Matching Meeting

Our matching meeting was reassuring. A lot of the stuff I knew already, but having our worker repeat it to us in a calm voice made a huge difference.

I now have a list of 30 children from photolistings, and some of them are two-brother and two-sister groups. Our worker explained that she'll send of inquiries and phone messages on all of them. Maybe a third of the caseworkers will get back to her. Often, the listings are out of date. She reminded us that diagnoses and need levels can be unreliable. An unscrupulous foster parent might be exaggerating the need level in order to get a higher state subsidy. Yikes! Conversely, a caseworker or foster parent may be downplaying the significance of certain issues for various reasons. She encouraged us to have her inquire on any child that fit our parameters even remotely.

I've heard stories of people sending off inquiries for hundreds of photolistings before getting back one response that the child's caseworker might be interested in them as a possible placement.

Age: 0-7. Almost all the children on our list are 4-7. Because we're not a medically qualified home, no serious physical disabilities. It's so sad how many of the kids are in wheelchairs or need to be fed through tubes. We don't know sign language or have any experience with severe visual impairment. No mental retardation, or other conditions that would mean the child would only be able to live independently with great difficulty. No FAS or full-blown RAD, or severe psychiatric disorders. Mild to moderate needs for pretty much everything else is fine. We feel especially confident about speech disorders and learning disabilities. We understand many children will have ADHD or ADHD-like behavior (this is a whole other topic I want to write a lot about later, because we have some pretty intense ADHD genes in one branch of our family), attachment issues, grief and loss, massive emotional trauma, tantrumming, etc., and we're doing as much training as possible on the issues we think we can handle. Many of our parameters have an easy justification: children with higher level needs usually need a full-time stay-at-home parent and will say that in their listings.

Applying these parameters still gives me a nasty feeling, like I'm cherry-picking... arggh. That's all I can say. I used to work with mentally handicapped children a long time ago and I especially feel bad about passing over them. They are wonderful. If I had a biological child like some of those children I worked with, I would be fully committed from the beginning... but I feel like I just couldn't dive into the middle.

The ten-year-old is back on our list, though. Our worker encouraged us to put him back in, and my husband and I leaped at the chance.

We had dinner with my parents tonight, and my stepfather asked me when I was going to bring home his fishing buddy! I tried to explain the intricacies of the coming matching stage. Damn, it's going to be tough.

Next week, we're going to another training seminar on transracial adoption. I can't wait to see what the audience demographic is going to be.