non-existant, we have to stay quiet until everything is final. 

Saying we’re excited is an understatement.  We just had to swallow the big price tag of international adoption fees.  Once we were over that hurdle (including a loan against Beau Jangle’s retirement account…), adopting internationally seemed like such an obvious choice. 

(I’ll pre-emptively state that we don’t think our adoption path is not the “best” or “right for everyone.”  Seems like a lot of people want to jump in and criticize the decision to adopt in a particular way.)

Went to our super-amazing nanny’s wedding.  Little Bean was a total peach.  Not a peep during the whole wedding or reception, except for a few glee-full giggles during the dinner speeches.