fost-adopt

we began out "parent resource training," as it's referred to, in january of 2004, three saturdays long. we were the only gay couple, but the facilitator had met several other gay foster parents in her 13 years on the job. there were about 10 couples and one single woman in our class. we learned a lot in our class. we were amazed at what situations were presented to us and at the many different conclusions people came to, about discipline, about dealing with children with delays, both emotional and developmental. we wondered how many men and women who could have children of their own, planned or not, could answer the questions we were asked, or asked to think about. we also had homework, income verification, health records, family history, how we each were raised, how our families dealt with discipline, spent holidays and vacations, our history together, how we dealt with conflict in our relationship, our thoughts about raising children who practice a religion (we don't), about keeping in contact with other siblings. one poignant exercise was to walk us through the feelings of a child taken from a home by a social worker, brought to a new home where they didn't know anyone, perhaps a different language was spoken, other children in the home, other parents, new school, new routine, new teachers, nothing familiar. then to have visits with your parent or parents for only a few hours a week, usually supervised by social workers. then to spend months away from the family that you knew and slowly become a part of a new family, only to perhaps be removed from this new family to return to your family, only to wonder if the things that caused you to be removed with happen again (if you're even old enough to comprehend that). an interesting fact that we learned is that there are over half a million foster children in the united states and one third of this country's homeless are former foster children.
we were assigned a social worker after our training was completed. we were the first gay male couple that she had worked with so at our first meeting in our home i asked about her thoughts toward gay men as parents. we had been told that some social workers bring their own beliefs to the job and might not try to find placements for us. we relaxed when she told us that it didn't matter whom children were raised by, only that they be raised in a loving, caring home. we were, of course, nervous when she visited us for our "home visits" but we quickly learned to like her and feel as ease. we completed all our paperwork in record time and were licensed foster parents by the end or march 2004. our only wait was for the social worker to complete our "home study," basically a short story of who we are and what type of placements we were looking for. we decided that if we were open to sibling groups and children ranging in age from newborn to 10 years old. this would allow more placement options, then we could then decide about each individually. we had to think about what type of delays we would be able to handle. we toyed with the idea of one of us staying at home but later found that impossible.